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There is only one decisive victory: the last. -- Karl von Clausewitz |
Colonel John Harris(180 total words in this text)(3801 Reads)  7 January 1859 - 12 May 1864 John Harris was born on 20 May 1790 in East Whiteland, Pennsylvania. He was 68 years old and had been a Marine officer for nearly 45 years when he became Colonel Commandant. As a captain with Archibald Henderson in the Seminole War, he commanded a mounted detachment of Marines and received a brevet of major for his services. In the Mexican War, he was sent with a battalion to Mexico, arriving after the cessation of hostilities to undertake occupation duty at Alvarado. Colonel Harris became Commandant on 7 January 1859 on the eve of the Civil War, and after the outbreak of that conflict, he labored to reconstitute the Corps which had been badly weakened by the loss of nearly half of its captains and lieutenants, who had departed for service with the Confederacy. Harris died in office on 12 May 1864, at which time the Secretary of the Navy was moved to confide to his diary, "His death gives embarrassment as to a successor.'' |
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This Day in History
1775:
The American Revolution begins as fighting breaks out at Lexington, Massachusetts.
1861: Residents of Baltimore, Maryland, attack a Union regiment while the group makes its way to Washington. 1861: President Lincoln orders a blockade of Confederate ports. 1927: In China, Hankow communists declare war on Chiang Kai-shek. 1938: General Francisco Franco declares victory in the Spanish Civil War. 1943: Waffen SS attack Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto putting down the uprising. 1951: I and IX Corps reached the Utah Line, south of the Iron Triangle. 1951: General MacArthur denounced the Truman Administration before a joint session of Congress for refusing to lift restrictions on the scope of the war. 1952: The U.N. delegation informed the communists that only 70,000 of 132,000 of the prisoners of war held by the United Nations Command were willing to return home. |
