November 15 in Military History

The Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation, the first constitution of the United States, after more than a year of debate. The document created a loose confederation of sovereign states with a weak central government that lacked the power to tax or maintain a standing army, weaknesses that would become painfully apparent during the final years of the Revolutionary War.

Sherman led 62,000 troops out of burning Atlanta on a 285-mile march to Savannah, cutting supply lines and destroying everything of military value in a 60-mile-wide swath, pioneering total war.

European powers convened the Berlin Conference to regulate the colonial partition of Africa. The fourteen-nation meeting established procedures for claiming African territory that required "effective occupation" by military force, triggering the arms buildup and colonial campaigns that defined the next thirty years.

The first general assembly of the League of Nations convened in Geneva, Switzerland, with 41 member states represented. The United States, whose President Wilson had championed the League, was conspicuously absent after the Senate rejected membership. The League's inability to enforce its decisions without American participation foreshadowed its failure to prevent World War II.

SS Security Service chief Reinhard Heydrich issued the directive ordering the concentration of Polish Jews into urban ghettos, the organizational predecessor to the Holocaust. The directive set military and logistical procedures that the SS and Wehrmacht would implement across German-occupied Europe.

In the climax of the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, battleship USS Washington under Admiral Willis Lee engaged the Japanese battleship Kirishima at 8,400 yards. Washington's radar-directed 16-inch guns scored nine hits in seven minutes, reducing Kirishima to a sinking wreck. The action ended Japan's last attempt to recapture Guadalcanal.

An estimated 500,000 to 600,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C., for the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, the largest antiwar demonstration in American history. The peaceful protest, which included a March Against Death reading the names of fallen soldiers, demonstrated the depth of public opposition to the Vietnam War.

The Palestine National Council, meeting in Algiers, declared the independence of the State of Palestine, with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat as president. The declaration, which implicitly recognized Israel's right to exist, was immediately recognized by over 80 countries and represented a shift from armed struggle toward diplomatic engagement.

Canada's House of Commons passed the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement, deepening military-industrial integration between the two nations. The agreement expanded defense-industrial cooperation in aerospace, armored vehicles, and munitions production that continues to shape NORAD and NATO procurement today.

The Soviet Buran orbiter completed a fully automated two-orbit flight from Baikonur Cosmodrome and landed without a crew aboard. The reusable spacecraft was the USSR's answer to the US Space Shuttle and represented a major military-space achievement that was abandoned with the collapse of the Soviet Union.