On this day 25 years ago

[chico20854]

November 3, 1997

Nothing in canon for the day!

NATO dispatches a team of experts from the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the British Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire to Ramstein Air Base in Germany to examine the captured SS-23 warhead.

The tanker Manatee is delivered in Baltimore, Maryland.

The refinery in Ashland, Ohio is shut down for six weeks of maintenance and upgrades, some of it long overdue.

The lead Irish Army battalions begin arriving to hastily erected camps within 5 km of the border with Northern Ireland.

The remnants of the 12th Motor-Rifle Division are split. The surviving enlisted troops are assigned to 35th Army as replacements and the remaining officers are returned to their prewar garrisons in Mongolia, ordered to stand up a new 12th Division.

The Missouri battle group arrives in Yokosuka, Japan.

The US XI Corps launches its drive to relieve the surrounded German V Korps in Wroclaw. The 1st Shock Army is forced to halt the counterattack east of Legnica with the battered remnants of the 321st Motor-Rifle Division, which was a low-quality unit from the beginning and has been roughly handled over the last several months. The 321st succeeds in stopping the advancing tanks (its few remaining artillery pieces being used as makeshift anti-tank guns in direct-fire mode), but at the cost of nearly all of its remaining men and all of its artillery.

The amphibious assault ship USS Nassau arrives off the southern coast of Turkey, where its embarked helicopters are able to reach isolated detachments of non-Turkish NATO troops and evacuate them.

The last vehicles of the 353rd Engineer Group (Combat) (US Army Reserve) arrive in Corpus Christi, Texas to await a ship to carry them to Europe. The group's personnel move by bus to Fort Hood, Texas, where they are released for two weeks of leave before deploying.

In distant McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, the annual summertime resupply of the American scientific research station (by the tanker Delaware Trader and freighter Green Wave, escorted by the icebreaker Polar Sea) is interrupted by the arrival of a Soviet raider, the destroyer Velichavyy. The raider was last identified by NATO when it broke out of Petropavlovsk in March alongside seven of her sisters; it has spent the prior months sheltering with the massed fishing fleet in a remote area of the South Pacific. The destroyer sits off the station and shells it, sinking all three ships and setting the station ablaze.