June 9 in Military History

French explorer Jacques Cartier reached the mouth of the St. Lawrence River on his first voyage to North America, beginning France's claim to Canada that would lead to two centuries of colonial warfare.

A band of American colonists in Rhode Island boarded and burned HMS Gaspee, a Royal Navy schooner that had run aground while chasing smugglers, in one of the first overt acts of armed resistance to the Crown.

European powers signed the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna, restructuring the continent after the Napoleonic Wars. The settlement created borders and a Concert of Europe that governed international relations for decades.

The largest predominantly cavalry engagement of the Civil War was fought near Brandy Station, Virginia, when 11,000 Union horsemen under Alfred Pleasonton surprised J.E.B. Stuart's Confederate cavalry, proving that Union cavalry could match their Southern counterparts.

Norway formally capitulated to Nazi Germany after two months of resistance, becoming the last of the countries invaded during the spring of 1940 to surrender. King Haakon VII and the government fled to London.

Three days after D-Day, all five beachheads were linked into a continuous front as over 326,000 troops consolidated the Allied position in Normandy.

The Red Army launched a massive offensive against Finnish forces on the Karelian Isthmus, seeking to knock Finland out of the war before the main Soviet summer offensive against Germany. It was one of the largest artillery preparations of the war.

The USS George Washington, the first fleet ballistic missile submarine, was launched at Groton, Connecticut. Armed with Polaris missiles, she would provide the sea-based leg of America's nuclear triad.

On the fifth day of the Six-Day War, Israeli armor and infantry attacked up the steep western face of the Golan Heights into entrenched Syrian positions, breaking through by nightfall in some of the toughest fighting of the war.

The 66-day siege of An Loc, capital of Binh Long Province in South Vietnam, ended when ARVN forces supported by massive American air power pushed the North Vietnamese Army out of the town. It was the bloodiest urban battle of the 1972 Easter Offensive.

Islamic State fighters captured Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, as Iraqi security forces collapsed and fled despite outnumbering the attackers by over 15 to one, marking the most dramatic territorial gain of the ISIS insurgency.