June 4 · This Day in America
On June 4, 1942, off a speck of atoll in the central Pacific, an outnumbered American fleet is waiting for a Japanese armada that does not know it has been read. Navy codebreakers had cracked enough of the enemy's plan to put the carriers in the right ocean on the right morning. Early attacks fail; American torpedo squadrons are slaughtered almost to a man. Then, in a span of about five minutes, dive-bombers fall out of the sun and three Japanese carriers are burning; a fourth follows by nightfall. Six months after Pearl Harbor, the tide of an entire ocean turns on courage, luck, and arithmetic done in a basement in Hawaii. Japan would not win another major offensive. The men in those torpedo planes bought the minute that changed the war.
Source: www.nationalww2museum.org
Also on this day · 1919
On June 4, 1919, the Senate finally clears the Nineteenth Amendment, sending women's suffrage to the states for ratification. It had taken more than seventy years — Seneca Falls, hunger strikes, picket lines outside the White House, generations of women who fought for a vote they would not live to cast. The words are plain: the right to vote shall not be denied on account of sex. A democracy spent seven decades arguing toward a sentence it should have started with.
Source: www.archives.gov