November 12 in History

Leon Trotsky, the architect of the Red Army and co-leader of the Russian Revolution, was expelled from the Soviet Communist Party, completing Joseph Stalin's ruthless consolidation of total power. The man who had stood beside Lenin during the October Revolution and commanded the military forces that won the Russian Civil War was now officially a non-person in the state he helped create. The power struggle between Stalin and Trotsky had consumed Soviet politics since Lenin's death in 1924. The two men represented fundamentally different visions of communism. Trotsky championed permanent revolution, arguing that socialism could only survive through global expansion. Stalin countered with "socialism in one country," a more pragmatic doctrine that prioritized building Soviet strength at home. The ideological debate masked a raw contest for personal dominance. Stalin outmaneuvered Trotsky methodically. As General Secretary, he controlled party appointments and built a patronage network that Trotsky, brilliant but politically clumsy, could not match. Stalin formed shifting alliances, first with Zinoviev and Kamenev against Trotsky, then turning on his former allies once Trotsky was isolated. By 1927, Trotsky had been stripped of every official position. The expulsion from the party was the penultimate step. In January 1928, Trotsky was exiled to Alma-Ata in Soviet Central Asia. A year later he was deported from the Soviet Union entirely, beginning a wandering exile through Turkey, France, Norway, and finally Mexico. Stalin's victory had consequences far beyond one man's fate. With Trotsky gone, there was no remaining figure of sufficient stature to challenge Stalin's authority. The purges, show trials, and forced collectivization that killed millions in the 1930s proceeded without meaningful opposition from within the party. Trotsky himself was assassinated by a Soviet agent in Mexico City in 1940, an ice axe driven into his skull.

American and Japanese warships collided in the pitch-black waters off Guadalcanal in one of the most chaotic and violent naval engagements of the Pacific War. The three-day Naval Battle of Guadalcanal became the decisive clash that broke Japan's ability to contest the strategically vital Solomon Islands, shifting the momentum of the entire Pacific theater. By November 1942, Guadalcanal had become a grinding attritional struggle. U.S. Marines had seized the island's airfield in August, but Japan was determined to take it back. The Imperial Japanese Navy assembled a powerful force including two battleships, a cruiser squadron, and eleven transport ships carrying 7,000 reinforcements. Their mission was to bombard Henderson Field into rubble and land fresh troops to overwhelm the exhausted American garrison. The first night action on November 13 was a close-range brawl fought at distances sometimes under a thousand yards. Rear Admiral Daniel Callaghan led a cruiser force directly into the Japanese formation in near-total darkness. The result was a confused melee where ships from both sides fired on their own vessels. Callaghan and Rear Admiral Norman Scott were both killed. The Americans lost two cruisers and four destroyers, but they turned back the bombardment force and saved Henderson Field. Two nights later, the battleship USS Washington settled the matter. In a devastating 7-minute barrage, Washington's 16-inch guns wrecked the Japanese battleship Kirishima, which capsized and sank. American aircraft from Henderson Field then destroyed seven of the eleven Japanese transports, leaving thousands of reinforcements stranded on beached hulks.

NASA's Voyager 1 swept past Saturn at a distance of 124,000 kilometers, capturing the first detailed images of the planet's magnificent ring system and revealing a world far stranger than anyone had predicted. The flyby transformed Saturn from a telescopic curiosity into a complex planetary system of staggering beauty and scientific richness. Voyager 1 had launched from Cape Canaveral three years earlier, in September 1977, on a trajectory that used Jupiter's gravity to slingshot toward Saturn. The spacecraft carried eleven scientific instruments packed into a body the size of a compact car, powered by three radioisotope thermoelectric generators that converted plutonium decay into electricity. By the time it reached Saturn, it was transmitting data across 1.5 billion kilometers of space. The images that arrived stunned planetary scientists. Saturn's rings, which ground-based telescopes showed as a few broad bands, resolved into thousands of individual ringlets, some braided together in patterns that defied existing gravitational models. The spoke-like features discovered in the B ring appeared to rotate with the planet's magnetic field rather than following orbital mechanics, a phenomenon that took decades to fully explain. The probe also delivered major discoveries about Saturn's moons. Titan, the largest, was revealed to have a thick nitrogen atmosphere denser than Earth's, with a surface pressure 50 percent higher than sea level on our planet. The atmosphere was opaque to Voyager's cameras, hiding a surface that would not be seen until the Cassini-Huygens mission arrived 24 years later. The decision to fly close to Titan for this observation came at a cost: it bent Voyager 1's trajectory out of the plane of the solar system, making visits to Uranus and Neptune impossible.

Twenty-nine Lancaster bombers of the Royal Air Force's 617 and 9 Squadrons flew through Arctic skies toward Tromso, Norway, each carrying a five-ton Tallboy earthquake bomb designed to destroy what conventional weapons could not. Their target was the Tirpitz, Nazi Germany's last operational battleship, a 42,000-ton behemoth that had spent most of the war hiding in Norwegian fjords while tying down massive Allied naval resources simply by existing. The Tirpitz was the sister ship of the Bismarck, and the Royal Navy had been obsessed with destroying her since 1942. The battleship's mere presence in Norway forced the Allies to keep capital ships in northern waters that were desperately needed elsewhere. Previous attacks had been numerous and creative. Midget submarines had damaged her in September 1943. Fleet Air Arm torpedo bombers had struck in April 1944. RAF Lancasters with Tallboy bombs had scored a hit in September 1944 that damaged her propulsion beyond repair. The Germans towed the crippled ship to shallow water near Tromso to serve as a floating coastal battery. This final raid succeeded where dozens of prior attempts had fallen short. The bombers approached from the east at 14,000 feet. German fighters that should have intercepted them failed to arrive due to a communication breakdown. The smoke screen generators that normally concealed the ship were activated too late. At least two Tallboy bombs struck the Tirpitz directly, and several near-misses buckled her hull plates. The massive ship rolled over and capsized within minutes. Of the Tirpitz's crew of approximately 1,700 men, around 1,000 were killed. Rescue teams could hear trapped sailors tapping from inside the upturned hull, and cutting teams managed to free 87 survivors through the bottom plates.