December 4 in Military History

General Washington said goodbye to his officers at Fraunces Tavern in New York City, embracing each man with tears in his eyes before departing to resign his commission. His voluntary relinquishment of power, when he could have been king, established the principle of civilian control of the military.

Union cavalry under General Judson Kilpatrick defeated Confederate cavalry under General Joseph Wheeler at Waynesboro, Georgia, during Sherman's March to the Sea. The engagement was the last significant cavalry action of the March, which was rapidly approaching Savannah. Sherman's destruction of Georgia's infrastructure was systematically dismantling the Confederacy's ability to wage war.

President Woodrow Wilson departed New York aboard the USS George Washington, becoming the first sitting American president to visit Europe. Wilson was traveling to the Paris Peace Conference to personally negotiate the Treaty of Versailles, carrying his Fourteen Points and his vision for a League of Nations. The trip marked America's emergence as a dominant voice in global affairs, though the Senate's ultimate rejection of the League would prove a bitter irony.

B-24 Liberators of the Ninth Air Force based in Egypt conducted the first US heavy bomber raid against Naples, attacking harbor facilities and warships in the Italian port. The strike, flown at extreme range, demonstrated the strategic reach of four-engine bombers and prefigured the heavy bomber campaign that would later operate from Italian bases.

President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill reconvened in Cairo following the Tehran Conference with Stalin. The two leaders selected General Dwight D. Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander for Operation Overlord, the cross-Channel invasion of France, over the heavily favored British General Sir Alan Brooke. The decision proved to be one of the most consequential command appointments in military history.

The United States Senate approved the participation agreement for the United Nations and its Military Staff Committee, committing the United States to contribute military forces to UN collective security operations. The framework would later authorize operations in Korea and dozens of peacekeeping missions that deployed American forces under multinational command.

Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the military dictator of the Central African Republic, crowned himself Emperor Bokassa I in a lavish $20 million ceremony modeled on Napoleon's 1804 coronation. The former French Army officer had seized power in a 1966 military coup and renamed the country the Central African Empire. The extravagant coronation, in one of the world's poorest nations, epitomized the military dictatorships that plagued post-colonial Africa during the Cold War.

USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, CVN-69, was commissioned at Newport News Shipbuilding, joining her sister USS Nimitz as the second of the Nimitz-class nuclear supercarriers. The class would define American naval power projection for the next four decades, with ten sisters eventually built and continuous forward deployment from the Mediterranean to the western Pacific.

Associated Press journalist Terry Anderson was released after 2,454 days as a hostage of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the longest-held Western hostage in the Lebanese crisis. Anderson's kidnapping in 1985 was part of a broader hostage crisis that entangled the U.S. military and intelligence community in the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran in exchange for hostage releases and diverted the profits to Nicaraguan rebels.

President George H.W. Bush ordered the deployment of US forces to Somalia to support humanitarian relief operations and protect UN aid workers. The Marine landing at Mogadishu on December 9 would begin a 15-month American presence that transitioned into the ill-fated Operation Gothic Serpent and shaped a generation of special operations doctrine.