June 3 in Military History

After a seven-month siege, the First Crusade captured the city of Antioch through treachery when an Armenian tower guard opened a gate, allowing Bohemond of Taranto's forces to storm the walls.

Union forces under Colonel Benjamin Kelley surprised and routed a Confederate camp at Philippi, Virginia, in the first organized land engagement of the American Civil War. The victory helped secure western Virginia for the Union.

Union forces suffered approximately 7,000 casualties in under an hour assaulting Confederate entrenchments, one of the war's most lopsided engagements.

President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Defense Act of 1916, expanding the Regular Army, federalizing the National Guard, and creating the Reserve Officers' Training Corps on the eve of American entry into World War I.

Operation Dynamo entered its final phase with the rearguard French forces holding the shrinking Dunkirk perimeter as the last evacuations were organized for June 4.

The Luftwaffe launched Operation Paula, a massed bombing attack by over 650 aircraft on French airfields and the Citroen factory at Javel near Paris, aimed at breaking French resistance in the final weeks of the Battle of France.

Japanese carrier aircraft struck Midway Atoll at dawn, but the American garrison's defenses had been forewarned and reinforced. The base survived, and Admiral Nagumo prepared a second strike, a fateful delay.

Carrier aircraft from the Ryujo and Junyo struck the U.S. Navy base at Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians, opening a diversionary campaign designed to draw American attention away from the main Japanese effort at Midway.

Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud merged their competing Free French movements into the French Committee of National Liberation, establishing a unified government-in-exile that would coordinate Free French military forces.

Astronaut Ed White performed the first American extravehicular activity during the Gemini 4 mission, floating outside his spacecraft for 23 minutes in a feat of military-developed space technology.

Three terrorists drove a van into pedestrians on London Bridge and then stabbed people in nearby Borough Market, killing eight and wounding 48 before being shot dead by armed police within eight minutes.