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13 June

Wreckage from the Battle of Villers-Bocage

The Battle of Villers-Bocage took place in Normandy, France, on 13 June 1944 during World War II. Following the D-Day landings on 6 June, the Germans established defences in front of Caen. The British attacked to attempt to exploit a gap in the German defences west of the city. They reached Villers-Bocage without incident in the morning but were ambushed by Tiger I tanks as they left the town and numerous tanks, anti-tank guns and transport vehicles were destroyed. The Germans then attacked the town but were repulsed. The British withdrew west of Villers-Bocage that evening and repulsed another attack the next day. The British conduct in the battle was controversial because their withdrawal marked the end of the post–D-Day "scramble for ground" and the start of an attritional battle for Caen. Some historians wrote that the British attack was a failure caused by a lack of conviction among some senior commanders; others judged the British force to be insufficiently strong for the task. (Full article...)

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On this day...

June 13

USS Jeannette

1525 – Martin Luther married Katharina von Bora, beginning the practice of clerical marriage in Protestantism.
1881 – The Jeannette expedition to reach the North Pole from the Pacific Ocean via the Bering Strait came to an end when the USS Jeannette (pictured) was finally crushed and sank after having been trapped in ice for almost two years.
1952 – Soviet aircraft shot down a Swedish military plane carrying out signals-intelligence gathering operations, followed three days later by the shootdown of a second plane searching for the first one.
1969 – Preston Smith, Governor of Texas, signed a law converting a research arm of Texas Instruments into the University of Texas at Dallas.
2013 – Some of the closest advisors and collaborators of Czech prime minister Petr Nečas were arrested for corruption.

Henry Middleton (d. 1784)
Manuel Marques de Sousa, Count of Porto Alegre (b. 1804)
Charles Algernon Parsons (b. 1854)
Fran Allison (d. 1989)

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