On This Day, March 8: 1st large unit of U.S. ground troops lands in South Vietnam
March 8 (UPI) — On this date in history:
In 1817, the New York Stock Exchange was established.
In 1913, the Internal Revenue Service began to levy and collect income taxes in the United States.
In 1914, International Women’s Day was observed on March 8 for the first time and would go on to be marked on this day annually. The United Nations began officially celebrating the day in 1977.
In 1917, strikes and riots in St. Petersburg marked the start of the Russian Bolshevik revolution.
In 1921, after Germany failed to make its first war reparation payment, French troops occupied Dusseldorf and other towns on the Ruhr River in Germany’s industrial heartland.
In 1943, Allied planes led by the Royal Air Force bombed the German city of Nuremberg, an important military manufacturing site. By the end of World War II, the vast majority of the city was destroyed by Allied bombings.
In 1957, Egypt reopened the Suez Canal to international traffic after Israel withdrew from occupied Egyptian territory.
File Photo courtesy Imperial War Museum
In 1965, about 3,500 U.S. Marines landed in Da Nang, South Vietnam. It was the first deployment of a large U.S. ground combat unit to the country, marking the United States’s official entry in the Vietnam War.
In 1974, the streaking epidemic that had been gripped parts of the United States appeared to run its logical course.
In 1983, U.S. President Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” in a speech before the British House of Commons.
In 1990, Colombia’s M-19 leftist guerrilla group surrendered its arms, ending 16 years of insurrection.
In 1999, baseball great Joe DiMaggio died at age 84.
File Photo by Ezio Petersen/UPI
In 2008, U.S. President George W. Bush vetoed legislation that would have outlawed severe interrogation methods such as waterboarding used by the CIA. Bush said the proposal would eliminate “one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror.”
In 2010, up to 500 people were killed in a nighttime “ethnic cleansing” raid on a village near Nigeria’s turbulent city of Jos.
In 2013, former Argentine President Carlos Saul Menem and ex-Defense Minister Oscar Camilion were convicted of smuggling weapons to Croatia and Ecuador.
In 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 carrying 239 people vanished over the Indian Ocean en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. A massive search found no sign of the plane and a government statement months later said all aboard — 227 passengers and 12 crew members — “are presumed to have lost their lives.”
In 2022, David Bennett, a 57-year-old man who became the first to receive a heart transplant from a genetically modified pig, died two months after the historic surgery.
In 2024, a U.S. Defense Department report found no evidence that the U.S. government is aware of and concealing the truth about unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UFOs.
File Photo by Chip Somodevilla/UPI
