February 19th 1945.“We’ve got cities and pricks, all up along the beach, and dozens of marines are around each one of them …” In the final months of World War II, Some 30,000 US marines begin landing at Iwo Jima.That’s where they fight a month-long battle to seize the western Pacific island from Japnanese forces.

 

1942. Also during World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, adopts a controversial policy on the America’s home front. He gives the US military authority to relocate and detain Janpanese-Americans as well as Janpanese nationals living in the US. More than four decades later, the government apologizes for the policy and pays money to the surviving Janpanese-Americans. 

 

1473. Nicolas Copernicus, the astronomer who concluded the Sun, not the earth, is at the center of our Solar system, is born in Poland.

 

1997. Deng Xiaoping, the last China’s major Communist revolutionary dies in Beijing at age 92. His rules are China embrace free market economic reforms and the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

 

And 1940.“The tears of the cloud, where there’s no one around…” Singer-songwriter Smokey Robinson, one of the voices who shape Motown songs of the sixties, is born in Detroit.

 

Today in history, February 19th. Bryant Thomas, the Associated Press.