September 22 in Military History

Captain Nathan Hale of the Continental Army was hanged by the British in New York City for espionage. The 21-year-old Yale graduate had volunteered to gather intelligence behind British lines on Long Island. His reported last words, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country", made him America's first celebrated patriotic martyr.

The U.S. Post Office Department was established under the Act of Congress that created the Treasury and Post Office. Postal roads became the nineteenth-century backbone of Army courier traffic, military correspondence, and troop-movement notifications, and the department would later operate Army-Navy mail routes through two world wars.

Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, transforming the Civil War into a crusade to end slavery and authorizing the enlistment of Black soldiers in the Union Army.

The C-class submarine USS C-5 was launched at the Fore River Shipbuilding Company in Quincy, Massachusetts, one of a class of five coastal submarines that represented the U.S. Navy's transition from experimental to operational undersea warfare. The C-boats deployed to the Canal Zone and Philippines, extending U.S. submarine presence into forward bases before the First World War.

German submarine U-9, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Otto Weddigen, torpedoed and sank three British armored cruisers, HMS Aboukir, HMS Hogue, and HMS Cresham, in just over an hour in the North Sea. Nearly 1,459 British sailors were killed. The action demonstrated the lethal potential of the submarine and transformed naval warfare forever.

The British 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem was in desperate straits as German counterattacks cut off the paratroopers from reinforcement. Only Colonel John Frost's 2nd Battalion held the north end of the Arnhem bridge, surrounded and under constant attack. The division would be virtually destroyed, with only 2,163 of 10,000 men escaping across the Rhine.

Soichiro Honda and Takeo Fujisawa incorporated the Honda Motor Company in Hamamatsu, Japan. Though best known for civilian vehicles, Honda would later produce small engines used in reconnaissance UAVs, generator sets for forward operating bases, and components for Japanese Self-Defense Force utility vehicles.

The United Nations-brokered ceasefire ended the 1965 Indo-Pakistani War after 17 days of combined-arms fighting in Kashmir and the Punjab. The conflict produced the largest tank battles in South Asia, validated Indian Centurion and Pakistani Patton doctrine in different ways, and shaped procurement and doctrine for both militaries into the twenty-first century.

Iraqi forces under Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, beginning the Iran-Iraq War, one of the deadliest conflicts of the late twentieth century. The war would last eight years, kill an estimated 500,000 to 1.5 million people, involve chemical weapons attacks, and end in a stalemate that resolved nothing. The conflict's debt burden on Iraq directly contributed to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

U.S. special operations forces captured Ali Hassan al-Majid, the former Iraqi general responsible for the Anfal campaign chemical attacks against Kurdish civilians in 1988. His capture closed a major accountability chapter from the Iran-Iraq War era and gave prosecutors evidence for the subsequent Iraqi Special Tribunal trials.