August 1965

[August 1], 1965 (Sunday)

• General Lo Jui-ching, the Chief of Joint Staff of the armed forces of the People's Republic of China, declared on Radio Peking that the Chinese were ready to fight the United States again, as they had in the Korean War. Comparing U.S. President Lyndon Johnson to Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Hideki Tojo, General Lo said of the Americans that "If they lose all sense of reality in their lust for gain and persist in underestimating the strength and determination of the Chinese people, impose a war on us, and compel us to accept the challenge, the Chinese people and the Chinese People's Liberation Army, long well prepared and standing in battle array, not only will stay with you without fail to the end, but invite you to come in large numbers, the more the better.
• Jim Clark of Scotland clinched the 1965 Formula One racing championship by winning the German Grand Prix at Adenau, outside of Nürburgring. It was Clark's sixth victory in all six of his starts in the 1965 season.
• Cigarette advertising became illegal on British television. Still, the number of British cigarette smokers continued to increase until the mid-1970s.
• Born: Sam Mendes, English film director who won an Academy Award for American Beauty and a Golden Globe for Road to Perdition; in Reading, Berkshire

  [August 2], 1965 (Monday)

• The Japanese tanker Meiko Maru collided with the American freighter ship Arizona in the Pacific Ocean, south of Tokyo and sank along with 18 of her crew of 22. The Meiku Maru weighed 995 tons, and the Arizona, whose crew of 57 was unhurt, weighed more than 12 times as much at 12,711 tons.
• Britain's new Leader of the Opposition, Ted Heath, moved to censure the government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson. The motion, a vote of confidence on Wilson's government, failed, 290–303.
• Born:
• *Sandra Ng, Chinese film and television actress; as Ng Kwan-yu in British Hong Kong
• *Hisanobu Watanabe, Japanese baseball pitcher and manager; in Kiryū
• Died: František Langer, 77, Czech dramatist, physician, screenwriter, and literary critic

  [August 3], 1965 (Tuesday)

• After coming under attack by Viet Cong sniper fire, U.S. Marines burned down the South Vietnamese village of Cam Ne, "using flame throwers, cigarette lighters and bulldozers" to set fire to 150 houses made up of straw, thatch, and bamboo, and bulldozing homes made of sturdier materials. Major General Lewis W. Walt, the commander of the 3rd Marine Division, said in a statement that "the civilians had been urged in advance by helicopter loudspeakers to go to open fields where they would be safe" before their homes were burned down. The Marines were accompanied by CBS reporter Morley Safer and a cameraman, and while the newspaper reports of the deliberate destruction of homes had little impact, American TV viewers were shocked when they saw film of the attack on the CBS Evening News, and U.S. President Lyndon Johnson was infuriated by the CBS decision to show the Vietnam War in an unfavorable light.
• Rex Heflin, a highway inspector working in the area of Santa Ana, California, photographed a UFO. His four Polaroid photos, distinguishable from previous purported pictures of such objects, would come to be considered among the most reliable evidence of the existence of UFOs because the photographs in a Polaroid 101 camera developed inside the camera within one minute after being taken. Earlier in the week, police in central Oklahoma and southwestern New Mexico received multiple calls from witnesses who had seen "objects flying very high and changing from red to white to blue-green, in diamond-shaped formations" in Chickasha, Shawnee, Cushing, and Chandler, Oklahoma; and Hobbs, New Mexico, Carlsbad, New Mexico, and Artesia, New Mexico.
• Born: Mark "Spike" Stent, English record producer and mixing engineer who has worked with many international artists since 1985; in Alton, Hampshire

  [August 4], 1965 (Wednesday)

• The U.S. Senate voted, 79 to 18, to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The day before, the measure had passed the U.S. House of Representatives, 328 to 74, and, hours later, passed the U.S. Senate.
• The Cook Islands officially became self-governing, with Albert Henry as their first prime minister.
• Born:
• *Fredrik Reinfeldt, Prime Minister of Sweden from 2006 to 2014; in Stockholm
• *Dennis Lehane, American mystery novelist; in Boston

  [August 5], 1965 (Thursday)

• The Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, also referred to as the "Second Kashmir War", began as Pakistan commenced Operation Gibraltar when as many as 10,000 armed infiltrators crossed into India and the state of Jammu and Kashmir, disguised as civilians. India and Pakistan had fought over the area after both became independent in 1947, and had divided the area along a ceasefire line on January 1, 1949, with Pakistan organizing the area west of the line as Azad Kashmir. Sixty companies of the Pakistani armed services came across the line with instructions for targets to attack, and several were captured that day. Within the first three weeks of fighting, 412 Pakistani servicemen and 150 Indian soldiers would be killed in combat. The war would last five months, until January 4, 1966, when the two nations agreed to withdraw their troops back to their respective sides of the 1949 line.
• Fifteen members of a film crew were injured in an accident during the filming of the movie Easy Come, Easy Go, including the lead actor, Jan Berry of the rock duo Jan and Dean, and the director, Barry Shear. Background scenes were being filmed aboard a flatcar at a railroad yard in the Chatsworth section of northwestern Los Angeles, when a train crashed into the car from behind. Berry sustained a compound fracture of his left leg, while Shear suffered internal injuries. Paramount Pictures would abandon the project and recycle the title two years later for an unrelated story starring rock singer Elvis Presley.
• Only 21 days after becoming Prime Minister of Greece, the unpopular Georgios Athanasiadis-Novas was voted out of office by a vote of 167 to 131 in the Hellenic Parliament. King Constantine II had appointed Athanasiadis-Novas on July 15 after dismissing his predecessor, Georgios Papandreou. Papandreou demanded and received a face-to-face meeting with the King and told reporters later that he had asked the king to reappoint him as the Premier, or to call new elections.
• Future U.S. President Gerald R. Ford, a Congressman from Michigan and the leader of the Republican minority in the House of Representatives, urged President Johnson to ask Congress to declare war on North Vietnam, so that the increasing commitment of American servicemen could be debated. "It would be the honest thing to do under the circumstances, considering our present commitment."
• After reviewing the photographs of Mars transmitted by the Mariner 4 space probe, NASA's chief reviewer, Dr. Robert B. Leighton, announced that there was no life on Mars, and it was unlikely that there ever had been. "There never has been an ocean on Mars," Dr. Leighton said in a press conference, "which makes it less hopeful that life could have started there spontaneously."
• Sir Gerald Lathbury succeeded Sir Alfred Dudley Ward as Governor of Gibraltar.

  [August 6], 1965 (Friday)

• President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law after speaking in the rotunda of the United States Capitol. Johnson then went over to the Senate Chamber for the first time since becoming president, reportedly "used about 100 pens" to sign the document, and announced that the first lawsuits under the new Act would be filed the next afternoon at 1:00. The law, initially set to expire after five years, eliminated literacy tests and other provisions that had been used to disqualify African-Americans from voting, and would dramatically increase the number of registered black American voters. By 1969, 60 percent of eligible blacks in southern states would be registered to vote; in Mississippi, the number of black voters would increase eight-fold between 1964 and 1968.
• On the 20th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, a crowd of 30,000 people gathered at the Peace Memorial Park, where Mayor Shinzo Hamai added 469 additional names to the list of identified victims of the blast, including 69 who had died in the past year from radiation-related cancers. The other 400 people had been killed when the bomb detonated on August 6, 1945, and remained unidentified for more than 19 years.
• Retaliating for an attack on one of its patrol craft in April by gunboats from the People's Republic of China, the Navy of Taiwan sent two of its ships, the Jianmen and the smaller Zhangjiang, across the Taiwan Strait to stage a landing on the coastline of Guangdong province near Shantou. The People's Liberation Army Navy dispatched four of its own gunboats and after a three-hour battle, both of the Taiwanese ships were sunk.
• Help!, the fifth studio album by The Beatles and the soundtrack to their film of the same name was released in the UK by Parlophone Records. Seven of the fourteen songs, including the singles "Help!" and "Ticket to Ride", appeared in the film and take up the first side of the vinyl album. The second side includes "Yesterday", the most-covered song ever written.
• The Soviet Union's Zond 2 space probe passed within of the planet Mars, closer than the American Mariner 4 approach on July 15. Unfortunately, the Zond probe had stopped transmitting on May 2, so none of the images it had taken were received on Earth.
• After its pilots bailed out safely following gunfire, a B-57 bomber and its payload of 16 armed bombs crashed in a residential area of the South Vietnamese city of Nha Trang, killing at least 12 people and injuring 75 others.
• NASA's Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight George E. Mueller announced the creation of the Saturn/Apollo Applications Office, with responsibility for both the Saturn IB Centaur program and the Apollo Extension System effort, with David M. Jones as the acting director.
• Born:
• *Mark Speight, English TV host of the children's art programme SMart; in Seisdon, Staffordshire
• *David Robinson, U.S. Navy officer and NBA all-star, inductee in the Basketball Hall of Fame; in Key West, Florida
• *Ravi Coltrane, American jazz saxophonist; in Long Island, New York, to saxophonist John Coltrane
• *Yuki Kajiura, Japanese composer, arranger and music producer; in Tokyo
• *Chin Ka-lok, Chinese action movie actor and TV host; in Hong Kong
• Died:
• *Nancy Carroll, 61, American stage and film actress, was found dead in her apartment after failing to show up for the final performance of the play Never Too Late at the Tappan Zee playhouse in Nyack, New York, where she co-starred with Bert Lahr.
• *Everett Sloane, 55, American character actor on radio, stage, film, and television, was found dead in his home after taking an overdose of barbiturates, apparently in despair over his failing eyesight.