HMAS Australia Targeted by First Kamikaze Attack

At 6am, on 21 October 1944, the Royal Australian Navy vessel HMAS Australia became the first target of a Japanese suicide bomber attack.

There is some academic debate on whether this was a deliberate suicide attack ordered by the Japanese High Command or (just) an accident as the pilot attempted an extreme manouver. There had also been previous attacks on individual pilots' initiatives as early as 1942, but generally this occasion is regarded as the start of Japanese kamikaze tactics in the Pacific War.

Elsewhere in the world, Portuguese seafarer Ferdinand Magellan became the first European to discover - and later navigate - a passage between the southern tip of mainland South America and Tierra Del Fuego, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which later would be named after him the Strait of Magellan (1520). Sticking with the maritime theme of the day, 27 ships of the Royal British Navy under command of Admiral Lord Nelson defeated the combined French and Spanish Navies at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805).

Our German friends may be interested to learn that 26-year-old master baker Carl Brandt founded the "Märkische Zwieback- und Keksfabrik" in Hagen 100 years ago today. Generations of German children grew up with the Brandt brand as a synonym for "Zwieback", a double baked form of crisp bread, which he did not invent but improved by changes to the original recipe. While our American and Mexican friends commemorate the death of Ignacio Annaya (1975) with the "International Day of the Nacho" today.

Swedish chemist, engineer, innovator, armaments manufacturer and inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm on this day (1833). As were jazz legend Dizzy Gillspie (Cheraw/South Carolina, 1917), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Tel Aviv, 1949) and Australian rugby great David "Campo" Campese (Queanbeyan, 1962).