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HMS Indefatigable was a battlecruiser of the Royal Navy and the lead ship of her class. Her keel was laid down in 1909 and she was commissioned on 24 February 1911. When the First World War began, the ship was serving with the 2nd Battlecruiser Squadron (BCS) in the Mediterranean, where she unsuccessfully pursued the battlecruiser Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau of the German Imperial Navy as they fled towards the Ottoman Empire. The ship bombarded Ottoman fortifications defending the Dardanelles on 3 November 1914, then, following a refit in Malta, returned to the United Kingdom. Indefatigable was sunk on 31 May 1916 during the Battle of Jutland, the largest naval battle of the war. Part of Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty's Battlecruiser Fleet, she was hit several times in the first minutes of the "Run to the South", the opening phase of the battlecruiser action. Shells from the German battlecruiser Von der Tann caused an explosion ripping a hole in her hull, and a second explosion hurled large pieces of the ship 200 feet (60 m) in the air. Only three of the crew of 1,017 survived. (more...)

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February 24: Independence Day in Estonia (1918); Flag Day in Mexico

• 1607 – Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, considered the first fully developed opera, was first performed in Mantua (now in modern Italy).
• 1822 – The first Swaminarayan temple, Swaminarayan Mandir in present-day Ahmedabad, India, was inaugurated.
• 1826 – The Treaty of Yandabo was signed, ending the First Anglo-Burmese War, the longest and most expensive war in the history of the British Raj.
• 1944 – World War II: The United States Army long-range penetration special operations unit known as Merrill's Marauders began a 1000-mile (1600 km) march over the Patkai region of the Himalayas and into the Burmese jungle behind Japanese lines.
• 2006 – Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (pictured) declared a state of emergency in an attempt to subdue a possible military coup.

More anniversaries: February 23 – February 24 – February 25