Three ships carrying colonists sent by the Virginia Company anchored off a peninsula in the James River. The settlers chose the site for its deep water anchorage and defensibility, overlooking its swampy, mosquito-infested drawbacks. Disease, starvation, and conflict with the Powhatan Confederacy nearly destroyed the colony within its first years, but Jamestown endured to become the seedbed of English settlement in America.
The 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry began storming Hill 937 in the Ashau Valley, defended by entrenched North Vietnamese regulars. Ten frontal assaults up steep, muddy slopes under heavy fire produced 72 American deaths and over 370 wounded before the hill fell on May 20, only for U.S. forces to abandon it weeks later. The battle's heavy cost for seemingly little strategic gain fueled growing American public disillusionment with the war.
Skylab lifted off unmanned from Kennedy Space Center, but 63 seconds into flight aerodynamic forces tore away its micrometeoroid shield, which also ripped off one solar array and jammed another. The station reached orbit crippled, overheating and short on power, forcing NASA to delay the first crew launch by ten days while engineers scrambled to design emergency repairs, including a makeshift parasol sunshade, that astronauts would install by hand.
As the Pope's open jeep circled St. Peter's Square before a general audience, Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Ağca fired a 9mm Browning pistol, hitting John Paul II in the abdomen, hand, and arm. Emergency surgery saved his life. The Pope later visited Ağca in prison and forgave him personally, an act that became one of the defining images of his papacy.