August 13 in History

After 75 days of siege, starvation, and smallpox, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan fell to Hernan Cortes and his indigenous allies on August 13, 1521. The last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtemoc, was captured while trying to escape across Lake Texcoco by canoe. With his surrender ended a civilization that had dominated central Mexico for two centuries, and one of the most extraordinary cities the world had ever produced was reduced to rubble. Tenochtitlan was a marvel that astonished the Spanish when they first saw it in November 1519. Built on an island in Lake Texcoco, connected to the mainland by three wide causeways, the city housed between 200,000 and 300,000 people, making it larger than any European city except Constantinople. Its markets, temples, aqueducts, and botanical gardens represented the accumulated achievement of Mesoamerican civilization. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a soldier in Cortes's army, compared the sight to the enchanted cities in the tales of Amadis. Cortes had been expelled from the city during the Noche Triste in June 1520, losing hundreds of soldiers and most of his Aztec gold. He spent the next year rebuilding his forces and, crucially, cementing alliances with indigenous peoples who resented Aztec domination, particularly the Tlaxcalans. When he returned, he commanded roughly 900 Spanish soldiers and somewhere between 75,000 and 200,000 indigenous warriors. He also brought 13 small brigantines, built from scratch to control the lake. The siege was methodical and merciless. Cortes cut the freshwater aqueducts, blockaded the causeways, and destroyed the city section by section to prevent ambushes. Disease did as much damage as weapons. Smallpox, introduced by a single infected member of an earlier Spanish expedition, tore through a population with no immunity. By the time Cuauhtemoc surrendered, an estimated 100,000 to 240,000 Aztecs had died. The Spanish built Mexico City directly on top of Tenochtitlan's ruins, burying the old world beneath the new.

East German soldiers unrolled barbed wire across the heart of Berlin in the predawn hours of August 13, 1961, severing a city that had functioned as a single organism for seven centuries. By morning, families were separated, subway lines were cut, and the border between East and West Berlin was sealed. The barrier that began as a fence of wire and wooden posts would harden into 96 miles of reinforced concrete, guard towers, and minefields that became the Cold War's most powerful symbol. The wall was born of desperation. Since the creation of two German states in 1949, roughly 3.5 million East Germans had fled to the West, many by simply crossing from East Berlin to West Berlin and boarding a plane. The hemorrhage was destroying the East German economy, draining it of doctors, engineers, and skilled workers. By 1961, an average of 1,000 people were leaving daily. Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader, had been pressing Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev for permission to close the border. On June 15, Ulbricht told the press that "no one has the intention of erecting a wall," using the word publicly for the first time. Khrushchev gave his approval after gauging that President John F. Kennedy would not risk war over Berlin's internal boundary. He was right. Kennedy privately told aides that "a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war." The American response was limited to diplomatic protests. On the night of August 12, Ulbricht signed the order, and at midnight, police and army units began sealing the border with a speed that caught West Berliners completely off guard. The wall stood for 28 years. At least 140 people died attempting to cross it. When it finally fell on November 9, 1989, the scenes of jubilant Berliners dancing atop the concrete slabs became among the most celebrated images of the 20th century. But on that August morning in 1961, the wall's construction confirmed the Cold War's most brutal truth: an entire government had chosen to imprison its own population rather than reform itself.

Three weeks of quarantine in a converted Airstream trailer ended on August 13, 1969, and Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins stepped out to discover they had become the most famous human beings on Earth. New York City threw them the largest ticker tape parade since the end of World War II, with an estimated four million people lining the streets of lower Manhattan to cheer the men who had walked on the Moon less than a month earlier. The quarantine had been NASA's precaution against the possibility, however remote, that the astronauts had brought back lunar pathogens. The three men spent their isolation in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, undergoing medical tests, debriefings, and the tedious work of documenting every detail of their mission. Scientists monitored moon rock samples for signs of biological activity. None was found, and on August 10, the astronauts were released. The celebration that followed was deliberately spectacular. President Richard Nixon hosted a state dinner in Los Angeles on the evening of the parade, where he presented each astronaut with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The dinner was attended by members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, governors from all 50 states, and ambassadors from 83 countries. Nixon, keenly aware of the propaganda value of the achievement, used the occasion to frame the Moon landing as a triumph for all humanity, even as the Space Race had been driven by Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. The parade and its surrounding events marked the high-water mark of public enthusiasm for the Apollo program. Within three years, NASA's budget would be slashed, three planned lunar missions would be canceled, and the final Moon landing would take place in December 1972. Armstrong, famously private, largely retreated from public life. But on that August day, the streets of New York belonged to three men who had done what no human beings had ever done before.

George Monck assembled a regiment of foot soldiers on August 13, 1650, at the English border town of Coldstream, Berwickshire, creating a military unit that has outlasted every army that ever tried to destroy it. Originally raised to fight for Oliver Cromwell's Parliamentary forces during the English Civil Wars, Monck's Regiment of Foot would survive the fall of the republic, the restoration of the monarchy, and 375 years of continuous service to become the oldest regiment in continuous active service in the British Army. Monck was a pragmatic soldier who had fought on both sides of the Civil War. Initially a Royalist, he was captured and switched allegiance to Parliament, eventually proving himself one of Cromwell's most capable commanders during campaigns in Ireland and Scotland. His regiment was forged in the brutal fighting of the Third English Civil War, when Cromwell invaded Scotland to crush Royalist resistance. The regiment's defining moment came a decade later. After Cromwell's death in 1658 and the collapse of his son Richard's brief protectorate, England descended into political chaos. Monck, then commanding Parliamentary forces in Scotland, marched his regiment south to London in January 1660 and engineered the restoration of King Charles II to the throne. It was one of the most consequential acts of individual political judgment in English history, ending the republican experiment without a shot fired. Charles II disbanded Cromwell's New Model Army but retained Monck's regiment, renaming it the Coldstream Guards. The unit has served the Crown in virtually every major British conflict since: Marlborough's wars, the Napoleonic campaigns, the Crimean War, both World Wars, and operations in the Falklands, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Their motto, "Nulli Secundus" (Second to None), reflects a seniority dispute with the Grenadier Guards that has never been formally resolved.

The Hamburg America liner Deutschland docked at Plymouth after crossing the Atlantic eastward in five days, eleven hours and forty-five minutes, smashing its own speed record by over three hours. The achievement demonstrated that steam turbine technology was shrinking the ocean, intensifying the transatlantic rivalry among shipping lines that defined the golden age of ocean liners. The Deutschland's record run in August 1900 came during the height of the Blue Riband competition, an unofficial award given to the passenger liner making the fastest Atlantic crossing. German, British, and French shipping companies poured enormous resources into building faster ships, viewing the record as a matter of national prestige as much as commercial advantage. The Deutschland, launched in 1900 for the Hamburg America Line, was designed specifically to capture and hold the speed record. Her quadruple-expansion steam engines produced over 37,000 horsepower, driving the 16,500-ton vessel at sustained speeds above 23 knots. The record-breaking eastward crossing attracted intense newspaper coverage on both sides of the Atlantic, and the Deutschland briefly held both the eastward and westward records. However, her extreme vibration at high speed made her deeply unpopular with passengers, who complained of constant shaking that made dining and sleeping uncomfortable. The Hamburg America Line eventually withdrew her from the express service and converted her into a cruise ship, a concession that high speed alone did not guarantee commercial success. The transatlantic speed competition would continue until the 1950s, with increasingly powerful turbine ships pushing crossing times below four days before jet aircraft made the entire contest irrelevant.