March 12 in Military History

Union Major General Nathaniel P. Banks launched the Red River Campaign, a joint Army-Navy operation intended to capture Shreveport, the Confederate capital of Louisiana, and seize Confederate cotton supplies. The campaign deployed approximately 30,000 troops and a fleet of gunboats under Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter up the Red River. The expedition ended in humiliating failure at the Battle of Mansfield.

Juliette Gordon Low founded the Girl Scouts of the USA in Savannah, Georgia, inspired by the Boy Scout and Girl Guide movements. During both World Wars, Girl Scouts played a significant support role, selling war bonds, collecting scrap metal, growing victory gardens, and serving as hospital assistants. The organization has since produced numerous military leaders and veterans who credit their scouting experience with preparing them for service.

The Battle of Neuve Chapelle, the first deliberately planned British offensive of World War I, reached its climax as British and Indian troops attempted to exploit their initial breakthrough but were halted by German reserves and communication failures. The battle proved that artillery could rupture trench lines but that exploiting the breach before the enemy could reinforce remained the central unsolved problem of the war.

Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary founder of the Republic of China and the Kuomintang, died of liver cancer in Beijing at age 58. His death created a power vacuum that led to Chiang Kai-shek's rise, the KMT-Communist split, the Chinese Civil War, and ultimately Mao Zedong's victory in 1949, events that reshaped Cold War geopolitics and directly influenced the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

Mahatma Gandhi began the 240-mile Salt March from Sabarmati Ashram to the coastal village of Dandi, protesting the British salt tax. The march, which culminated on April 5 when Gandhi symbolically made salt from seawater, triggered a wave of civil disobedience across India that undermined British authority and demonstrated that the empire could be resisted without military force.

German Wehrmacht troops crossed into Austria unopposed, completing the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria into the Third Reich. Hitler had pressured Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg to resign and accept a Nazi government. The annexation added 6.7 million people and Austria's industrial base to Germany, extended the Reich's strategic reach into southeastern Europe, and emboldened Hitler's further territorial ambitions.

Finland and the Soviet Union signed the Moscow Peace Treaty, ending the brutal Winter War that had begun with the Soviet invasion on November 30, 1939. Finland ceded 11% of its territory, including the Karelian Isthmus and the city of Vyborg, but preserved its independence. The war exposed catastrophic weaknesses in the Soviet military that directly influenced Hitler's decision to invade the USSR.

President Harry S. Truman addressed a joint session of Congress and requested $400 million in military and economic aid for Greece and Turkey to resist communist insurgencies and Soviet pressure. His declaration, "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation", launched the Cold War strategy of containment that would define American military policy for the next four decades.

The Turkish Armed Forces delivered a memorandum to Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel demanding the formation of a strong government capable of ending civil unrest, forcing his resignation in what became known as the "Coup by Memorandum." This was the second of four military interventions in Turkish politics during the Cold War, reflecting NATO's tolerance of military coups in allied nations deemed too weak or too left-leaning.

Three former Warsaw Pact nations, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, formally joined NATO, marking the alliance's first post-Cold War expansion into the former Soviet bloc. The accession ceremony at Independence, Missouri, was held at the Truman Presidential Library, symbolically linking the containment doctrine's author with its ultimate triumph.