The Battle of Osan was the first engagement between United States and
North Korean forces during the Korean War, on July 5, 1950. A U.S. task
force of 400 infantry supported by an artillery battery was moved to
Osan, south of the South Korean capital Seoul, and ordered to fight as
a rearguard to delay advancing North Korean forces while additional
U.S. forces arrived in-country to form a defensive line. The task force
lacked both anti-tank guns and effective infantry anti-tank weapons.
Aside from a limited number of HEAT shells for the unit's 105-mm
howitzers, crew-served weapons capable of defeating the T-34 had not
been distributed to U.S. Army forces in Korea at the time. In the first
encounter, a North Korean tank column overran the task force and
continued its advance south. After the column had successfully breached
American lines, the task force opened fire on a force of some 5,000
North Korean infantry approaching its position, temporarily holding up
the North Korean advance. Eventually, North Korean troops overwhelmed
American positions, and the remnants of the task force retreated in
disorder.
Read the rest of this article:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Osan>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1687:
The Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton was
first published, describing his laws of motion and his law of universal
gravitation.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophi%C3%A6_Naturalis_Principia_Mathematica>
1937:
The Hormel Foods Corporation introduced Spam , the canned precooked
meat product that would eventually enter into pop culture, folklore,
and urban legend.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_%28food%29>
1946:
Named after Bikini Atoll, the site of the nuclear weapons test
Operation Crossroads in the Marshall Islands, the modern bikini was
introduced at a fashion show in Paris.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/bikini>
1962:
The Late Late Show, the world's longest-running chat show by the same
broadcaster, aired on Irish television for the first time.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Late_Late_Show>
2009:
A series of violent riots broke out in Ürümqi, the capital city of the
Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_riots>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
scare quote (n):
(chiefly in plural) Each of a set of inverted commas or speech marks
seen as expressing the author's distance from, or unwillingness to
accept, the term enclosed
<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scare_quote>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
Life is not theory. It is reality, with inherent duties to everything
and everyone.
--Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tivadar_Csontv%C3%A1ry_Kosztka>
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