On March 7, 1971, more than a thousand US planes engaged in bombing missions, along with combat missions involving hundreds of helicopters, in a war that was supposed to be nearly over, in a battle intended to prove that the US was no longer needed. Operation Lam Son 719 is both little remembered and little understood, but might well have represented a final turning point in the American war in Vietnam.
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.