August 1958

August 1, 1958 (Friday)

• As part of its Operation Hardtack tests, the United States detonated a 3.88 megaton hydrogen bomb directly above the test site at Johnston Atoll in the South Pacific Ocean, due to an error that exploded the Redstone missile before it could reach a point over the ocean away. The blast, occurring at an altitude of 252,000 feet, was witnessed by thousands of people in the parts of the U.S. territory of the Hawaiian Islands away at 12:52 a.m. Hawaii time.
• Trial for 91 South Africans accused of high treason, on charges of conspiring to overthrow the government, began in Pretoria. The original indictment had been for 156 people arrested 19 months earlier in December 1956.
• Royal assent was given to the State of Singapore Act 1958, providing for internal self-government for the British colony of Singapore and an eventual transition to independence.
• Ian Fraser, Governor of the British Broadcasting Corporation, became the first person to receive a Life Peerage, a non-hereditary title created under the Life Peerages Act 1958. Fraser, who had served in the House of Commons since being elected in 1950, was granted the title Baron Fraser of Lonsdale.
• With his guerrilla troops surrounded by the Cuban Army after the Battle of Las Mercedes and facing an end to his Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro asked General Eulogio Cantillo for a seven-day ceasefire so that surrender negotiations could be pursued. A truce was agreed upon and, during the time when Castro and Cantillo were negotiating, the 300 26th of July Movement guerrillas gradually retreated every night back into the hills. When General Cantillo attempted to attack on August 8, Castro's forces could not be found. General Castillo then signed a secret agreement with Castro to call off further fighting.
• The Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense canceled its funding of the U.S. Air Force's "Man in Space Soonest" program, 37 days after the USAF had announced the selection of nine men being trained to be the first American astronauts. The cancellation came in the wake of the July 29 creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to supersede the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and to place the U.S. space program primarily under civilian control.
• Dr. Hugh L. Dryden, NACA Director, presented a program on the technology of crewed spaceflight vehicles to the Select Committees of Congress on Astronautics and Space Exploration.
• Born: Adrian Dunbar, Northern Irish television and stage actor, and film screenwriter; in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh
• Died: Albert E. Smith, 83, English-born U.S. film producer who founded Vitagraph Studios, one of the earliest newsreel companies

  August 2, 1958 (Saturday)

• The United States made its first successful test of its most powerful rocket, the three-engine Atlas-B intercontinental ballistic missile. Liftoff from Cape Canaveral in Florida took place at 5:16 in the afternoon local time. The first attempt at launching the Atlas-B, made on July 19, failed when the rocket blew apart while in flight.
• U.S. Army Sergeant James R. Nettles became the first American soldier to die in combat in the Middle East. The 20-year-old resident of Olustee, Florida, was struck by a sniper's bullet while riding in a patrol of Beirut, the capital of Lebanon. Sgt. Nettles was the fifth U.S. serviceman to die in the American invasion of Lebanon, after four had died in separate accidents.
• The Arab Federation, created on February 14 by the uniting of the nations of Iraq and Jordan into a new country, was formally dissolved by Jordan's King Hussein less than six months after it had been created. On July 14, the Iraqi Army had assassinated Hussein's cousin, King Faisal II of Iraq, abolished the monarchy and declared a republic.
• A Sabena airliner that had strayed into the airspace of Czechoslovakia, during a thunderstorm, was forced by two Czechoslovakian Air Force MiG fighters to land at an air force base in České Budějovice. Rather than keeping the group captive, as other Communist nations like East Germany and the Soviet Union had done with airplanes that had come into their airspace, the Czechoslovakians released the Belgian passengers and crew after four hours, during which the group was "entertained with a good dinner."
• Born: Show Hayami, prolific Japanese voice actor for anime; in Takasago, Hyōgo,
• Died: Dr. Michele Navarra, 53, Italian member of the Sicilian Mafia and boss of the Corleone gang, was ambushed and killed along with a passenger, Dr. Giovanni Russo, while driving on a country road in Sicily. The hit began a series of reciprocal murders that would continue for five years.

  August 3, 1958 (Sunday)

• The nuclear-powered submarine and its crew of 111 U.S. Navy servicemen and five American civilian scientific observers, became the first vessel to sail underneath the North Pole, whose ice cap is impenetrable by surface ships. The accomplishment was announced five days later when the voyage of Nautilus was revealed by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower at a ceremony presenting Commander William R. Anderson with the Legion of Merit at the White House. "Nautilus" had also been the name of the submarine, used by British explorer Hubert Wilkins, that came within of its attempt to sail to the North Pole, and of the fictional submarine in Jules Verne's 1869 novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, which included a chapter of Captain Nemo sailing under the ice of Antarctica.
• Peter Collins, 26, British race car driver and 1958 British Grand Prix winner, was killed in a crash during the German Grand Prix in Nürburgring in West Germany. Collins, who, along with Stirling Moss and Mike Hawthorn, was one of the "Big Three" of British sports car racing, was traveling past Adenau on the 11th lap of the 15-lap race when his Ferrari racer went off the track and rolled over. He was being flown by a West German Army helicopter to a hospital for emergency surgery for a fractured skull and brain injuries and died en route.
• The record for attendance at the 67,205-seat Yankee Stadium was set when 123,707 people came to the Jehovah's Witnesses International Convention. A commemorative plaque remained after the demolition of the structure following the construction of the new Yankee Stadium.
• Born:
• *Alexander Nevzorov, Soviet Russian TV journalist known as host of the program 600 Seconds and as a member of the Duma, the Russian parliament; in Leningrad, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
• *Augusto Minzolini, Italian journalist known as the director of the program RAI news program TG1 and as a member of the Italian Senate; in Rome
• *Lambert Wilson, French film actor; in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine département

  August 4, 1958 (Monday)

• A team of two mountaineers from Japan became the first persons to reach the top of the 37th-highest mountain in the world, the high Chogolisa II peak in the Karakoram range. Professor Takeo Kuwabara wrote later that Fujihira and Hirai reached the top of Chogolisa, "Bride Peak", at 4:30 in the afternoon local time and that "the top was too small to be occupied by the two."
• A team of three mountaineers from Austria became the first persons to reach the top of the 67th-highest mountain in the world, the Haramosh Peak in the Himalayas. Roiss would later write that the group reached the summit at about 2:00 in the afternoon local time, 13 hours after setting off from their camp, but "We were much too weary to enjoy that moment, to which we had so long been looking forward. We cowered down on the summit, which is no bigger than a table, and our only thought was rest and recuperation."
• On the island of Cyprus, a truce between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots was announced by Greek Army Colonel Georgios Grivas, leader of the underground group EOKA, which sought for Cyprus to become a part of Greece. The ceasefire came after appeals to both sides by the Prime Ministers of Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom.
• The Billboard Hot 100, Billboard magazine's weekly documentation of the most popular recorded songs in the United States, regardless of musical genre, was published for the first time, with rankings based on the averaging of surveys of best-selling and most played songs. While Billboard had ranked songs since 1945 in three separate charts for surveys best sales from stores, most played on radio stations and most played on jukeboxes, the "Hot 100" was the first to consolidate the results into a single, definitive endorsement of popularity. The first number one hit on the Hot 100 was Ricky Nelson's recording of the song "Poor Little Fool", written by Sharon Sheeley.
• The last television program of the DuMont Television Network in the U.S., Boxing from St. Nicholas Arena, was telecast on five stations in the U.S. that had once been part of the DuMont network, which had given up most of its programming two years earlier but was still under contract to broadcast boxing. The last fight pitted lightweight Lenny Matthews against Steve Ward.
• A U.S. District Judge in Richmond, Virginia issued an order allowing the public school system of Prince Edward County, Virginia, an unprecedented seven years to accomplish racial desegregation, with black and white students to be educated in separate schools until the beginning of the 1965-1966 school year. Judge Charles Sterling Hutcheson justified the seven-year delay based on language in the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that desegregation should be accomplished "with all deliberate speed", even if done 11 years after the decision.
• The horse racing career of Bold Ruler, the 1957 "Horse of the Year" in the United States, was declared at an end by his trainer, Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, who announced that the injured thoroughbred would be retired to stud at Claiborne Farm near Paris, Kentucky. Bold Ruler's record as ancestor of champion race horses would become greater than his own racing record, siring 1973 Triple Crown champion Secretariat and being the sire of the sires of six other Kentucky Derby winners: Dust Commander, Cannonade, Foolish Pleasure, Bold Forbes and Spectacular Bid. In addition, a third-generation descendant, Seattle Slew, would be the winner in 1977.
• Died: Archbishop Mario Zanin, 68, Italian Roman Catholic cleric and diplomat for the Vatican who served as its Apostolic Delegate to China, and Apostolic Nuncio to Chile and Argentina