Dec 13, 2017 2 min read

Today is Wednesday, Dec. 13, the 347th day of 2017. There are 18 days left in the year.

On Dec. 13, 1937, the Chinese city of Nanjing fell to Japanese forces during the Sino-Japanese War; what followed was a massacre of war prisoners, soldiers and citizens. (China maintains up to 300,000 people were killed; Japanese nationalists said the death toll was far lower, and some maintain the massacre never happened.)

In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson arrived in France, becoming the first chief executive to visit Europe while in office.

In 1944, during World War II, the light cruiser USS Nashville was badly damaged in a Japanese kamikaze attack off Negros Island in the Philippines that claimed 133 lives.

In 1962, the United States launched Relay 1, a communications satellite which retransmitted television, telephone and digital signals.

In 1977, an Air Indiana Flight 216, a DC-3 carrying the University of Evansville basketball team on a flight to Nashville, crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all 29 people on board.

In 1981, authorities in Poland imposed martial law in a crackdown on the Solidarity labor movement. (Martial law formally ended in 1983.)

In 1994, an American Eagle commuter plane crashed short of Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina, killing 15 of the 20 people on board.

“A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few.”

– Judge Learned Hand, American jurist (1872-1961)