Today, back in the day

1652 Bernert Willemsz Wijlant is born at the Cape two months after Jan van Riebeek’s arrival. His birth is the settlement’s first.

1816 About 25cm of snow fall in New England, America in the ‘year without a summer’ following Mount Tambora’s eruption in Indonesia, the year before. Crops fail across Asia and about 90 000 people die of famine.

1912 Novarupta erupts in Alaska – the largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century.

1944 The ‘Longest Day’ begins as thousands of Allied troops storm Normandy’s beaches, accompanied by mass drops of paratroopers behind enemy lines, beginning the invasion of Europe. The Allies secure a foothold on all beaches, but at a cost. From relatively light to no resistance on the English and Canadian beaches to a slaughter on Utah beach which had been assigned to the Americans, German resistance falters and the second front that Stalin has been pleading for opens. D-Day was one of the pivotal moments in modern history.

1968 Tragedy again rocks the Kennedy family, as US presidential candidate Senator Robert F Kennedy and brother of assassinated President John F Kennedy, dies of his wounds after being shot in Los Angeles.

1972 An explosion at the world’s largest coal mine in Wankie, Rhodesia, kills 427 miners. 1984 1 200 die in the Sikh ‘Golden Temple’ uprising in India.

2002 An asteroid 10m in diameter explodes over the Mediterranean Sea between Greece and Libya. More powerful than the Nagasaki atomic bomb, but most aren’t even aware of it.

2012 The Solar Impulse completes the world’s first intercontinental flight powered by the sun.

2017 Syrian Democratic Forces launch an offensive to take Raqqa from Islamic State.

2019 German serial killer and nurse Niels Högel gets a second life sentence for the murder of 85 more people (he had already been convicted of six killings). He is Germany’s worst post-war serial killer.

2024 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings commemorated in Normandy, France. Leaders of the Allied countries attend, what is probably the last major gathering of the last remaining veterans of the invasion that helped speed the fall of Nazi Germany and the liberation Europe.

DAILY NEWS

historical figure

Some June 6 history: The 'Longest Day' and it's bloody slaughter on the beaches, an asteroid explodes