A century before the US was even a thought the U.K. used “DayName, Month, DayNumber, Year” - E.g “Monday Septemp 10, 1666”, in newspapers - the london gazette for example.<p>This was still the case 100 years later when the Times started in 1778, and even remains the same today.<p>That the US uses the Month Day Year form understandably flows from that, the difference being that instead of writing “July 4 1776” the July was changed to a number for brevity, hence “07 04 1776”<p>It’s that number change that seems unique and confusing as it changes from three unambiguous numbers to two identical numbers that could be either way round.
This is in best terms incomplete and at worst misleading. Liberia is also solely mm-dd-yyyy, and several countries (such as Canada and the Philippines) use the mm-dd-yyyy (usually solely in Anglophone context) in conjunction with other date formats (dd-mm-yyyy in French and Spanish-influenced langues respectively, and yyyy-mm-dd in Canadian government communications).