March 9 in Military History

Napoleon married Josephine in a civil ceremony in Paris, just two days before departing to take command of the Army of Italy. The Italian Campaign that followed transformed the 26-year-old general into Europe's most famous military commander. His passionate letters to Josephine from the campaign are among history's most famous correspondence from a military leader.

During the Mexican-American War, General Winfield Scott landed approximately 10,000 troops near Veracruz, Mexico, in the first large-scale amphibious assault in U.S. military history. Using specially designed surfboats, the landing was executed without the loss of a single man. The campaign that followed, the march from Veracruz to Mexico City, is considered one of the most brilliant in American military history.

The USS Monitor and CSS Virginia fought the first battle between ironclad warships at Hampton Roads. The four-hour duel ended inconclusively, but it revolutionized naval warfare worldwide, making every wooden warship obsolete overnight.

President Abraham Lincoln promoted Ulysses S. Grant to the rank of Lieutenant General, a rank previously held only by George Washington, and placed him in command of all Union armies. The promotion recognized Grant's victories at Vicksburg and Chattanooga and set the stage for the coordinated strategy that would finally defeat the Confederacy.

Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa led nearly 500 raiders in a pre-dawn attack on the border town of Columbus, New Mexico, killing 18 Americans. It was the last significant armed incursion into the continental United States by a foreign force and triggered the Punitive Expedition under Brigadier General John J. Pershing, which became an invaluable training ground for World War I.

Germany declared war on Portugal after the Portuguese government seized 36 German merchant ships interned in Portuguese ports. Portugal subsequently joined the Entente powers, sending an expeditionary force of 55,000 troops to the Western Front and reinforcing its colonial holdings in Africa against German East Africa.

President Franklin Roosevelt submitted the Emergency Banking Act to Congress, which passed it in a record eight hours. The act, framed in explicitly military language, gave the government wartime-equivalent emergency powers to inspect and stabilize banks. Roosevelt had used military rhetoric throughout his inauguration, declaring war on the economic crisis as urgently as any foreign enemy.

The Royal Netherlands East Indies Army unconditionally surrendered to Japanese forces at Kalijati, West Java, completing Japan's conquest of the Dutch East Indies. The capitulation gave Japan control of the world's fourth-largest oil production, the resource for which Japan had gone to war, and resulted in over 100,000 Allied military personnel becoming prisoners of war.

Major General Curtis LeMay launched Operation Meetinghouse, dispatching 334 B-29 Superfortresses to firebomb Tokyo at low altitude. The bombers were stripped of defensive armament to carry maximum incendiary loads. The resulting firestorm, peaking in the early hours of March 10, would kill over 100,000 people and destroy 16 square miles of the city, the deadliest single air raid in human history.

Japanese forces in French Indochina overthrew the Vichy French colonial administration in a sudden coup, disarming French garrisons and imprisoning colonial officials across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The power vacuum allowed Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh to expand dramatically, setting the stage for the First Indochina War and ultimately the American involvement in Vietnam.