December 1965

[December 1], 1965 (Wednesday)

• The village of 't Haantje, Drenthe, in the Netherlands, narrowly escaped a disaster, when a French company drilling for gas began to lose control of the enormous gas pressure, resulting in a huge gas eruption. The ground around the hole caved in, swallowing all of the drilling equipment. The gas eruption would eventually be stopped by a cement injection from a new drilling hole. A small lake surrounded by a forest would become a permanent reminder of the near-miss.
• Billy Jones became the first African-American to play in the Atlantic Coast Conference, integrating the exclusively white college basketball circuit in the south Atlantic states in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida. Jones played briefly in a game for the University of Maryland against Penn State.
• The first airlift of Cuban émigrés into the United States began, with 75 Cuban citizens, mostly women and children, taking off from Varadero on a Pan American Airways DC-7, and arriving in Miami one hour later.
• NASA's George E. Mueller gave Marshall Space Flight Center the "green light" to begin the orbiting S-IVB Workshop and asked MSFC Director Wernher von Braun to develop two program development plans, one for an unpressurized version of the Workshop, and one for the pressurized version, in time for presentation at the next meeting of the Manned Space Flight Management Council. Mueller, the Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight, directed that the plans should address experiments to be carried in space, as well as funding arrangements where development work should be done. At von Braun's request, William Ferguson was appointed as the Workshop Project Manager.
• The United Church in Jamaica and the Cayman Islands was founded by a merger of the Protestant denominations "Presbyterian Church in Jamaica" and "Congregational Union of Jamaica".
• The Border Security Force was established in India as a special force to guard the country's borders with Pakistan, the People's Republic of China, Nepal, and Bhutan.

  [December 2], 1965 (Thursday)

• The U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Enterprise became the first nuclear-powered warship to see combat when it launched air strikes at the Viet Cong near Biên Hòa, South Vietnam.
• Died: Hugh Dryden, 67, NASA Deputy Administrator since 1958, died of cancer.

  [December 3], 1965 (Friday)

• Princess Cruises, an ocean liner service which would be made famous by the 1980s television series The Love Boat, began services with the departure of a chartered ship, the Canadian Pacific Lines steamer Princess Patricia, from Los Angeles on the first of ten 14-day cruises along Mexico's west coast, with stops at La Paz, Puerto Vallarta, Acapulco and Mazatlán. Seattle businessman Stanley McDonald inaugurated the Princess line after a six-month practice run in 1962, with the steamer Yarmouth, coinciding with the operation of the Seattle World's Fair, which had been in progress. On December 15, 1967, McDonald would double his fleet with the departure of a second ship, which he would rename from Italia to Princess Italia.
• Ten Royal Air Force jet fighters from Britain arrived in Lusaka, following Zambia's appeal for British help against Rhodesia. British Prime Minister Harold Wilson said that a battalion of 600 Royal Scots Army infantrymen would follow as long as Zambia's President Kenneth Kaunda agreed that they would remain under British command while on Zambian soil. Wilson also said that no British troops would cross into Rhodesia unless Rhodesia either attempted to attack Zambia, or attempted to shut off power from the Kariba Dam, across the Zambezi River, that supplied hydroelectric power to both nations. President Kaunda had asked Britain to invade Rhodesia in order to seize control of the Kariba Dam and to occupy the northern part of Rhodesia that bordered Zambia.
• In South Vietnam, an unidentified United States Marine stationed at Da Nang allegedly beheaded the shrine's golden image of Gautama Buddha at the Khue Bac Pagoda. By December 8, 500 Buddhist protesters marched through the streets of Da Nang after Khue Bac's principal monk, Thich Giac Ngo, threatened to disembowel himself to atone for allowing the Buddha to be destroyed. U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge promised to investigate the incident fully and to compensate the monastery for the damage, which included an injunction from other Buddhist monks that the Khue Bac Pagoda was "contaminated and could not be used again".
• At Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 35 of the 36 members of the Organization of African Unity threatened to sever diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom, unless the British government ended the rebellion of Rhodesia by December 15. The exception was The Gambia, which did not have a representative present at the five-hour session.
• The Who released their debut album My Generation in the UK, followed by an American release the following year. The album contains the title track, which is considered to be the band's signature song.
• The Beatles released their album Rubber Soul in the United Kingdom, followed by an American release of Rubber Soul that included most of the songs, along with some that had been omitted from the U.S. release of Help!. On the same day, a Beatles song that was not on the album, "Day Tripper", was released as a single. On the other side of the same 45 rpm record was "We Can Work It Out", which would receive more airplay and would reach number one in the United Kingdom and the United States, making it the most popular "B" side song in history.
• Born: Katarina Witt, East German figure skater and Olympic gold medalist; in Staaken
• Died:
• *Ike Richman, 52, American lawyer and co-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team, suffered a fatal heart attack in Boston while watching the 76ers play against the Boston Celtics. courtside. Richman, who had been instrumental in bringing the Syracuse Nationals to Philadelphia, collapsed while sitting on the 76ers' bench during the first quarter, when the teams were tied, 13–13. The team was informed of his death at halftime, and went on to win, 119 to 103.
• *Erich Apel, 48, East German economist and Chairman of the State Planning Commission, shot himself to death in his office at the House of Ministries in East Berlin.

  [December 4], 1965 (Saturday)

• Gemini 7, the fourth crewed mission of the Gemini program, was launched into orbit from complex 19 at Cape Kennedy at 1:30 in the afternoon. The primary objectives of the mission, flown by command pilot Astronaut Frank Borman and pilot Astronaut James A. Lovell, Jr., were demonstrating crewed orbital flight for approximately 14 days and evaluating the physiological effects of a long-duration flight on the crew. Among the secondary objectives were providing a rendezvous target for the Gemini 6A spacecraft, orbital station-keeping with the second stage of the Gemini launch vehicle and with spacecraft No. 6, and using lightweight pressure suits. Borman and Lovell would team up again three years later on Apollo 8, as they and William A. Anders would become the first humans to orbit the Moon.
• Eastern Air Lines Flight 853, a propeller-driven Lockheed Super Constellation with 54 people on board, and TWA Flight 42, a Boeing 707-131B carrying 58 people, collided in mid-air over Carmel, New York, with the Boeings left wing striking the Super Constellations tail. The TWA flight landed safely at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, despite having of its left wing sheared off after taking evasive action, while the Eastern plane crashed in a pasture on Hunt Mountain near Danbury, Connecticut, and caught fire, killing four people of the 54 on board. The TWA flight from San Francisco to New York had been assigned at altitude, while the Eastern plane from Boston to Newark, New Jersey, was assigned to when the two collided.
• The Grateful Dead played their first show under their new name, after originally billing themselves as The Warlocks, as promoter Ken Kesey held the second Acid Test concert. The event took place at 43 South Fifth Street in San Jose, California, after a Rolling Stones show nearby.
• Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah took office as the new Prime Minister of Kuwait, after his brother, the previous premier, ascended the throne as the new Emir of Kuwait. Jaber himself would become the new Emir in 1977 on the death of his brother.
• Saudi Arabia and Qatar signed a boundary agreement that delimited their land boundaries and their offshore drilling sites as well.
• Born: Veronica Taylor, American voice actress best known for her dubbing work of Ash Ketchum in the Pokémon series for its first eight seasons; in New York City

  [December 5], 1965 (Sunday)

• The first spontaneous political demonstration in the Soviet Union, and that nation's first civil rights protest, began in Pushkin Square in Moscow, where protesters gathered in response to the arrest of writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel in what would later be called the "Glasnost Meeting". The date selected was the Soviet Union's 30th annual Constitution Day holiday, and the location was the square named for one of Russia's most revered writers, Alexander Pushkin. Human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva would recall later that while Vladimir Bukovsky believed there were 200 participants when the demonstration began at 6:00 in the evening, she had been present and believed that it was a smaller number; 20 people were detained by KGB agents, but released after a few hours, although 40 of the known participants were expelled from their scientific institutes. Mathematician Alexander Esenin-Volpin was among the speakers who urged that Sinyavsky and Daniel be given the fair and open trial guaranteed by the 1936 constitution, and the Constitution Day protest was repeated every year until the close of the 1970s.
• In the Philippine Sea about from the Ryukyu Islands of Japan, a United States Navy Douglas A-4E Skyhawk aircraft carrying a B43 nuclear bomb fell into the ocean from the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga. The jet crashed, killing its pilot, Lieutenant Douglas M. Webster. The aircraft, the thermonuclear weapon and Webster's remains would never be recovered. The United States Department of Defense would not reveal the proximity of the lost weapon to Japanese territory until 1989.
• France's President Charles de Gaulle won more votes than the other five candidates in the French presidential election, but his 10,828,523 votes out of more than 24 million cast fell short of a majority, forcing a December 19 runoff between de Gaulle and second-place finisher François Mitterrand, who won 7,694,003 votes.
• The military service of the Avro Lancaster bomber came to an end when the Fuerza Aérea Argentina's B-040 airplane crashed at the Río Gallegos airport. The Argentine Air Force had been the last military force anywhere to use the Lancaster, and B-040 was the last one that had still been airworthy.
• Born: John Rzeznik, American rock musician and founder of the Goo Goo Dolls; in Buffalo, New York
• Died:
• *Joseph Erlanger, 91, American physiologist and Nobel laureate
• *Joseph Breen, 75, American film censor