June 24 in History

Edward III of England climbed to the top of his flagship’s castle and personally directed the destruction of the French fleet. At the Battle of Sluys on June 24, 1340, an English force of roughly 150 ships attacked a larger French fleet anchored in the harbor of Sluys in modern-day Belgium, sinking or capturing nearly every enemy vessel in a day-long engagement that killed an estimated 16,000 to 20,000 French sailors and soldiers. The battle was the opening clash of what would become the Hundred Years’ War. Edward had claimed the French throne in 1337, and Philip VI of France had responded by assembling a massive fleet to invade England. The French fleet, numbering roughly 200 ships, was chained together in defensive lines across the harbor mouth, a tactic that prevented escape but also limited maneuverability. French commanders had ignored the advice of their Genoese mercenary admiral, who urged them to meet the English in open water. Edward exploited the French formation ruthlessly. English longbowmen poured arrows into the packed decks from a distance, then grappling hooks pulled the ships together for brutal hand-to-hand combat. The battle began in the morning with the sun and wind favoring the English and continued until nightfall. Edward himself was wounded in the fighting. The French losses were so catastrophic that, according to contemporary accounts, no one at court dared tell Philip VI the news until his jester said the English were cowards because they had not jumped into the sea like the French. Sluys gave England control of the English Channel for the next decade and eliminated any serious threat of a French invasion. Edward was free to pursue the war on French soil, a strategic advantage that would lead to English victories at Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356. Command of the sea proved as decisive in medieval warfare as it would in every European conflict that followed.

Hundreds of people in the streets of Aachen could not stop dancing. On June 24, 1374, a mysterious outbreak of compulsive movement struck the German city during the feast of St. John the Baptist, with afflicted residents dancing wildly for hours or days until they collapsed from exhaustion, injury, or heart failure. The episode spread to nearby cities in the Low Countries, including Liège, Utrecht, and Tongeren, affecting thousands over the following months. Medieval chroniclers described the victims as appearing possessed, screaming and begging for help while their bodies continued to move. Some dancers reported terrifying visions of demons or floods of blood. Others stripped off their clothing or demanded that onlookers stamp on their feet to stop the compulsion. Local authorities, unsure whether the affliction was medical or spiritual, organized religious processions and exorcisms. Some towns hired musicians to play along, hoping the dancers would exhaust themselves more quickly. Modern explanations for the dancing plague remain contested. The ergotism theory, which attributes the behavior to hallucinations caused by ergot fungus contaminating grain supplies, has fallen out of favor because ergot restricts blood flow to the extremities, making sustained dancing physically impossible. The leading contemporary hypothesis, advanced by historian John Waller, points to mass psychogenic illness triggered by extreme stress: the Rhineland in 1374 was recovering from the Black Death, widespread flooding, and famine, conditions that produced apocalyptic anxiety across the population. The 1374 outbreak was neither the first nor the last episode of mass dancing mania in Europe. Similar events were recorded from the seventh century through the famous 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague, when hundreds danced in the streets for weeks. These outbreaks disappeared after the seventeenth century, leaving behind one of medieval history’s most unsettling and least understood phenomena.

Every road, rail line, and canal into West Berlin went dark overnight. On June 24, 1948, the Soviet Union imposed a total blockade on the western sectors of the city, cutting off food, fuel, and supplies to 2.5 million civilians in an attempt to force the United States, Britain, and France to abandon their post-war occupation zones. The blockade was Stalin’s response to the Western Allies’ introduction of a new currency, the Deutsche Mark, in their zones of occupied Germany, which threatened Soviet economic control. West Berlin had roughly 36 days of food and 45 days of coal when the blockade began. The conventional military response was obvious: send an armed convoy down the autobahn and dare the Soviets to fire the first shot of World War III. General Lucius Clay, the American military governor, advocated this approach. Instead, President Truman authorized an operation that most military planners considered physically impossible: supplying an entire city of 2.5 million people by air. The Berlin Airlift began on June 26 with C-47 cargo planes carrying 80 tons of supplies. Within months, the operation scaled to an extraordinary logistical achievement. At its peak, Allied planes landed at Tempelhof and Gatow airports every 90 seconds, around the clock, delivering an average of 8,000 tons of cargo daily. American and British pilots flew more than 278,000 flights over the course of the operation, delivering 2.3 million tons of food, coal, medicine, and raw materials. Stalin lifted the blockade on May 12, 1949, after 318 days, having achieved none of his objectives. The airlift continued until September to build up reserves. The crisis accelerated the creation of NATO, formalized the division of Germany into East and West, and demonstrated that the Western Allies would defend Berlin at nearly any cost. Tempelhof Airport, once a symbol of Nazi ambition, became a monument to the Cold War’s first major confrontation.

The United States Air Force published a 231-page report explaining that aliens had never visited Roswell, New Mexico. Released on June 24, 1997, fifty years after the alleged incident, "The Roswell Report: Case Closed" concluded that the alien bodies witnesses claimed to have seen were actually anthropomorphic test dummies dropped from high-altitude balloons during Project High Dive in the 1950s, and that the wreckage recovered in 1947 came from a classified nuclear monitoring balloon called Project Mogul. The Roswell incident had begun in early July 1947, when rancher Mac Brazel found debris scattered across a field northwest of Roswell. The Army Air Field initially issued a press release stating that a "flying disc" had been recovered, then quickly retracted the statement, calling the debris a weather balloon. The story faded until the late 1970s, when UFO researchers interviewed aging witnesses and published books reviving the alien spacecraft theory. By the 1990s, Roswell had become the centerpiece of American UFO mythology. The Air Force’s 1994 report had already identified Project Mogul as the source of the debris, but it could not explain the alien body claims. The 1997 follow-up tackled this directly, arguing that witnesses had conflated events from different years. The crash test dummies, used between 1954 and 1959, bore a superficial resemblance to alien descriptions: they were hairless, about four feet tall, and were transported in body bags to military facilities after recovery. The report argued that over decades, witnesses compressed these separate memories into a single narrative. The report satisfied few believers. Critics pointed out that the dummy drops began seven years after the 1947 incident and questioned how witnesses could confuse plastic mannequins with alien beings. Roswell remains the most investigated and debated UFO case in history, and the town itself has embraced its extraterrestrial reputation, drawing hundreds of thousands of tourists annually to its museums, gift shops, and annual festival.

Robert the Bruce chose his ground with the precision of a man who understood that geography could defeat numbers. At the Battle of Bannockburn on June 23-24, 1314, a Scottish army of roughly 7,000 infantry defeated an English force more than twice its size under King Edward II, securing Scotland’s independence in the most decisive battle of the medieval Scottish wars. Edward II had marched north with perhaps 20,000 men to relieve the English garrison at Stirling Castle, which had been under Scottish siege. Bruce positioned his forces on marshy ground near the Bannock Burn, a stream south of Stirling, where the terrain neutralized the English advantage in heavy cavalry. The first day of battle opened with a famous single combat: Bruce killed English knight Sir Henry de Bohun with a single blow of his axe when de Bohun charged him before the armies engaged. The main battle on June 24 saw Bruce’s schiltrons, dense formations of spearmen, advance against the English in a tactic that surprised commanders accustomed to defensive Scottish formations. The English army, compressed between the Bannock Burn and the Forth River with limited room to deploy its cavalry, fell into disorder. When Bruce committed his reserve and camp followers appeared on a nearby hill, possibly mistaken for reinforcements, the English army broke and fled. Edward II barely escaped capture, riding first to Stirling Castle and then to Dunbar, where he took a boat south. Bannockburn did not end the Anglo-Scottish wars, which continued intermittently for another fourteen years. But the battle destroyed Edward II’s military credibility and confirmed Bruce’s legitimacy as king. The 1320 Declaration of Arbroath, which asserted Scottish sovereignty to the Pope, drew its moral authority directly from Bannockburn. Scottish independence was formally recognized by England in the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton in 1328.