Milestones: April 19, 2024

April 19, 2024 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

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REVOLUTIONARY WAR’S FIRST BLOODSHED — BRITISH TROOPS ON A MISSION TO CAPTURE PATRIOT LEADERS AT LEXINGTON, Massachusetts, and seize their arsenal on the morning of April 19, 1775, found a “welcome” committee — 77 armed minutemen under the command of Captain John Parker waiting for them on the town’s common green. The British troops, numbering about 700, were there on the order of the British governor of Massachusetts, General Thomas Gage to seize all weapons and gunpowder accessible to the American insurgents. Gage also ordered British trips to march against the Patriots’ arsenal at Concord to capture Patriot leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock. However, the Patriots, having already been on alert, deployed Paul Revere and William Dawes to awaken the militiamen and warn Adams and Hancock. Even though the Minutemen were ready, it did not take long for the British to defeat them, and the war’s first bloodshed began.

However, at Concord, several hundred armed Patriots were ready for the British arrival. Even though the British were able to destroy the Patriots’ military supplies, the British wound up having to retreat to Boston when the Americans rushed against them. During the British army’s trek to Boston, Patriot snipers shot at them.

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CIVIL WAR BLOODSHED — THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR SAW ITS FIRST BLOODSHED ON APRIL 19, 1861, when an angry secessionist mob in Baltimore attacked Union troops from Massachusetts who were en route to Washington via train. The Civil War itself had begun a week earlier, on April 12, when Confederate fighters opened fire on Fort Sumter in South Carolina, a Union stronghold. The Union soldiers were trying to connect between separate rail lines in a slave state, but rioters blocked the carriages. Both sides fought on the way to the train station, but the Massachusetts troop got aid from the Baltimore police who held back the mobsters.

Although the Union troops had to leave behind their equipment, they were able to board their train and evacuate. This battle claimed four soldiers and three times as many rioters.

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RESISTANCE FIGHTING — JEWISH RESISTANCE FIGHTERS LAUNCHED THE WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING ON APRIL 19, 1943, as Nazi forces were trying to clear out the ghetto in that city. The Nazis, following their invasion of Poland starting on Sept. 1, 1939, had corralled the Jewish citizens into “ghettos,” enclosures secured with barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards. This compact area of less than two square miles housed more than 500,000 Jewish people in sickening conditions. When the Nazi leader announced that the ghetto would be emptied the next day to honor Hitler s birthday, more than a thousand of the ZOB resistance fighters opened fire, not only with guns but bombs.

The Nazi soldiers, having avoided sustaining heavy casualties, returned to the Warsaw Ghetto five days later and routed the Jews.

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BRANCH DAVIDIAN ASSAULT — A DISASTROUS TEAR GAS ASSAULT BROKE OUT ON APRIL 19, 1993 AT THE BRANCH DAVIDIAN COMPOUND in Waco, Texas. The FBI was after the religious cult of this name after almost two months of standoff between federal authorities and the compound’s members. The Branch Davidian leader was a Biblical-knowledgeable man who had changed his name to David Koresh to honor Israel’s beloved (but flawed) king and the Persian king Cyrus (Koresh in Hebrew according to the cult) The Branch Davidians were actually an offshoot of Seventh Day Adventists who syncretized Christianity with survivalism and Apocalypse theology. The feds were after the Branch Davidians for the group’s massive acquisition of assault rifles, handguns and grenades. On the morning of April 19, 1993, the FBI launched its tear gas assault, which ignited fires in the compound.

By day’s end, the compound had burned down, with Koresh and 80 of his followers, including 22 children, some of whom were his biologically, died in the assault.

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RETALIATING FOR WACO — A TERROR ATTACK THAT WAS LATER CONNECTED TO THE BRANCH DAVIDIAN TEAR GAS ASSAULT exactly two years earlier, rocked the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City just after 9 a.m. on April 19, 1995. The blast killed more than 100 instantly, trapping dozens and maiming young children at a daycare center within the building. Emergency crews from across the U.S. aided in the rescue effort. The death toll two weeks later as the mission became search and recovery was 168 people, 19 of them children. A manhunt brought federal authorities to a former U.S. Army soldier named Timothy McVeigh, then 27, and an associate, Terry Nichols. They had been affected and radicalized by the feds’ raid of Idaho survivalist Randy Weaver in 1992 and then the Branch Davidian debacle. McVeigh and Nichols planned the bombing of the Murrah building, renting a rental truck loaded with a diesel-fuel-fertilizer and a bomb, and making this the worst terrorist attack ever committed on U.S. soil by an American citizen.

McVeigh, who had originally fought his death sentence, informed a judge to go ahead with the execution. McVeigh, by then 33, died of lethal injection at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, the first federal prisoner executed since 1963.

See previous milestones, here.