Person report

★29 May 1942
Bing Crosby recorded his version of the song "White Christmas", which went on to become the best-selling single of all time, with over 50 million copies sold.

★16 Oct 1944
A four-day air battle over Taiwan ended with a decisive American victory, destroying hundreds of Japanese aircraft and military facilities.

★14 Dec 1948
American physicists Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann were awarded a patent for their cathode-ray tube amusement device, the first interactive electronic game.

★15 Jan 1951
Ilse Koch, the wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald and Majdanek concentration camps, was sentenced to life imprisonment by a West German court.

★20 Jul 1969
The Apollo 11 lunar module landed on the Sea of Tranquillity, where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon six-and-a-half hours later.

★05 Dec 1972
Gough Whitlam took office as the 21st Prime Minister of Australia and formed a duumvirate with his deputy Lance Barnard, ending 23 years of Liberal-Country Party government.

★28 Sep 1975
An attempted robbery of the Spaghetti House restaurant in Knightsbridge, London, went wrong, and became a six-day hostage situation.

★18 May 1980
The stratovolcano Mount St. Helens erupted, killing 57 people in southern Washington State, reducing hundreds of square miles to wasteland, and causing over US$1 billion in damage.

★19 Apr 1984
Scottish-born composer Peter Dodds McCormick's "Advance Australia Fair", a patriotic song that was first performed in 1878, officially replaced "God Save the Queen" as Australia's national anthem.

★12 Oct 1984
The Provisional Irish Republican Army detonated a bomb at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England, in a failed attempt to assassinate British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and most of her cabinet.

Historical data by Wikipedia Contributors CC BY-SA 3.0.