July 27 · This Day in America
At ten in the morning in a wooden building at Panmunjom, U.S. Lt. Gen. William K. Harrison and North Korea's Gen. Nam Il sign eighteen copies of an armistice — the end of the longest truce negotiation in history, 158 meetings across two years. They do not shake hands. Twelve hours later, at ten that night, the shooting stops along a line that still runs almost exactly where the war began. It is not a peace treaty. No nation signs it. More than 36,000 Americans had died on that peninsula, and 1.8 million had served. "We have won an armistice on a single battleground," Eisenhower told the country, "not peace in the world." The Korean War became the war without a victory parade — the one that ended in a quiet that has now held, uneasily, for more than seventy years.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1866
After a decade of broken cables and ruined fortunes, the steamship Great Eastern reaches Heart's Content, Newfoundland, paying out a line that holds. American financier Cyrus Field had failed and failed and gone back out. Now a message that once took ten days by ship crosses the Atlantic in minutes. "Perfect communication established between England and America." The ocean had just gotten smaller.
Source: www.pbs.org
“We have won an armistice on a single battleground — not peace in the world.”President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953