Reading 3 of 6 free1776 Club · all 6 storiesTuesday, October 6
From the desk
Start with 1777: Sir Henry Clinton landed 2,100 troops at Stony Point and pushed through the hills behind Forts Clinton and Montgomery, where the landward defenses stood unfinished. Both forts fell by nightfall, the chain meant to block the Hudson was cut loose, and General James Clinton escaped wounded through Popolopen Gorge. Worth a longer look: 1942, when Marines crossed the Matanikau from two directions to trap Japanese units massing near Henderson Field. For something stranger, 1990 sent Ulysses off Discovery toward a five-year detour to study the Sun's poles, a path no spacecraft had tried.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1777Featured · This day in history
Forts Clinton and Montgomery fall in an hour; the Hudson chain goes down with them
For months the Hudson Highlands had held, their iron chain and river batteries built to stop any British warship from sailing north. On October 6, 1777, Sir Henry Clinton landed 2,100 troops at Stony Point and pushed them through the hills behind Forts Clinton and Montgomery, where the landward defenses stood unfinished. Both forts fell by nightfall after a brief, fierce fight; General James Clinton was wounded and escaped through Popolopen Gorge. The British burned the ruins and cut loose the chain they had come to destroy.
The battle proved to the young Continental Congress that fortifications alone could not hold a river against a determined amphibious force, a lesson that shaped how West Point was sited and defended for the rest of the war. The Americans rebuilt their chain farther upriver within weeks, a decision that kept the Hudson closed to British shipping for the rest of the war.
Did you know
QHow many cannons did Fort Montgomery's river battery carry before the attack?
Six 32-pound guns, positioned to rake any British ship that tried to force the cable chain and boom stretched across the Hudson below the fort. That armament was the reason Clinton's force avoided a river approach entirely and marched overland from Stony Point instead, hitting the forts from the one side their builders had not finished fortifying. The guns never got the chance to fire on a warship; Fort Montgomery's own gun crew, under Captain John Lamb, spiked them rather than let them fall into British hands intact.
QWhat happened to the physical site of Fort Clinton after the Revolution?
It no longer exists in any recognizable form. Construction crews building U.S. Route 9W and the Bear Mountain Bridge in the 1920s destroyed the ground where Fort Clinton once stood. Fort Montgomery, just to the north, had a different fate entirely: it survives today as a National Historic Landmark, meaning one half of the twin disaster of October 6, 1777 can still be walked, while the other lies under a highway.
QWhat decoy maneuvers did Sir Henry Clinton stage before the real attack, and where?
Weeks before landing at Stony Point, Clinton sent troops on feinting maneuvers near Tarrytown and Verplanck's Point, far south of the actual target. The ruse was aimed squarely at General Israel Putnam, who commanded the overall American defense of the Hudson Highlands and controlled reinforcements that could have strengthened the forts. Putnam took the bait and shifted his attention toward the false threats, leaving Forts Clinton and Montgomery thinner on manpower than they might have been. Putnam's own force never reached the real battle in time to matter. The feint cost Clinton only marching time, and it left Putnam looking south when the real landing happened at Stony Point.
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2008science
MESSENGER finds a 716-kilometer scar on Mercury's southern hemisphere
MESSENGER was more than four years into a three-pass approach to Mercury, trading speed for a safe orbit three years later. On October 6, 2008, during its second flyby, the probe's cameras caught a basin 716 kilometers across in the planet's southern hemisphere, the second-largest impact structure on Mercury after Caloris. Scientists named it Rembrandt. Inside its rim are volcanic plains, a long scarp, and craters cut nearly four billion years ago.
A NASA probe, launched on an American Delta II rocket, found a feature named after a Dutch painter rather than an American figure, a reminder that space science runs on international naming conventions even when the hardware and funding are domestic. The discovery also marked MESSENGER as only the second American mission ever to study Mercury up close, after Mariner 10 in 1975.
Did you know
QHow did engineers manage to skip some of MESSENGER's planned course-correction burns?
Several thruster firings scheduled for the cruise to Mercury turned out to be unnecessary because sunlight did the work instead. Flight controllers used solar radiation pressure acting on MESSENGER's solar panels to make fine trajectory adjustments, effectively steering the spacecraft with photons rather than burning propellant. The technique mattered because MESSENGER carried only 607.8 kilograms of propellant and helium pressurizer for its entire seven-year journey, and every gram saved extended what the mission could do once it reached Mercury orbit. It is a small, almost accidental efficiency that let the probe arrive with more fuel margin than the original flight plan assumed, buying room for the reboosts needed later to survive its degrading orbit.
QWhat strange science opportunity did MESSENGER's first Venus flyby accidentally rule out?
During the October 24, 2006 Venus flyby, MESSENGER passed behind the planet and entered superior conjunction, meaning the Sun sat directly between Earth and the spacecraft, blocking radio contact entirely. With no way to downlink data, the team conducted zero scientific observations during that particular encounter, a rare case of a flyby with no data reaching Earth at all. Contact was not reestablished until late November, more than a month later. The second Venus flyby in June 2007 made up for it, delivering the mission's greatest velocity reduction and full instrument coverage, including simultaneous measurements with ESA's Venus Express orbiter already stationed there.
QWhy did MESSENGER's own instruments nearly become unreliable before the mission even properly began?
After launch in August 2004, the team used the August 2005 Earth flyby as a deliberate shakedown, pointing MDIS at the Earth and Moon and running checks across the other instruments measuring atmosphere, surface composition, and magnetic fields. The goal was to catch calibration problems years before they could corrupt science data at Mercury. The flyby also doubled as a test for the so-called flyby anomaly, a puzzling trajectory deviation seen in some past spacecraft encounters with Earth, but MESSENGER showed no such anomaly. Catching instrument quirks this early meant minor errors could be corrected over the following five years rather than discovered too late, after orbit insertion in 2011.
1942military
Five Marine battalions cross the Matanikau in a pincer; the Japanese line east of the river breaks
Nine weeks after landing on Guadalcanal, the Marines still hadn't secured the ground west of their own perimeter, and Japanese troops were massing along the Matanikau River to prepare gun positions aimed at Henderson Field. On October 6, 1942, two battalions of the 5th Marine Regiment crossed at the river's mouth while three more battalions, with Colonel William Whaling's scouts and snipers, crossed inland at a single-log footbridge to close the trap from behind. The pincer forced Japanese units under Major General Yumio Nasu back from their positions east of the river, inflicting heavy losses. The fighting continued through October 9, pushing the Japanese line west of the river.
The October attack fixed what the September attack had gotten wrong. Two weeks earlier, an uncoordinated attack at the same river had been repulsed; this time division headquarters kept the whole operation under one command with artillery and air support planned in advance. The coordinated approach held through the harder fighting still ahead for Henderson Field, and it became a case the Marine Corps taught for generations as a lesson in coordinated planning.
Did you know
QWhy did Marines on a ridge resort to spelling out messages with their own undershirts?
During the September fighting that preceded the October crossing, three Marine companies got surrounded by Japanese forces on a rise known as Hill 84 and lost radio contact with the rest of the regiment. Cut off and taking losses, the Marines stripped off their white undershirts and laid them out on the ridge to spell H-E-L-P, hoping someone overhead would notice. A Cactus Air Force SBD Dauntless flying support for the operation spotted the message and relayed it back to command. The trapped Marines eventually escaped only with help from a Navy destroyer and landing craft crewed by Coast Guardsmen. The near-disaster convinced Vandegrift's staff the September plan needed a total rework before trying the river again.
QWhat specific Japanese units landed on Guadalcanal just two days before the first failed Matanikau attack?
On 11 September, the 3rd Battalion of the 4th Aoba Infantry Regiment came ashore at Kamimbo Bay on Guadalcanal's western tip, arriving too late to take part in Kawaguchi's assault on the Marine ridge that began the next day. Rather than sitting idle, the battalion folded into Colonel Akinosuke Oka's force already positioned near the Matanikau. Tokyo Express runs kept feeding the buildup afterward, delivering food, ammunition, and 280 more men from the 1st Battalion, Aoba Regiment starting 15 September. These late arrivals quietly thickened the Japanese line west of the river well before Maruyama's October reinforcements ever showed up.
QHow many Marines arrived in the single convoy that let Vandegrift finally close his defensive ring around Lunga Point?
On 18 September, an Allied convoy delivered 4,157 men of the 3rd Provisional Marine Brigade to Guadalcanal, a single infusion large enough to let Vandegrift close his defensive ring and free battalions for offense. Vandegrift used the fresh troops to do something he couldn't manage before: starting 19 September, he established an unbroken defensive line completely around the Lunga perimeter for the first time since the landings. That solid ring gave the Marines the manpower to spare battalions for offensive patrols into the Matanikau Valley rather than holding every man back purely for defense, a shift that set up both the September raid and the better-resourced October crossing that followed it.
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