ON THIS DAY

1839 The Battle of Kapain ends a nineday campaign that started at Mezeg, Enzelberg, with the Voortrekkers under Andries Hendrik Potgieter and Pieter Uys conclusively defeating the Matabele under Mzilikazi.

1847 Chloroform first used aas an anaesthetic.

1901 The most southern battle of the second Anglo-Boer War is fought at Kraalbospan, near Darling in the Western Cape.

1912 The frozen bodies of explorer Robert Scott and his men are found on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica.

1914 Rebellion leader General C.R. de Wet suffers a crushing defeat by government forces at Winburg, in the Free State.

1920 The Dalmatian coast between Italy and Yugoslavia is ceded to Yugoslavia Leon Trotsky is expelled from the Soviet Communist Party, leaving Joseph Stalin in undisputed control of the Soviet Union. 1933 First known photo of so-called Loch Ness monster is taken by Hugh Gray 1938 One of Nazi Germany’s leaders, Hermann Goering, announces that he wants Madagascar as a Jewish homeland. 1941 Temperatures around Moscow drop to -12°C as the Soviet Union launches ski troops for the first time against the freezing German forces near the city. 1942 Following the Allied victory at el Alamein South African armoured cars pursue retreating German forces and reenter Tobruk.

1944 The Royal Air Force launches 29 Avro Lancaster bombers, which sink the German battleship Tirpitz, with 12,000 lb Tallboy bombs off Tromsø, Norway.

1948 In Tokyo, the International MilitaryTribunal for the Far East sentences seven Japanese military and government officials, including General Hideki Tojo, to death for their roles in World War II.

1966 Buzz Aldrin takes the first ‘space selfie’, a photo of himself performing extravehicular activity in space during the Gemini programme.

1970 Cyclone Bhola makes landfall in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) killing up to 500 000, making it the deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded.

1974 South Africa suspended from UN General Assembly because of apartheid. 1982 KGB Chief Yuri Andropov succeeds Leonid Brezhnev as leader of the Soviet Union.

1990 Tim Berners-Lee publishes a formal proposal for the World Wide Web.

1996 Saudi Arabian Flight 763 and Kazakhstan Airlines Flight 1907 collide in midair over Charkhi Dadri in India, killing 349 people, the third-deadliest aviation disaster in history.

1997 Ramzi Yousef is found guilty of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

2001 Taliban forces abandon Afghanistan’s capital Kabul, ahead of advancing Afghan Northern Alliance troops.

2017 For the first time Prince Charles lays the wreath to Great Britain’s war dead, replacing Queen Elizabeth. | The Historian