June 11 in Military History

The marriage that would eventually trigger England's break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the transformation of England into a Protestant naval power.

Patriots from Machias, Maine, captured the British armed schooner HMS Margaretta in the first naval engagement of the American Revolution, sometimes called the "Lexington of the Sea."

The Second Continental Congress appointed John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston to draft a declaration of independence from Britain, beginning the most consequential document in American history.

RAF Whitley bombers attacked Turin and Genoa in the first Allied air raids on Italy, just one day after Mussolini declared war on Britain and France.

The United States and the Soviet Union signed the Master Lend-Lease Agreement, formalizing the transfer of $11 billion in war materiel that would ultimately equip significant portions of the Red Army and Soviet civilian economy.

The Royal Navy launched Operation Harpoon, a heavily escorted supply convoy from Gibraltar toward Malta, part of a simultaneous two-convoy effort to relieve the besieged Mediterranean island. Italian and German air and naval attacks inflicted heavy losses.

Admiral Marc Mitscher's fast carriers launched the preparatory air strikes against Saipan, Tinian, and Guam that opened Operation Forager, the American seizure of the Mariana Islands and the strategic bombing campaign against mainland Japan.

Mass kamikaze attacks continued against the US fleet off Okinawa, part of a campaign that sank 36 ships and killed nearly 5,000 Navy personnel.

The British 3rd Parachute Regiment attacked Argentine positions on Mount Longdon on the approaches to Port Stanley, opening the decisive final battles of the Falklands War in a night assault across rocky ridges.

Timothy McVeigh, the Gulf War veteran who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people, was executed by lethal injection at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.

The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft reached Saturn, a mission jointly funded by NASA, ESA, and the Italian Space Agency that leveraged military-developed navigation and communication technologies.