TODAY IN HISTORY

On Oct. 2, 1941, during World War II, German armies launched an all-out drive against Moscow; Soviet forces succeeded in holding onto their capital.

In 1780, British spy John Andre was hanged in Tappan, New York, during the Revolutionary War.

In 1835, the first battle of the Texas Revolution took place as American settlers fought Mexican soldiers near the Guadalupe River; the Mexicans ended up withdrawing.

In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a serious stroke at the White House that left him paralyzed on his left side.

In 1939, the Benny Goodman Sextet (which included Lionel Hampton) made their first recording, “Flying Home,” for Columbia.

In 1944, German troops crushed the two-month-old Warsaw Uprising, during which a quarter of a million people had been killed.

In 1955, the suspense anthology “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” premiered on CBSTV.

In 1959, Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” made its debut on CBS-TV.

In 1967, Thurgood Marshall was sworn as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court as the court opened its new term.

In 1975, President Gerald R. Ford formally welcomed Japan’s Emperor Hirohito to the United States during a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House.

In 1985, actor Rock Hudson, 59, died at his home in Beverly Hills, California, after battling AIDS.

In 1996, an AeroPeru Boeing 757 crashed into the Pacific Ocean, killing all 61 passengers and nine crew members on board.

In 2002, the Washington D.C.-area sniper attacks began, setting off a frantic manhunt lasting three weeks. (John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo were finally arrested for 10 killings and three woundings; Muhammad was executed in 2009; Malvo was sentenced to life in prison.)

In 2006, Charles Carl Roberts IV, a milk truck driver, took a group of girls hostage in an Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, fatally shooting five of them before committing suicide. Americans Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello won the Nobel Prize in medicine. Actress Tamara Dobson died in Baltimore at age 59.

In 2011, Syrian dissidents formally established a broadbased national council designed to overthrow President Bashar Assad’s regime, which they accused of pushing the country to the brink of civil war.