May 2

1519 – Leonardo da Vinci, Italian painter, sculptor, and architect, dies, age 67, at the summer home of King Charles VIII, Château du Clos Lucé, Amboise, France.

1559 – John Knox returns from exile to Scotland to become the leader of the  Scottish Reformation.

1611 – The King James Version of the Bible is published for the first time in London, by printer Robert Barker.

1670 – King Charles II of England grants a permanent charter to the Hudson’s Bay Company to open up the fur trade in North America.

1863 – General Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson is wounded by friendly fire while returning to camp after reconnoitering during the Battle of Chancellorsville.

1918 – General Motors acquires the Chevrolet Motor Company of Delaware.

1945 – The U.S. Army’s 8th and 82nd Airborne Divisions liberate Wöbbelin concentration camp, near Ludwigslust, Germany. finding around 1000 dead prisoners out of 4000 imprisoned there.
In southern Bavaria, a column of several hundred prisoners, en route from from Dachau to the Austrian border is halted by the U.S. Army’s  522nd Field Artillery Battalion.
The Soviet Union announces the fall of Berlin.

1964 – Viet Cong commandos from the 65th Special Operations Group mine and sink the American aircraft carrier USNS Card while it is docked at Saigon.

1982 – During the Falklands War, the British nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror sinks the Argentine cruiser ARA General Belgrano.

2000 – President Clinton announces that accurate GPS access would no longer be restricted to the U.S. military.

2011 – Special Warfare Operators of U.S. Navy Seal Team-6 assault a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks is suspected to be hiding, and kill him and several other Al Qaeda terrorist leaders