5 April in military history: Battle of the Ice, 1242

Prince Alexander Yaroslavich, later called Nevsky, with the men of Novgorod and his brother Andrei, against the knights of the Livonian Order, whom the chronicle calls the Germans, and the Chud, the Estonians.

That is the date in the Novgorod chronicle, under the year its editors render as 1242, and modern historians such as Kuchkin follow it. The Pskov chronicles give 1 April, and the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle gives no date.

The early sources do not say so, and the Rhymed Chronicle has the dead fall on the grass. Donald Ostrowski dates the drownings' entry into the story to the fifteenth century and, tentatively, the ice breaking under the knights to Eisenstein's 1938 film.

The Rhymed Chronicle gives twenty Brothers of the Order killed and six captured. The Novgorod chronicle gives countless Chud and 400 Germans killed and 50 captured.

In 1942, on Easter Sunday, Japanese carrier aircraft attacked Colombo in Ceylon, and the same afternoon bombers sank the British cruisers Dorsetshire and Cornwall.