Three trillion trees, a botched assassination outside her 'pozzie', and the end of World War II
Officers and crew of the 'Mighty Mo,' anchored in Tokyo Bay, watch as the Japanese delegation approaches senior Allied commanders, one of whom was South Africa's Commander AP Cartwright, to sign surrender documents, marking the end of world War II.
Image: reddit.com
On this day in history, September 2
31BC In the Battle of Actium, off Greece, the forces of Octavian defeat Mark Antony’s and Cleopatra’s troops, ending the Roman republic.
1666 The Great Fire of London begins in Pudding Lane; 80% of London is destroyed.
1806 A landslide destroys the town of Goldau, Switzerland, killing 457 people.
1848 Sir Harry Smith proclaims the territory between the Orange and Vaal rivers as British territory, regardless of protests by Voortrekker leader Andries Pretorius.
1870 Prussian forces take Napoleon III of France and 100 000 of his soldiers prisoner in the Battle of Sedan.
1898 Lord Kitchener’s force decisively defeats the Dervishes at the Battle of Omdurman, in Sudan, taking Khartoum.
1901 US vice-president Theodore Roosevelt, first utters the much-used phrase, ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’ at the Minnesota State Fair.
1909 Britain’s King Edward VII signs the South Africa Act, creating the Union of South Africa from the colonies of the Cape of Good Hope, Natal, Orange River Colony, and Transvaal.
1944 Holocaust diarist Anne Frank is sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
1945 V-J Day, formal surrender of Japan aboard the ‘Mighty Mo’, the battleship USS Missouri, marks the end of World War II. One of the senior Allied commanders witnessing the signing ceremony was South Africa's Commander AP Cartwright. (Due to the complexities of the events surrounding the end of the Pacific war, V-J Day has been, and is, commemorated on a variety of dates: August 15, the anniversary of Hirohito’s announcement in local time; August 14, the date of Hirohito’s announcement in the US; and September 2, the anniversary of Japan’s formal surrender.)
1987 In Moscow, the trial begins for Mathias Rust, 19, who flew his Cessna airplane undetected into Red Square.
1998 The UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda finds Jean-Paul Akayesu, the former mayor of a small town in Rwanda, guilty on nine counts of genocide.
2001 Chris Barnard, the medical pioneer who performed the first heart transplant, dies of an asthma attack in his hotel room in Paphos, Cyprus, where he was holidaying.
2015 Earth’s trees number 3 trillion according to a Yale University study.
2019 Violence and looting directed at foreigners in Johannesburg results in five deaths and dozens arrested by the police.
2022 An attempted assassination of Argentina’s vice-president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner outside her home in Buenos Aires fails when assailant’s gun jams.
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