Person report

★18 Mar 1925
The Tri-State Tornado spawned in Missouri, traveled over 219 miles across Illinois and Indiana, and killed 695 along the way, making it the tornado with the longest continuous track ever recorded and the deadliest in U.S. history.

★18 May 1926
Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson was reportedly kidnapped near Venice Beach in Los Angeles before reappearing five weeks later in Mexico.

★23 Aug 1927
After a controversial trial, and despite worldwide protests, Italian-born American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were executed via electrocution in Massachusetts for murder.

★05 May 1936
Second Italo-Abyssinian War: Italian troops captured Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, unopposed.

★31 Aug 1939
Nazi forces, posing as Poles, staged an attack against the German radio station Sender Gleiwitz in Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia, Germany, creating an excuse to invade Poland the next day.

★17 Jun 1940
Second World War: Britain's worst maritime disaster occurred when at least 3,000 people were killed as a result of the troopship RMS Lancastria's sinking by the Luftwaffe near Saint-Nazaire, France.

★09 Apr 1942
World War II: Japanese forces defeated Allied troops at the Battle of Bataan on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines before beginning to forcibly transfer more than 90,000 prisoners of war to prison camps in the Bataan Death March.

★16 Nov 1945
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization was founded.

★02 Aug 1947
A British South American Airways airliner crashed into Mount Tupungato in the Argentine Andes; its wreckage was not found until 1998.

★29 Aug 1949
The Soviet Union successfully conducted its first nuclear weapons test, exploding the 22-kiloton RDS-1.

Historical data by Wikipedia Contributors CC BY-SA 3.0.