On 27 July 1953 the Korean War armistice was signed at Panmunjom by Lieutenant General William K. Harrison for the United Nations Command and General Nam Il for the North Korean and Chinese forces. Signed at 10 a.m., it came into force at 10 p.m. On 27 July 1880 Ayub Khan's Afghans defeated a British brigade at Maiwand.
Two years of talks
The Korean War began on 25 June 1950, when North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea. Armistice talks opened at Kaesong on 10 July 1951, but they dragged on for two more years while the fighting went on, held up above all by the question of whether prisoners of war could refuse to go home.1
Ten minutes at Panmunjom
At 10 a.m. on 27 July 1953, in a building put up for the ceremony at Panmunjom, Lieutenant General William K. Harrison, Jr., senior delegate of the United Nations Command, and General Nam Il, senior delegate of the Korean People's Army and the Chinese People's Volunteers, sat down to sign the copies of the agreement. Neither man spoke to the other, and the signing was over at 10:12. That afternoon General Mark W. Clark, the UN commander, countersigned the agreement at Munsan-ni.2
The agreement was done "in English, Korean and Chinese, all texts being equally authentic", and most of its provisions were to take effect at 2200 hours, 10 p.m., on 27 July.3
The guns fall silent
For twelve more hours the artillery kept firing and UN aircraft kept up their attacks on North Korea. At 10 p.m. the armistice came into force and the guns along the front fell silent.4
Because of the time difference, President Eisenhower spoke to Americans on radio and television at 10 p.m. on 26 July. "We have won an armistice on a single battleground, not peace in the world", he said.5
The armistice was a military agreement to stop the fighting, not a peace treaty. Clark himself warned that day that it was only a cease-fire while a political solution was sought, the official Army historian Walter G. Hermes writes.6
Battle of Maiwand
27 July 1880 · 146 years ago
Also on 27 July: Maiwand, 1880
In the Second Anglo-Afghan War, Ayub Khan, a son of the former emir Sher Ali, marched from Herat toward Kandahar in his own bid to become emir. A British and Indian brigade under Brigadier-General George Burrows was sent to intercept him. On 27 July 1880 Burrows marched from his camp at Khushk-i-Nakhud toward Maiwand and found Ayub's army already on the move across his front. It was far larger than his own: Burrows put it at 25,000 men, and the National Army Museum calls it up to ten times the size of his force.7
After hours of artillery fire, swarms of ghazis rushed the center in the afternoon, the infantry line gave way and the brigade broke. The 66th (Berkshire) Regiment lost its commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel James Galbraith, last seen holding one of the colors, and officer after officer fell carrying them. About a hundred men made a last stand in a walled garden. By the account of an Afghan artillery officer, which General Primrose reported, and by the regimental history, the last eleven of them, two officers and nine men, charged out and died back to back in the open.8
The survivors retreated through the night to Kandahar, where the garrison withdrew into the citadel and Ayub laid siege to the city. The return signed at Kandahar on 3 August lists 964 British and Indian soldiers killed and 7 missing, besides followers; the official account counts 971 killed and missing of the 2,476 men engaged. The 66th alone lost 10 officers and 275 or 276 men killed. On 1 September 1880 Sir Frederick Roberts, who had marched his relief force from Kabul, defeated Ayub outside Kandahar.9
In fiction, Arthur Conan Doyle's Dr. Watson says in A Study in Scarlet that he served with the Berkshires "at the fatal battle of Maiwand".10
Also on this day
Battle of Almenar
27 July 1710 · 316 years ago
Near Balaguer in Catalonia, the Bourbon army of Philip V met an allied force of British, Austrian, Dutch and Portuguese troops backing Archduke Charles in the War of the Spanish Succession. Philip's army was beaten and had to fall back behind the Ebro, though it stayed intact.
