June 14 in History

The Continental Congress resolved on June 14, 1775, to organize and fund a unified military force from the ragged collection of New England militia companies besieging British-held Boston. The decision created what would become the Continental Army, and it was driven as much by political necessity as military logic. Massachusetts militiamen had been fighting since Lexington and Concord in April, but Congress needed the other colonies invested in the conflict if the revolution was to succeed. Delegates from the southern and middle colonies were wary of funding what appeared to be a New England war. John Adams of Massachusetts strategically championed the appointment of George Washington, a Virginian, as commander-in-chief the following day. The choice was partly military, Washington being one of the few delegates with significant command experience from the French and Indian War, and partly political, binding Virginia and the southern colonies to the cause. Washington accepted the commission but refused a salary, asking only that Congress cover his expenses. The army Washington inherited was barely an army at all. Roughly 17,000 men were camped around Boston, organized into independent militia units with separate officers, varying terms of enlistment, and almost no standardized equipment, training, or discipline. Many soldiers had enlisted for only a few months and planned to return home for harvest. Desertion rates were staggering. Washington spent his first months imposing basic order on what he privately described as "a mixed multitude of people under very little discipline." June 14 is now celebrated as the birthday of the United States Army. The force that began as an improvised siege camp outside Boston would, six years later, defeat the most powerful military on earth at Yorktown.

Reverend Elijah Craig is traditionally credited with distilling the first bourbon whiskey from corn in Georgetown, Kentucky, around 1789, though the claim has been disputed by historians for over a century. The association of Craig's name with bourbon's origin appears to date from an 1874 newspaper article, and no contemporary documents confirm that he was the first to age corn whiskey in charred oak barrels, the process that defines bourbon's distinctive flavor and amber color. What is less disputed is that corn-based whiskey production became widespread in Kentucky and neighboring states during the late eighteenth century. Scotch-Irish and German settlers brought distilling traditions to the frontier, where corn grew far more abundantly than the rye and barley used in Eastern whiskeys. Distilling was also a practical solution to transportation costs. A horse could carry roughly four bushels of corn to market, but the same horse could carry the equivalent of twenty-four bushels if the corn was first converted to whiskey. The name "bourbon" itself is contested. The most common theory links it to Bourbon County, Kentucky, where Craig lived and operated his distillery. Another theory holds that the whiskey was named for Bourbon Street in New Orleans, a major destination for Kentucky spirits shipped down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Bourbon County was originally a vast territory that encompassed much of eastern Kentucky, so many early distillers technically operated within its borders. Congress declared bourbon a "distinctive product of the United States" in 1964, legally requiring that it be made from at least 51 percent corn, aged in new charred oak barrels, and produced in America. Kentucky today produces roughly 95 percent of the world's bourbon supply, an industry worth over $9 billion annually.

German forces entered Paris unopposed on June 14, 1940, after the French government declared it an "open city" to spare it from aerial bombardment and artillery fire. Wehrmacht troops marched through empty boulevards as roughly two million Parisians had already fled south in what became known as l'exode, the largest mass displacement in French history. A massive swastika banner was hung from the Arc de Triomphe within hours. The fall of Paris came just five weeks after Germany launched its Western offensive on May 10. The Wehrmacht's blitzkrieg through the Ardennes forest, considered impassable by French military planners, had outflanked the Maginot Line and split Allied forces in two. British and French troops were evacuated from Dunkirk between May 26 and June 4, and German forces then turned south. French resistance collapsed with shocking speed. The army that had fought Germany to a bloody standstill for four years in World War I lasted barely six weeks in the second. General Fedor von Bock led the German troops into the capital. French military governor General Henri Dentz, left behind to ensure an orderly handover, surrendered the city formally. The next day, June 15, German officers breakfasted at the Ritz and went shopping on the Champs-Elysees. Marshal Philippe Petain, who had replaced Paul Reynaud as head of government on June 16, requested armistice terms on June 17. The armistice, signed on June 22 in the same railway car where Germany had surrendered in 1918, divided France into an occupied northern zone under German military control and a nominally autonomous southern zone governed by Petain's Vichy regime. Paris remained under occupation for over four years, until its liberation by Free French and American forces on August 25, 1944.

Argentine forces in Stanley surrendered to British Major General Jeremy Moore on June 14, 1982, ending the seventy-four-day Falklands War. The final battles for the hills surrounding the capital, fought over the previous three nights in freezing conditions, had broken the Argentine defensive line. Moore's signal to London read: "The Falkland Islands are once more under the government desired by their inhabitants. God Save the Queen." Argentina had invaded the Falkland Islands on April 2, catching Britain and most of the world off guard. General Leopoldo Galtieri's military junta, facing economic crisis and domestic unrest, gambled that seizing the islands, which Argentina calls the Malvinas and had claimed since the nineteenth century, would rally nationalist support and that Britain would not fight for a remote archipelago 8,000 miles from home. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dispatched a naval task force within three days. The British campaign was an extraordinary logistical achievement. Operating at the extreme limit of their supply lines, with no nearby friendly bases and limited air cover, British forces landed at San Carlos Water on May 21 and fought their way across East Falkland over three weeks. The war cost 255 British and 649 Argentine lives. Argentine conscript soldiers, many of them poorly trained teenagers from tropical northern provinces, suffered from inadequate food, equipment, and leadership. Six British ships were sunk by Argentine air attacks, including HMS Sheffield and the transport Atlantic Conveyor. The defeat destroyed Galtieri's junta and accelerated Argentina's return to democracy in 1983. For Thatcher, the victory transformed her political fortunes. She had been Britain's least popular prime minister before the war and won a landslide reelection in 1983.

Napoleon Bonaparte came within hours of losing everything at Marengo. On June 14, 1800, Austrian General Michael von Melas attacked the French Army of the Reserve near the village of Marengo in northern Italy and drove it into a disorganized retreat by mid-afternoon. Napoleon had divided his forces and was badly outnumbered when the fighting began. By three o'clock, Melas believed the battle was won, handed field command to a subordinate, and retired to tend a minor wound. The reversal came from General Louis Desaix, who had been dispatched with a division to block Austrian escape routes south. Hearing the cannon fire, Desaix marched his men back toward the battle and arrived in late afternoon with roughly 5,000 fresh troops. His counterattack, supported by a cavalry charge led by General Francois Kellermann the younger, struck the advancing Austrian column and shattered it. Desaix was killed in the opening moments of his charge, reportedly telling an aide: "Go tell the First Consul I die regretting I have not done enough to be remembered by posterity." The Austrian army, which had been on the verge of a complete victory, collapsed into retreat. Melas, stunned by the reversal, signed an armistice the following day that surrendered most of northern Italy to France. The Convention of Alessandria gave Napoleon control of territory up to the Mincio River and forced Austria to withdraw its forces east. Marengo secured Napoleon's position as First Consul and proved that his military reputation from the Italian and Egyptian campaigns was no fluke. He later described it as the battle he loved most. Napoleon mythologized the victory extensively, commissioning paintings that depicted him calmly directing events rather than presiding over a near-catastrophe saved by a dead subordinate's initiative.

The German Reichstag passed the Second Naval Law on June 14, 1900, authorizing the construction of a fleet that would double the Imperial German Navy from nineteen to thirty-eight battleships over the next seventeen years. Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the architect of the legislation, designed the buildup to create a fleet powerful enough that even the Royal Navy would hesitate to engage it. The law triggered an Anglo-German naval arms race that poisoned relations between the two countries and contributed directly to the alliance system that produced World War I. Tirpitz's "risk theory" calculated that Germany did not need to match Britain ship for ship. Britain maintained naval commitments across a global empire, from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. A concentrated German fleet in the North Sea could threaten enough British capital ships to make war unacceptably costly. The theory assumed Britain would seek an accommodation rather than risk losing naval supremacy, even temporarily. Tirpitz proved spectacularly wrong. Britain responded to the German naval buildup not with conciliation but with acceleration. The launch of HMS Dreadnought in 1906, a revolutionary all-big-gun battleship that rendered every existing capital ship obsolete, reset the arms race at zero and actually favored Britain's superior shipbuilding capacity. Both nations poured enormous resources into dreadnought construction. By 1914, Britain had twenty-nine dreadnoughts and battlecruisers to Germany's seventeen. The naval rivalry also pushed Britain into diplomatic alignments that would have seemed impossible a decade earlier. The Entente Cordiale with France in 1904 and the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 reflected Britain's growing concern about German intentions. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had championed the naval program partly out of personal rivalry with his cousin King Edward VII, ended up achieving the opposite of Tirpitz's strategic goal: encirclement rather than respect.

Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army crushed King Charles I's Royalist forces at Naseby on June 14, 1645, in the engagement that effectively decided the English Civil War. The Parliamentarian army of roughly 15,000 men outnumbered the Royalist force of 12,000, but numbers alone did not determine the outcome. Naseby was the first major test of the New Model Army, a professional fighting force created just three months earlier to replace the patchwork of regional armies that had fought the war's first three years with mixed results. Charles had been winning. His nephew Prince Rupert of the Rhine, commanding the Royalist cavalry, had a fearsome reputation. The king's forces had captured Leicester on May 30 and threatened to march on London. Parliament's decision to consolidate its armies under a unified command with Sir Thomas Fairfax as general and Cromwell as lieutenant general of cavalry was a desperate gamble that the new organization could fight effectively before it had time to train together. The battle opened with a Royalist cavalry charge on the right wing that scattered the opposing Parliamentarian horse and pursued them off the field, a characteristic error of Rupert's impetuous style. On the other flank, Cromwell's Ironsides drove the Royalist cavalry back in a disciplined charge, then wheeled to attack the exposed Royalist infantry center. Fairfax's infantry held firm in the middle. The Royalist foot, caught between Cromwell's cavalry and advancing infantry, broke and surrendered in large numbers. Charles lost nearly his entire army: 1,000 killed, 4,500 captured, all his artillery, his baggage train, and critically, his private correspondence, which Parliament published to show he had been negotiating for foreign Catholic armies to invade England. The revelations destroyed whatever remained of his political credibility.