May 5 in Military History

Napoleon, who conquered most of Europe and transformed modern warfare, died in exile at age 51. His innovations in military organization, corps structure, combined arms tactics, and national mobilization profoundly influenced all subsequent military thinking. His campaigns are still studied at every military academy in the world.

A Mexican army of 4,500 defeated 6,000 French troops at Puebla, a victory celebrated as Cinco de Mayo.

The second day at the Wilderness saw Confederate Lt. Gen. Longstreet seriously wounded by friendly fire, eerily paralleling Stonewall Jackson's wounding at Chancellorsville one year earlier. Despite 17,000+ Union casualties over two days, Grant ordered the army south, breaking the pattern of retreat.

The Confederate ironclad ram CSS Albemarle, supported by gunboats, engaged a Union flotilla in Albemarle Sound. The Union gunboat USS Bombshell was captured and the sidewheeler USS Sassacus was heavily damaged attempting to ram the Confederate vessel.

German occupation forces in the Netherlands surrendered to Canadian forces, ending the brutal "Hunger Winter" that killed approximately 20,000 Dutch civilians. Canadian troops had fought a costly campaign through the Scheldt and into the Netherlands, and are still honored in Dutch ceremonies to this day.

The U.S. Army 11th Armored Division liberated Mauthausen in Austria, one of the last major concentration camps freed. An estimated 90,000 prisoners had perished through slave labor, starvation, and gassing. American soldiers were profoundly shaken by what they found.

A Japanese Fu-Go incendiary balloon, one of roughly 9,300 launched from Honshu, descended near Bly, Oregon and killed six people who disturbed it, the only deaths on the American mainland caused by enemy action during the Second World War.

Navy Commander Alan Shepard made a 15-minute suborbital flight aboard Mercury "Freedom 7," becoming the first American in space. The military test pilot's flight came 23 days after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's orbital flight, demonstrating American capability during the Space Race.

Navy Commander Alan Shepard rode a Mercury-Redstone rocket on a 15-minute suborbital flight from Cape Canaveral, becoming the first American in space. The mission validated the Mercury capsule design and committed the United States to the race to the Moon.

The U.S. Navy formally resumed EP-3 Aries signals intelligence flights along the Chinese coast after a multi-month suspension, reinstating a surveillance pattern that would eventually lead to the 2001 Hainan Island incident.