1780: Admiral Sir George Rodney won the "Moonlight Battle" off Cape St Vincent. An unusual night action in the age of sail, his fleet inflicted heavy losses on a smaller Spanish fleet, and allowed British supply ships to reach Gibraltar, where the garrison had been starved almost into submission.

1809: The British expeditionary force under Sir John Moore

in Spain, which had been forced to retreat in the face of massively superior French forces, fought a superb rearguard action at Corunna, where the Royal Navy had arrived to evacuate it. Marshal Soult's French army was mauled, but Sir John Moore, who had done much to resurrect the concept of light infantry in the British Army, was fatally wounded.

1881: During an action near Pretoria in the First Boer War, Lance Corporal James Murray of the Connaught Rangers and Trooper Danaher of the Transvaal Horse ran 500 yards through heavy fire from a unit of sixty Boers to rescue a badly wounded soldier lying in the open. Both men were awarded the Victoria Cross.

1917: Berlin sent the famous "Zimmermann telegram" to the German ambassador in Washington. The signal was intercepted by the British and decoded by Royal Navy cryptologists. The contents were then passed to the United States Government, where the revelation of German efforts to manoeuvre Mexico against the US provoked outrage.

1991: The Coalition commenced air operations against Iraq on the night 16/17 January, following Saddam Hussein's failure to withdraw from Kuwait.