March 19 in History

Robert Cavelier de La Salle's own men shot him in the head on March 19, 1687, while he searched for food near their camp in East Texas. Born on November 22, 1643, in Rouen, France, La Salle had been educated by Jesuits and emigrated to New France (present-day Canada) in 1666. He became an explorer driven by two ambitions: finding a navigable water route to China and claiming the Mississippi River basin for France. He achieved the second. In April 1682, he descended the Mississippi from the Illinois country to its mouth on the Gulf of Mexico, claiming the entire river basin, 828,000 square miles, for King Louis XIV and naming it Louisiana in his honor. The claim was audacious: it encompassed roughly a third of the modern United States, from the Appalachians to the Rockies. His 1684 expedition to establish a French colony at the mouth of the Mississippi was a catastrophe. He missed the river's mouth entirely, landing 400 miles west on the coast of Texas, near Matagorda Bay. The colony he established, Fort Saint Louis, was plagued by disease, hostile encounters with local tribes, and La Salle's own difficult temperament. He was an autocratic leader who alienated subordinates through arbitrary punishments and erratic decision-making. After two years of wandering through swamps and prairies attempting to find the Mississippi overland, his men mutinied. They killed his nephew first, then La Salle when he came looking for him. The assassins were themselves murdered weeks later by other members of the expedition. The survivors eventually reached French settlements in the Illinois country. Fort Saint Louis was destroyed by Karankawa warriors in 1688. France lost track of Texas for decades because the one man who could have led them back was dead in the wilderness.

The journey nearly killed him before he reached Rome. Frederick III spent sixteen months traveling from Vienna to his coronation, dragging his entire court across the Alps because he couldn't trust leaving anyone behind with access to his treasury. Pope Nicholas V crowned him Holy Roman Emperor on March 19, 1452—the last time a pope would ever perform this ceremony in Rome. After Frederick, emperors simply declared themselves crowned in their own territories, skipping Rome entirely. The medieval world's most sacred ritual died not from revolution or reform, but because one paranoid Habsburg refused to travel faster than his gold wagons.

The king surrendered his throne not to invading armies, but to his own son's conspiracy. Charles IV of Spain abdicated at Aranjuez on March 19, 1808, after Prince Ferdinand orchestrated riots outside the palace gates—complete with paid agitators who torched the royal favorite's mansion. Ferdinand VII seized power believing he'd won. But Napoleon had been waiting for exactly this chaos. Within two months, both father and son found themselves prisoners in France, and Bonaparte installed his own brother Joseph on the Spanish throne. The amateur coup that Ferdinand thought would make him king instead handed Spain to a foreign emperor.

Confederate General Joseph Johnston launched a surprise attack against William Sherman's advancing columns at Bentonville, North Carolina, on March 19, 1865, in the last major Confederate offensive of the entire Civil War. Johnston had scraped together 21,000 men from the remnants of three different armies, many of them barefoot and armed with whatever they could find, to face Sherman's 60,000 veterans marching north through the Carolinas after burning Atlanta and Savannah. The gamble was desperate and everyone knew it. Johnston struck the left wing of Sherman's army while it was strung out on a single road, rolling up Union General Henry Slocum's XIV Corps and nearly breaking through before Federal reinforcements arrived by forced march. For a few hours on the first day, the Confederates actually had numerical superiority on the immediate battlefield, the last time that would ever happen. By the second day, Sherman's full force was deployed and Johnston's position became untenable. He withdrew on March 21, having inflicted 1,500 casualties while suffering 2,600 of his own, losses his army could not absorb. Five weeks later, on April 26, Johnston surrendered his entire command to Sherman at Bennett Place near Durham, the largest Confederate capitulation of the war. The battle at Bentonville proved Johnston still had fight left, but his men had nothing left to fight with.

The train didn't stop. Italian Fascists opened fire from the Parenzana railway on children playing near the tracks in Strunjan, a small Slovenian coastal village between Trieste and Piran, on March 20, 1921. Two children were killed instantly. Two more were maimed so severely they required amputations. Three others were wounded. The shooters kept riding, disappearing toward Trieste as if nothing had happened. This wasn't combat. Slovenia's coastal territories had been absorbed into Italy after World War I just two years earlier under the Treaty of Rapallo, and Mussolini's Blackshirts were systematically "Italianizing" the newly acquired population through terror. They burned Slovenian cultural centers and schools, banned the Slovenian language from public use, forced name changes on families, and attacked anyone who resisted assimilation. The Parenzana, a narrow-gauge railway built by Austria-Hungary to connect coastal towns from Trieste to Parenzo, became a weapon that day. The line ran through a string of Slovenian and Croatian villages where residents had no warning and no defense against gunfire from a passing train. The massacre at Strunjan was never prosecuted. Italian authorities treated it as an incident involving unidentified individuals, though witnesses identified the shooters as members of local Fascist squads. Seven casualties in a village of fishermen and farmers, and the message was unmistakable: speak Italian, abandon your identity, or vanish.

A hundred men walked through 1,300 British soldiers and lived. At Crossbarry, Tom Barry's IRA column was surrounded by twelve times their number—armored cars, machine guns, the full weight of Crown forces tightening a noose across County Cork's frozen fields. Barry didn't retreat. He attacked the weakest point in the encirclement, breaking through in a firefight that lasted three hours. The British lost ten men, captured nobody. Three months later, London agreed to negotiate. Sometimes the trap springs on the trapper.

The military told them they lacked the intelligence and temperament to fly complex aircraft. So in March 1941, the War Department activated the 99th Pursuit Squadron at Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama, not to prove Black pilots could fight, but to create a controlled experiment that would supposedly demonstrate they couldn't. The men would wash out of training, the thinking went, and the "experiment" would quietly validate existing segregation policies. Instead, Captain Benjamin O. Davis Jr., son of the Army's only Black general, and his fellow cadets completed the identical training program as white pilots at other bases. They graduated, received their wings, and shipped overseas to North Africa in 1943. The 99th flew 1,578 combat missions across North Africa, Sicily, and mainland Europe. Their most celebrated role was escorting heavy bombers deep into German territory, where Luftwaffe fighters routinely slaughtered unprotected B-17 formations. Bomber crews who flew with the Tuskegee escorts, identifiable by the red paint on their aircraft tails, reported dramatically lower loss rates. The "Red Tails" became so effective that bomber groups specifically requested them as escorts. Their combat record was the single most powerful piece of evidence used to dismantle military segregation. In 1948, President Truman signed Executive Order 9981 integrating the armed forces, citing the Tuskegee Airmen's performance as proof that segregation undermined military effectiveness. The unit designed to demonstrate inferiority became the unit that ended it.

He'd survived bullets before, but not the thought of prison. Frank Nitti, Al Capone's enforcer-turned-boss of the Chicago Outfit, pressed a .32 caliber revolver against his own head at the Illinois Central railyard on March 19, 1943. He fired three times. The first two shots missed, which seems impossible at that range, but witnesses said he was staggering drunk and weeping. The third killed him. The feds had Nitti cornered, but not for bootlegging or the dozens of murders attributed to his organization. The indictment was for extorting Hollywood studios in a scheme to control the movie industry through the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees union. Nitti and his associates had been skimming millions from studios like Paramount, Fox, and Warner Brothers by threatening to shut down production through labor strikes. Nitti had inoperable colon cancer, a claustrophobic fear of confined spaces that his associates described as debilitating, and faced a possible twenty-year sentence. The man who'd survived a 1932 assassination attempt by Chicago police detective Harry Lang, who shot him three times in his own office and left him for dead, couldn't face the walls closing in around him a second time. His death triggered a power vacuum that fractured the Outfit for years as Sam Giancana and Tony Accardo fought for control. But the Hollywood extortion case proceeded without him, eventually sending seven of his co-conspirators to federal prison and proving that Tinseltown's golden age had been paying protection money to the mob for most of the 1930s.

Hitler wanted Germany itself obliterated. On March 19, 1945, with Soviet tanks less than 40 miles from Berlin, he signed what Albert Speer would later call the Nero Decree, officially titled the "Demolitions on Reich Territory Decree." The order was explicit: every factory, bridge, railroad, power plant, waterworks, food store, and communications facility in Germany was to be destroyed rather than allowed to fall into enemy hands. Hitler's reasoning, delivered to Speer during a meeting in the Fuhrerbunker, was chillingly logical within his worldview: the German people had proven themselves the weaker nation in this war, and therefore didn't deserve to survive. The strongest people would be the ones left standing, and those would be the Eastern peoples. He was ordering the death of his own civilization. Speer, his armaments minister and personal architect, had been quietly sabotaging demolition orders for weeks already, convincing regional commanders and Gauleiters to ignore destruction directives while maintaining the appearance of compliance. He later claimed he told Hitler directly that the war was lost, though historians debate the extent of his resistance versus self-serving postwar testimony. What's clear is that the Nero Decree was largely not carried out. Local officials, military commanders, and industrial managers recognized that destroying infrastructure would doom the civilian population to starvation and exposure without meaningfully delaying Allied advances. The man who'd promised a thousand-year Reich was willing to leave his countrymen with nothing.

The ship was burning so hot that live ammunition was cooking off in every direction, and Captain Leslie Gehres refused to abandon her. On March 19, 1945, a single Japanese dive bomber slipped through cloud cover just 50 miles from the Japanese mainland and dropped two 550-pound semi-armor-piercing bombs directly onto the USS Franklin's flight deck. The bombs detonated among fully fueled and armed aircraft, creating a chain reaction of explosions that ripped through the hangar deck and blew the flight deck into twisted metal. 724 sailors died, many incinerated at their battle stations. The fires were so intense that ready ammunition, rockets, and depth charges cooked off for hours, sending projectiles screaming across the ship. Most of the crew evacuated to nearby escort vessels. But Gehres and a skeleton crew of 704 men refused to leave. They fought fires for three days while the carrier lay dead in the water within range of Japanese airfields. Lieutenant Commander Joseph O'Callahan, a Catholic chaplain, organized firefighting teams and dragged burning men to safety while fully exposed to explosions, earning the Medal of Honor. Chief Engineer Joseph Hale restored power from the after engine rooms. They coaxed the Franklin back to life and sailed her 12,000 miles under her own power to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. She became the most heavily damaged aircraft carrier in naval history to survive and return home, a ship that every damage control expert calculated should have been a tomb on the Pacific floor.