TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Saturday, March 11, the 70th day of 2023. There are 295 days left in the year. On this date in:

1862: During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln removed Gen. George B. Mcclellan as general-in-chief of the Union armies, leaving him in command of the Army of the Potomac, a post Mcclellan also ended up losing.

1918: What were believed to be the first confirmed U.S. cases of a deadly global flu pandemic were reported among U.S. Army soldiers stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas; 46 soldiers would die. (The worldwide outbreak of influenza claimed an estimated 20 to 40 million lives.)

1941: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Lend-lease Bill, providing war supplies to countries fighting the Axis.

1942: As Japanese forces continued to advance in the Pacific during World

War II, U.S. Army Gen. Douglas Macarthur left the Philippines for Australia, where he vowed on March 20, “I shall return” – a promise he kept more than 21⁄2 years later.

1954: The U.S. Army charged that Sen. Joseph R. Mccarthy, R-wis., and his subcommittee’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, had exerted pressure to obtain favored treatment for Pvt. G. David Schine, a former consultant to the subcommittee. (The confrontation culminated in the famous Senate Army-mccarthy hearings.)

1985: Mikhail S. Gorbachev was chosen to succeed the late Konstantin U. Chernenko as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.

1997: Rock star Paul Mccartney was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

2002: Two columns of light soared skyward from Ground Zero in New York as a temporary memorial to the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks six months earlier.