September 13 in Military History

A French army under King Francis I and allied Venetian forces defeated a Swiss mercenary force in a two-day battle at Marignano, south of Milan. French combined arms of heavy cavalry, pikemen, and massed artillery overcame the Swiss pike squares that had dominated European battlefields for fifty years. The battle ended Swiss military hegemony and established French control over Milan until 1525.

British forces under Major General Wolfe defeated the French under Montcalm in a fifteen-minute battle that decided the fate of North America. Both commanders were mortally wounded.

The British fleet began a 25-hour bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor during the War of 1812. American lawyer Francis Scott Key, held aboard a British ship during the attack, watched through the night. When dawn revealed the American flag still flying over the fort, Key was inspired to write "The Star-Spangled Banner," which became the U.S. national anthem.

U.S. forces under General Winfield Scott stormed the fortress of Chapultepec on the outskirts of Mexico City during the Mexican-American War. The assault, which cost over 800 American casualties, was led in part by young officers who would later command armies in the Civil War, including Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, and George Pickett.

Corporal Barton Mitchell of the 27th Indiana Infantry discovered three cigars wrapped in a copy of Confederate Special Order 191, the detailed operational plan for Lee's Maryland Campaign. The document, dropped by an unknown staff officer near Frederick, gave General George McClellan precise information on the dispersal of Lee's army. McClellan's slow response still allowed Lee to concentrate at Sharpsburg and fight the Battle of Antietam four days later.

Fires erupted in the Armenian and Greek quarters of Smyrna four days after Turkish nationalist forces under Mustafa Kemal entered the city, capping the Greco-Turkish War. The fires consumed most of the city over four days and killed an estimated 10,000 to 100,000 people. US Navy destroyers and allied warships in the harbor evacuated approximately 250,000 Greek and Armenian civilians in a mass maritime rescue operation.

Marshal Rodolfo Graziani's Italian Tenth Army crossed the Libyan-Egyptian border with five divisions and 80 tanks, beginning the North African campaign of the Second World War. The invasion advanced 65 miles to Sidi Barrani and halted. Three months later the smaller British Western Desert Force under Richard O'Connor launched Operation Compass, destroyed ten Italian divisions, and captured 133,000 prisoners.

German Sixth Army troops under General Friedrich Paulus launched the first major infantry assault into the city of Stalingrad, beginning the most brutal urban battle of World War II. The fight for Stalingrad would rage for over five months, consuming entire divisions in savage house-to-house combat. The eventual Soviet encirclement and destruction of the Sixth Army marked the turning point of the war on the Eastern Front.

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek became President of the Republic of China while simultaneously serving as Supreme Commander of Chinese forces in the war against Japan. His complex relationship with American military advisors, particularly General Joseph Stilwell, would define the fraught Sino-American wartime alliance.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn, establishing a framework for Palestinian self-governance and mutual recognition. The accords were witnessed by President Clinton and represented the closest the Israeli-Palestinian conflict came to resolution. Rabin, a decorated military hero, was assassinated by an Israeli extremist two years later.