On this day:

May 3, 1942 – The first day of the first modern naval engagement in history, called the Battle of the Coral Sea, a Japanese invasion force succeeds in occupying Tulagi of the Solomon Islands in an expansion of Japan’s defensive perimeter. The United States, having broken Japan’s secret war code and forewarned of an impending invasion of Tulagi and Port Moresby, attempted to intercept the Japanese armada. Four days of battles between Japanese and American aircraft carriers resulted in 70 Japanese and 66 Americans warplanes destroyed. This confrontation, called the Battle of the Coral Sea, marked the first air-naval battle in history, as none of the carriers fired at each other, allowing the planes taking off from their decks to do the battling. Among the casualties was the American carrier Lexington; “the Blue Ghost” (so-called because it was not camouflaged like other carriers) suffered such extensive aerial damage that it had to be sunk by its own crew. Two hundred sixteen Lexington crewmen died as a result of the Japanese aerial bombardment. Although Japan would go on to occupy all of the Solomon Islands, its victory was a Pyrrhic one: The cost in experienced pilots and aircraft carriers was so great that Japan had to cancel its expedition to Port Moresby, Papua, as well as other South Pacific targets.

Four Medals of Honor were awarded at Coral Sea:

• Lieutenant John J. Powers (Yorktown, VB-5) for actions while attacking Shoho on 7 May at Tulagi, and on 8 May in while attacking Shokaku (killed in action)
• Lieutenant Milton E. Ricketts (Yorktown), engineering repair party, on 8 May (killed in action)
• Lieutenant William E. Hall (Lexington, VS-2) for his attack on Shoho on 7 May and interception of Japanese torpedo planes (too few available fighter aircraft forced the use of dive/scout bombers as low-level interceptors) on 8 May (survived)
• Chief Water Tender Oscar V. Peterson (Neosho) for his heroism in the ship's engineering spaces on 7 May (died of wounds)

https://www.historyonthenet.com/the-battle-of-the-coral-sea/
http://usnhistory.navylive.dodlive.mil/2017/05/03/the-end-of-the-beginning-of-the-war-in-the-pacific-the-battle-of-the-coral-sea/

the first ground troops, the 173 airborne, are dispatched to viet nam on may 3rd, 1965

Twas two days before Cinco De Mayo


#HistoryBuff

you know in Mexico they don't celebrate cinco de mayo, except in pueblo, where the battle it commemorates took place. and it's not Mexican independence day, which is sept. 16th.
cinco de mayo commemorates the battle of Pueblo, when the mexican forces pulled a highly unlikely win out of their asses over the forces of Napoleon. i had to google that, i asked two mexicans what cinco de mayo was all about, and they couldn't tell me. seems like Americans aren't the only ones ignorant about their past

At Kent State University, 100 National Guardsmen fire their rifles into a group of students, killing four and wounding 11.

President Richard Nixon’s May 1st announcement of the American incursion into Cambodia leads to massive anti-Vietnam war protests on college campuses nationwide. At Kent State University students burned the ROTC building and rioted in downtown Kent. The governor of Ohio dispatched Guardsmen from the 1st Battalion, 145th Infantry and several Troops of the 107th Armored Cavalry (at peak strength a total of 1,395 men) to restore order in Kent. These men were already on state active duty in response to a wildcat truckers strike when moved to the campus. Except for some trouble in the town of Kent on Saturday night, in which ten Guardsmen were injured by thrown bottles and rocks, overall for two days the situation remained calm. But on Monday the 4th a planned anti-war rally was scheduled, drawing both students and non-students. The campus authorities tried to stop the rally but the crowd on the Commons kept growing larger, more vocal and belligerent. The sheriff, riding a Guard jeep and with a Guard driver, approached the crowd to tell them to disperse when the jeep was pelted with stones, bottles and other missiles. The Guard driver was hit in the eye from broken windshield glass. It was then decided to have the Guardsmen clear the crowd. At this time the Guard had no crowd control equipment other than CS (tear) gas fired from grenade launchers. They had no batons, face or body shields, no body armor and no non-lethal projectiles. What they did have were steel helmets, gas masks (which greatly restrict vision) and M-1 rifles with fixed bayonets. Since ten Guardsmen had been injured two days earlier the men were now issued live ammunition. After firing a volley of tear gas the troops, totaling 125 men, moved out to push the crowd over “Blanket Hill” surmounted by the Student Center in hopes they would disperse in the parking lot on the other side. As the men moved forward, they came under a barrage of projectiles including chunks of concrete with steel rebar rods which had been stockpiled by protestors. Fifty Guardsmen were hit, some multiple times, as they continued to advance. The line of troops split to move on each side of the Center as the crowd fell back over the hill. Once the men on the right side of the advance crested the hill they found themselves cut off from further advance by a steel fence. As they turned to return the way they came, their tear gas ran out and some in the crowd started to approach them shouting and throwing objects. For reasons no one can fully explain someone fired a shot. Some say it came from a dorm room overlooking the crowd while others say only the Guard fired. Whichever version is right, the Guardsmen fired a ragged volley of 34 shots, hitting 13 people, four of whom were killed. In the aftermath the campus was immediately closed until the next school year. Years of court action resulted in no Guardsmen ever being convicted of a crime in the shooting. While Kent State will remain a dark day in Guard history some good did come from it. As a result of studies made after the event, Guardsmen today have the proper crowd control equipment and non-lethal devices are available. And all Army Guard personnel receive extensive training in crowd control techniques. Perhaps the best evidence of change is that in the more than 35 years since that day, despite numerous calls upon the Guard in many states to control riotous behavior, there has been no repeat of the tragedy

Further Reading:
https://www.kent.edu/may-4-historical-accuracy
http://allthatsinteresting.com/kent-state-massacre
https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/decades-later-no-justice-kent-state-killings

The 1st Annual Grammy Awards were held on May 4, 1959. They recognized musical accomplishments by performers for the year 1958. Two separate ceremonies were held simultaneously on the same day; the first in The Beverly Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills, California, and the second in the Park Sheraton Hotel in New York City.[1]Count Basie, Domenico Modugno, Henry Mancini, Ella Fitzgerald and Ross Bagdasarian, Sr. each won 2 awards.[2][3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Annual_Grammy_Awards


Sinatra had the rare feat of landing both of his 1958 albums in the running.


1st Annual Grammy Awards
Award ceremony

Date: May 4, 1959
Other ceremonies: 1959
Host: Mort Sahl
Location: Beverly Hilton Hotel, Los Angeles & New York

May 5, 1961 – From Cape Canaveral, Florida, Navy Commander Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. is launched into space aboard the Freedom 7 space capsule, becoming the first American astronaut to travel into space. The suborbital flight, which lasted 15 minutes and reached a height of 116 miles into the atmosphere, was a major triumph for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA was established in 1958 to keep U.S. space efforts abreast of recent Soviet achievements, such as the launching of the world’s first artificial satellite–Sputnik 1–in 1957. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the two superpowers raced to become the first country to put a man in space and return him to Earth. On April 12, 1961, the Soviet space program won the race when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was launched into space, put in orbit around the planet, and safely returned to Earth. One month later, Shepard’s suborbital flight restored faith in the U.S. space program. NASA continued to trail the Soviets closely until the late 1960s and the successes of the Apollo lunar program. In July 1969, the Americans took a giant leap forward with Apollo 11, a three-stage spacecraft that took U.S. astronauts to the surface of the moon and returned them to Earth. On February 5, 1971, Alan Shepard, the first American in space, became the fifth astronaut to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 14 lunar landing mission

https://www.space.com/17385-alan-shepard-first-american-in-space.html

5/6/37..the Hindenburg airship burst into flames as it touches its mooring pole. 37 people die.

May 6th: On this Day

1965, In their Clearwater, Florida hotel room, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards worked out the opening guitar riff of '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' following Richard's purchase of a Gibson fuzz-box earlier that day. The song is considered to be one of the all-time greatest rock songs ever recorded. In 2004 Rolling Stone magazine placed 'Satisfaction' in the second spot on its list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

1965,

May 6, 1942 – U.S. Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright surrenders all U.S. troops in the Philippines to the Japanese. The island of Corregidor remained the last Allied stronghold in the Philippines after the Japanese victory at Bataan (from which General Wainwright had managed to flee, to Corregidor). Constant artillery shelling and aerial bombardment attacks ate away at the American and Filipino defenders. Although still managing to sink many Japanese barges as they approached the northern shores of the island, the Allied troops could hold the invader off no longer. General Wainwright, only recently promoted to the rank of lieutenant general and commander of the U.S. armed forces in the Philippines, offered to surrender Corregidor to Japanese General Homma, but Homma wanted the complete, unconditional capitulation of all American forces throughout the Philippines. Wainwright had little choice given the odds against him and the poor physical condition of his troops (he had already lost 800 men). He surrendered at midnight. All 11,500 surviving Allied troops were evacuated to a prison stockade in Manila. General Wainwright remained a POW until 1945. As a sort of consolation for the massive defeat he suffered, he was present on the USS Missouri for the formal Japanese surrender ceremony on September 2, 1945. He would also be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor by President Harry Truman. Wainwright died in 1953-exactly eight years to the day of the Japanese surrender ceremony.

May 7, 1915 – British ocean liner Lusitania is torpedoed without warning by a German submarine off the south coast of Ireland. Within 20 minutes, the vessel sank into the Celtic Sea. Of 1,959 passengers and crew, 1,198 people were drowned, including 128 Americans. The attack aroused considerable indignation in the United States, but Germany defended the action, noting that it had issued warnings of its intent to attack all ships, neutral or otherwise, that entered the war zone around Britain. When World War I erupted in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson pledged neutrality for the United States, a position that the vast majority of Americans favored. Britain, however, was one of America’s closest trading partners, and tension soon arose between the United States and Germany over the latter’s attempted quarantine of the British isles. Several U.S. ships traveling to Britain were damaged or sunk by German mines, and in February 1915 Germany announced unrestricted submarine warfare in the waters around Britain. In early May 1915, several New York newspapers published a warning by the German embassy in Washington that Americans traveling on British or Allied ships in war zones did so at their own risk. The announcement was placed on the same page as an advertisement of the imminent sailing of the Lusitania liner from New York back to Liverpool. The sinkings of merchant ships off the south coast of Ireland prompted the British Admiralty to warn the Lusitania to avoid the area or take simple evasive action, such as zigzagging to confuse U-boats plotting the vessel’s course. The captain of the Lusitania ignored these recommendations, and at 2:12 p.m. on May 7 the 32,000-ton ship was hit by an exploding torpedo on its starboard side. The torpedo blast was followed by a larger explosion, probably of the ship’s boilers, and the ship sunk in 20 minutes. It was revealed that the Lusitania was carrying about 173 tons of war munitions for Britain, which the Germans cited as further justification for the attack. The United States eventually sent three notes to Berlin protesting the action, and Germany apologized and pledged to end unrestricted submarine warfare. In November, however, a U-boat sunk an Italian liner without warning, killing 272 people, including 27 Americans. Public opinion in the United States began to turn irrevocably against Germany. On January 31, 1917, Germany, determined to win its war of attrition against the Allies, announced that it would resume unrestricted warfare in war-zone waters. Three days later, the United States broke diplomatic relations with Germany, and just hours after that the American liner Housatonic was sunk by a German U-boat. On February 22, Congress passed a $250 million arms appropriations bill intended to make the United States ready for war. In late March, Germany sunk four more U.S. merchant ships, and on April 2 President Wilson appeared before Congress and called for a declaration of war against Germany. On April 4, the Senate voted to declare war against Germany, and two days later the House of Representatives endorsed the declaration. With that, America entered World War I.

In 2008, divers explored the wreck of the Lusitania, situated eight miles off the coast of Ireland. On board, the divers found approximately four million U.S.-made Remington .303 bullets. The discovery supports the German's long-held belief that the Lusitania was being used to transport war materials. The find also supports the theory that it was the explosion of munitions on board that caused the second explosion on the Lusitania.

today in 1945 the german army surrendered to the allies, at Reims, in northern france.
their only alternative was to face the approaching russian army, who had already proved that they didn't take german prisoners.

Dr. No is released on 05/08/63.
the first Bond film sets the standard for followers, and launches the career of Sean Connery, a bit part player up to that time

It only seemed like yesterday dam time flies

• 1873 – Der Krach: Vienna stock market crash heralds the Long Depression.

on this day in 1960 the first birth control pill is approved for use.

1671 – Thomas Blood, disguised as a clergyman, attempts to steal England's Crown Jewels from the Tower of London.

1958 – Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo has world premiere in San Francisco.

May 9 1964, Chuck Berry began his first ever UK tour at The Astoria Theatre, London, supported by The Animals, The Swinging Blue Jeans, Karl Denver and the Nashville Teens.


May 9 1964, Louis Armstrong went to No.1 on the US singles chart with 'Hello Dolly' making him the oldest artist to hit No.1 at the age of 62. In 2011, 85 year-old Tony Bennett broke this record when his Duets album topped the US album chart.

On this day in 1869, the presidents of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads meet in Promontory, Utah, and drive a ceremonial last spike into a rail line that connects their railroads. This made transcontinental railroad travel possible for the first time in U.S. history. No longer would western-bound travelers need to take the long and dangerous journey by wagon train, and the West would surely lose some of its wild charm with the new connection to the civilized East.