September 2 in Military History

Union forces under Major General William Tecumseh Sherman completed the capture of Atlanta, Georgia, after a four-month campaign of maneuver and battle. Confederate General John Bell Hood had evacuated the city the previous day, destroying military supplies and ammunition trains. The fall of Atlanta electrified the North, virtually guaranteeing Lincoln's reelection in November and dooming the Confederacy's last political hope for a negotiated peace.

Union Major General Henry Slocum led the XX Corps of the Army of the Cumberland into Atlanta a day after Confederate forces evacuated the city. Slocum accepted the surrender from Mayor James Calhoun and raised the US flag over the courthouse. The formal occupation secured the rail hub that had been the campaign's strategic objective for four months.

Prussian and German forces under Helmuth von Moltke encircled and destroyed the French Army of Chalons at Sedan, capturing Emperor Napoleon III and 104,000 French troops. The victory effectively ended the Franco-Prussian War's main field campaign and precipitated the fall of the French Second Empire two days later. Sedan became a template for the envelopment operations German staffs would refine for seventy years.

A British-Egyptian force of 25,000 under General Sir Herbert Kitchener decisively defeated a Mahdist army of 50,000 at Omdurman in Sudan. British Maxim guns, artillery, and disciplined firepower destroyed the attacking Mahdist forces, killing approximately 12,000 while suffering fewer than 500 casualties. A young cavalry officer named Winston Churchill participated in one of the last great cavalry charges in British military history during the battle.

Vice President Theodore Roosevelt delivered his most famous foreign policy speech at the Minnesota State Fair, introducing the phrase speak softly and carry a big stick as the articulation of the doctrine that would define his presidency. Twelve days later McKinley died of his assassin's wounds and Roosevelt became the 26th President. The Big Stick policy shaped the expansion of the US Navy and American interventions across the Caribbean basin for the next decade.

Navy pilot Lieutenant (j.g.) George H.W. Bush was shot down by Japanese anti-aircraft fire while attacking a radio transmitter on Chichijima in the Bonin Islands. Bush completed his bombing run despite his aircraft being on fire, then bailed out over the ocean. He was rescued by the submarine USS Finback after floating for hours in a life raft. His two crewmates did not survive.

Patton's Third Army crossed the Meuse River and liberated Verdun, the site of the 1916 battle that had defined the First World War for France. The advance brought US armored columns within striking distance of the German border and the Siegfried Line. Fuel shortages imposed by the Normandy supply chain would halt the advance within days, a logistics failure that allowed Germany to rebuild its western defenses.

Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and General Yoshijiro Umezu signed the Instrument of Surrender aboard the USS Missouri (BB-63) in Tokyo Bay, formally ending the Second World War.

On the same day as the Japanese surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independence of Vietnam from French colonial rule in Hanoi, deliberately echoing the American Declaration of Independence. The declaration set the stage for thirty years of conflict, first the French Indochina War, then the American Vietnam War, that would cost millions of lives.

The U.S. Air Force began operating the first airborne command post, known as "Looking Glass," an EC-135C aircraft that maintained continuous airborne alert for nearly three decades. The mission ensured that the U.S. nuclear command and control system could survive a Soviet first strike and authorize retaliation. Looking Glass flights continued uninterrupted for 29 years until 1990.