1941

1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950

political events

World War II explodes into a global conflict as German troops invade Soviet Russia and Japanese forces attack Pearl Harbor (see below).

President Roosevelt recommends a Lend-Lease program to aid the Allies in a January 6 congressional message that defies widespread isolationist sentiment. The $17.5 billion budget submitted to Congress by the president January 8 includes nearly $11 billion for national defense. The United States has been producing 25,000 planes per year but needs far more; Congress authorizes $7 billion in Lend-Lease aid March 27.

British Commonwealth troops capture Bardia from Italian forces in Libya January 5 (see 1940). They advance westward through Libya, capturing Tobruk January 22, Derna January 30, and Benghazi February 7 and taking more than 125,000 Italians prisoner, including at least six generals. The Germans rush their newly organized Afrika Korps to North Africa under the command of Gen. Erwin Rommel, whose advance guard arrives at Tripoli February 14. The last Italian troops are driven out of Sudan February 16, and the Italian-held port of Mogadishu in Somaliland falls February 25 to a British army under the command of Dublin-born Gen. Alan G. (Gordon) Cunningham, 53; Ethiopian troops take Burye March 6, Allied troops take the Eritrean capital Asmara April 1 (see 1936), and Gen. Cunningham occupies Addis Ababa April 6 as Italian resistance collapses. The main Italian armies under Amadeo di Savoia, duke d'Aosta, surrender at Amba Alagi May 20, and the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie is able to return from exile. Ethiopia regains her independence in December (see 1936). British troops help oust Italian occupation forces and restore Haile Selassie to power.

The Battle of Cape Matapan in the Mediterranean in March ends in defeat for the Italian Navy, which loses some 3,000 men. Armed with information supplied by the code-breakers of Bletchley Park, Royal Navy and Australian Navy forces under the command of Andrew B. Cunningham (whose brother Allan commands British ground forces in Ethiopia) employ an elaborate ruse to keep the enemy from knowing that the British have broken the Enigma code.

Gen. Rommel prepares to launch counterattacks in Libya, and the British evacuate Benghazi April 3 as Rommel's Afrika Korps advances. Gen. Sir Claude John Eyre Auchinleck, 57, arrives from India in July to succeed Gen. Wavell as commander of the now depleted 8th Army, Gen. Cunningham goes to Egypt in August to work with him, and they launch a counteroffensive in the Libyan Desert November 18 (see 1942).

Yugoslavia joins the Axis March 25 under pressure from Berlin and a revolution begins March 27; Hungary's premier Gróf Pál Teleki commits suicide at his native Budapest April 3 at age 61, having cooperated with the Germans last year by negotiating a treaty of friendship with Yugoslavia (he is succeeded by László Bárdossy, who will deepen ties with Nazi Germany but serve for less than a year). German troops invade Yugoslavia April 6, Croats support them, and hundreds of thousands of Serbs are killed, mostly by Croatian irregulars. The Germans take over the Kosovo mines that yielded silver in Roman times and whose sprawling British-built works produce silver, lead, cadmium, gold, and zinc for German war plants. The Germans set up Ante Pavelic, now 51, as poglavnik (führer), his Ustase regime adopts the slogan "Ready for the Fatherland" ("Za dom Spremni") and searches out Jews and Orthodox Serbs for brutal treatment, but Yugoslav communists help Enver Hoxha set up the Albanian Communist Party, which will later become the Party of Labor (see 1942).

German troops invade Greece April 6. The nation's dictator Ioannis Metaxas has died at Athens January 29 at age 69 after a repressive reign that began in August 1936, but his efforts to reorganize the nation economically and militarily have enabled Greece to resist her Italian invaders. Prime Minister Churchill orders some British 8th Army units from North Africa to come to the aid of the Greeks, whose king George II flees to Crete, then to Alexandria, and later to London.

The America First Committee founded in April unites isolationists under the leadership of Chicago Tribune publisher Robert R. McCormick and Sears, Roebuck chairman Robert E. Wood, who are joined by Charles A. Lindbergh, Senators Borah, Byrd, Wheeler, and others (see 1940).

Japan's foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka flies to Moscow and signs a non-aggression treaty with Josef Stalin April 14 (but see 1945). Admiral Soemu Toyoda, 56, replaces Matsuoka as foreign minister in July, and Prince Fumimaro Konoye resigns his premiership in October, having failed to reach an agreement with the United States. He is succeeded October 16 by Gen. Hideki Tojo, now 56, who appoints Kyushu-born diplomat Shigenori Togo, 59, foreign minister. A member of a rich family, Togo married a German woman while working at Japan's Berlin embassy in 1920 and has served as ambassador to Nazi Germany and to the Soviet Union (see 1942).

Hitler aide Rudolf Hess flies a modified Messerschmidt 110 from Augsburg to Scotland May 10 with a view to discussing peace terms and joint opposition to the Bolshevism of Josef Stalin's Soviet Union. Dodging anti-aircraft fire, he parachutes onto a field 12 miles from Dongeval Castle, home of London-born nobleman Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, 37, 14th duke of Hamilton; identifying himself at first as Hauptmann Alfred Horn, he asks to see the duke and then admits that he is Rudolf Hess. The British intern him, the Gestapo imprisons his adjutants and secretaries, but Hitler protects Hess's family and sends a personal telegram of condolence to his mother after his father dies in October (see 1946).

London goes up in flames again May 10 in the worst German incendiary attack on the city since December (see 1940); more than 3,000 people are killed, the House of Commons is destroyed, but St. Paul's Cathedral survives and once again no German invasion materializes; Hitler has sent his Lüftwaffe on the short, 8½-minute flight across the Channel to terrorize London in order to mask his preparations for an invasion to the East, but he loses about 2,375 planes to anti-aircraft fire and Royal Air Force fighters before the raids are halted. President Roosevelt has appointed former Social Security Board chairman John G. Winant to succeed millionaire Joseph P. Kennedy as ambassador to the Court of St. James in February, and Winant walks the streets of London, endearing himself to the citizens by offering help to the injured amid the rubble of bombed-out houses.

Some 16,000 German paratroopers invade Crete May 20 in the world's first large-scale aerial assault, but the Germans sustain so many casualties that Hitler will never again try to land an invasion force that way. British Commonwealth troops under the command of Gen. Bernard C. Freyberg, now 52, try to hold on to the island as a naval base but withdraw 12 days later, evacuating 17,000 men safely while leaving many dead and more than 10,000 who are taken as prisoners of war.

The German battleships D.K.M. Scharnhorst and D.K.M. Gneisenau put in at Brest March 22 after operating for 2 months in the North Atlantic, sinking several ships, and threatening British supply lines (see 1940). Repeated air attacks will keep them in port for the rest of the year (see 1942).

The 41,700-ton German battleship D.K.M. Bismarck sails out of Gdynia, Poland, May 18, the 21-year-old, 42,000-ton British battle cruiser H.M.S. Hood fires on her at 5:52 in the morning of May 24. Bismarck responds 2 minutes later with 38-centimeter shells that wreak havoc; Hood breaks in two and goes down in less than 10 minutes with all but three of her 1,400 men and officers, but Bismarck goes down 600 miles off the French coast May 27 after being spotted by a Catalina flying boat out of Ireland. The Germans will claim that she was scuttled, the British that a lucky shot from a carrier-based torpedo plane hit Bismarck's rudder, crippling the huge battlewagon, and the British destroyer Sikh commanded by Graham H. Stokes, 38, is credited with firing the torpedoes that did the job. Only 100 members of Bismarck's 1,300-man crew survive.

German U-boats continue to prey on merchant ships in the North Atlantic (see 1940). Admiral Karl Doenitz's wolf packs easily evade depth charges, which are ineffective against submarines that have descended more than 25 feet, and a U-boat can remain submerged for up to 18 hours (see 1942).

The Royal Air Force begins flying B-24 (Liberator) long-range heavy bombers that were introduced 2 years ago by Consolidated-Vultee Aircraft. A high-level bomber with a range of 1,590 miles, it has a maximum speed of 295 miles per hour and a ceiling of 28,000 feet; its wings span 110 feet and contain 18 separate, self-sealing fuel tanks. It normally carries a crew, and it has a retractable tricycle landing gear. Its bomb bay can hold four 2,000-pound bombs, and a 4,000-pound bomb can be mounted beneath each wing. Consolidated-Vultee will produce 10,000 B-24s in the next few years, and three other companies (Ford Motor, Douglas Aircraft, and North American Aviation) will produce another 9,000 (see 1943).

British forces arrive in Iraq May 31 and foil an attempt by Axis sympathizers to take over the government and obtain oil for the German war machine (see 1939). Former premier Rashid Ali al-Gailani, 47, has led a pro-Nazi coup and is sent into exile (see Arab League, 1945).

British and Free French troops invade Syria and Lebanon in early June to prevent a German takeover of those countries. Lebanese independence is proclaimed November 26 (see 1943).

Jewish terrorists in Palestine use violence to fight for independence from Britain (see 1939). The Stern Gang founded by Polish-born underground leader Abraham Stern, 34, assassinates officials, it bombs military installations and oil refineries, and although the British will kill Stern next year, his followers will continue the struggle (see 1945).

German troops invade Soviet Russia at dawn June 22 under the command of Gen. Karl Rudolf von Rundstedt, 65, and Gen. Heinrich Alfred Walther von Brauchitsch, 59, in Operation Barbarossa. The German high command had intended to launch the invasion in early May; British action in the Balkans has diverted German resources to the south, and the delay will prove catastrophic. Shrugging off the advice of his generals and dismissing the objections of Karl Haushofer, Adolf Hitler throws close to 90 percent of his Wehrmacht into the offensive on the eastern front, but Josef Stalin, stunned, gives no immediate orders to return fire, refusing for 8 hours to believe that his "ally" has betrayed him (see 1939). Bombers destroy 1,200 Soviet planes—800 of them on the ground—within 9 hours, and more than 3 million Germans, Finns, Hungarians, and Romanians, equipped with 3,350 tanks and 7,184 pieces of artillery, advance at the rate of 50 miles per day beyond a 1,800-mile frontier from the Arctic Circle to the Black Sea against an unprepared Soviet army, most of whose leaders have been liquidated in Stalin's political purges of the late 1930s. More than a million Soviet troops are quickly killed or taken prisoner. Ukrainian villagers welcome the invaders in many cases as liberators; they soon find that the Germans are more brutal in their treatment of civilians on the eastern front than in the West.

Boer War hero (and Boy Scouts founder) Lord Robert Baden-Powell dies at Nyeri, Kenya, January 8 at age 83; former Spanish king Alfonso XIII in exile at Rome February 28 at age 64; German Nobel pacifist Ludwig Quidde in exile at Geneva March 5 at age 82; former German kaiser Wilhelm II of an intestinal ailment and a pulmonary edema in exile at Doorn in the Netherlands June 4 at age 82; former Polish president (and pianist) Ignace Jan Paderewski after a 4-day illness in his New York hotel suite June 29 at age 80.

British and Soviet diplomats sign a mutual assistance treaty at London July 13, but British intelligence predicts a Soviet collapse within weeks; U.S. intelligence says 3 months.

The twin-engined DH-98 Mosquito introduced by De Havilland Aircraft Co. has a wooden frame and a plywood skin (see 1920). Designed by Geoffrey de Havilland in 1938 and produced in Australia and Canada as well as in England, the mid-wing two-seater is glued and screwed together, has a top speed of more than 400 miles per hour (faster than any other plane on either side of the conflict), and will prove to have a range of more than 1,500 miles carrying a two-ton bomb load. Adapted for service as a night fighter, the Mosquito will be credited with downing more than 600 Lüftwaffe planes over Germany, and 7,780 of the planes will be built for use as bombers, fighters, high-altitude fighters, night fighters, and photo-reconnaissance purposes (see commercial jet, 1949).

Link Aeronautical Corp. produces trainers that will be used until 1945 to teach an estimated 500,000 pilots (see 1934). Link factories at Binghamton and Gananoque, Ont., will soon have 1,500 workers turning out 80 trainers per week.

The Atlantic Charter comes out of secret meetings held off the coast of Newfoundland from August 9 to 12 by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill. Drafted by Alexander (George Montague) Cadogan, 56, the charter contains eight articles of agreement on war aims. The president's mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, dies at Hyde Park, N.Y., September 7 at age 87, and he wears a black armband to express his grief.

Brig. Gen. Adna Romanza Chaffee Jr. is promoted to major general in early August but dies at Boston August 22 at age 56. He has led efforts to develop an armored force, but the U.S. Cavalry remains largely a horse-mounted unit based at Fort Riley, Kansas. Large-scale tank production will not begin until next year.

The U.S. Army's Ordnance Department works with arms makers to develop a lightweight, fully automatic rifle capable of firing a 110-grain bullet with a muzzle velocity of 2,000 feet per second (see Garand, 1934); it receives nine prototype rifles May 1, one has been submitted by John Garand, and none passes the army's tests. The Army drops its requirement that the weapon be fully automatic, begins a new round of tests September 15, and at the end of the month adopts a Winchester Arms rifle designed by David Marshall Williams, 40, who worked out the details of his mechanism for the new .30-caliber M1 carbine while serving time for murder (he killed a policeman who raided his illegal still in 1921 but was paroled in 1929).

British and Soviet troops invade Iran in late August. Reza Shah Pahlevi abdicates September 16 after a 16-year reign in which he has broken the power of the tribes, built the Trans-Iranian Railway, emancipated women (see 1935), and built roads, schools, and hospitals, and opened the nation's first university. He is succeeded by his son Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, 21, who is more inclined to cooperate with the Allies.

Tallin, Estonia, falls to the Germans August 29, German soldiers lay siege to Leningrad in September, they take Kiev September 19, sustaining heavy losses but defeating and trapping a 500,000-man Soviet army commanded by Marshal Simon Mikhailovich Budenny, 58; Kiev's city center is destroyed by a fire that has probably been started by Partisans or by the Soviet secret police as part of a rear-guard action that leaves 25,000 homeless. By October the Germans control an area more than twice the size of France, but they carry no winter clothing, the temperature falls to -40° F., fresh Soviet troops arrive from the Urals and Siberia, and Marshal Konstantin Konstaninovich Rokossovsky, 44, drives the Germans away from Moscow after they have reached a point only 25 miles from the Kremlin. Longtime Stalin friend Marshal Klimenti Efremovich Voroshilov, 60, has worked to modernize the Red Army, which launches a counterattack at Leningrad October 2, Stalin declares a state of siege October 20, and Hitler removes Gen. von Brauchitsch from command, making him a scapegoat for having failed to take Moscow.

Gen. Erich von Manstein leads his 11th Army southward into the Crimea, captures more than 430,000 prisoners, and by November 16 has taken all of the peninsula except for Sevastapol (see 1942), but by December the Wehrmacht is fighting 360 Soviet divisions when it had anticipated fighting fewer than 200. Gen. Ivan Stepanovich Konev, 43, defeats German tank expert Gen. Heinz Guderian as he approaches Moscow in December, staging a planned retreat of troops in the center of his line, luring the Germans into pursuit, and then bringing his flanks to bear, closing a trap on the German tanks. The Red Army recaptures Rostov in the south and by December 12 has retaken more than 400 townships, but the retreating Germans destroy churches, homes, and cultural treasures (including the homes of Chekhov and Tchaikovsky) before they leave.

President Roosevelt issues an order September 11 that German or Italian vessels sighted in U.S. waters are to be attacked immediately. Isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh draws widespread criticism by giving a speech at Des Moines September 11 in which he accuses the British, the Jews, and the Roosevelt administration of trying to drag America into the European war: "The leaders of both the British and Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war . . . A few far-sighted Jewish people . . . stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government."

U.S. Supreme Court justice James C. McReynolds resigns February 1 on the eve of his 78th birthday, having alienated his colleagues with his overt anti-Semitism, racial bigotry, and extreme right-wing positions.

Former cabinet member and U.S. senator William G. McAdoo dies at Washington, D.C., February 1 at age 77; former U.S. Supreme Court justice Willis Van Devanter of a coronary occlusion at Washington February 8 at age 81; former Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis at Washington October 5 at age 84.

A German U-boat torpedoes the U.S. destroyer Kearny off Iceland October 17; a U-boat sinks the U.S. destroyer Reuben James in the North Atlantic October 31 with a loss of 100 lives. Congress amends the Neutrality Act of 1939 November 17 by permitting merchant vessels to arm themselves and carry cargoes to belligerent ports.

Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu comes under attack Sunday morning, December 7 (December 8, Tokyo time) as six Japanese carriers launch 360 planes led by Mitsuo Fuchida, 38. Japan's Purple Code was deciphered last year by cryptologists William F. (Frederick) Friedman, 53, Frank B. (Byron) Rowlett, 33, and others, but officials at the U.S. naval base have not been alerted to the Imperial Navy's plans. Japanese bombs and torpedoes cripple the U.S. Pacific fleet, sinking the battleships U.S.S. Arizona,Oklahoma, California, Nevada, and West Virginia, damaging three other battleships, inflicting major damage on three cruisers and three destroyers, destroying 200 U.S. planes, and killing 2,344 men (the Japanese lose only 29 planes). The American public hears only that the U.S.S. Arizona has been sunk and the Oklahoma capsized (a 1,760-pound bomb hits the Arizona, which goes down with 1,177 men trapped forever inside; some 400 men are trapped inside the Oklahoma but 30 of them are rescued). The attack on Pearl Harbor has come without a declaration of war, begins at 7:50 a.m. Honolulu time (1:20 p.m. in Washington), and continues for 2 hours. It is only at 9 p.m. Washington time that the Japanese foreign minister advises the U.S. Embassy at Tokyo that a state of war exists between the United States and Japan. "I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant," says Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, 57, who has planned the attack with naval chief of staff Admiral Osami Nagano, 61. U.S. authorities at Pearl Harbor did not trust the signals from radar equipment that detected the presence of the Japanese carriers and aircraft. (Conspiracy theorists will suggest that President Roosevelt and the U.S. military had advance knowledge of the Japanese attack but did not alert Pearl Harbor because they wanted a casus belli; of course even an abortive attack on the naval base would have provided such a provocation.) All three Pacific-based U.S. aircraft carriers are at sea December 7; none is hit, and although all but two of the eight battleships hit at Pearl Harbor will be repaired and returned to service, carriers will prove more important than battleships in the Pacific War.

December 7 is "a date which will live in infamy," says President Roosevelt in an address to Congress December 8. The Senate votes 82 to 0 for a declaration of war on Japan, the House votes 388 to 1 for war; Jeanette Rankin, now 61, voices the lone dissent: "As a woman I can't go to war," she will say, "and I refuse to send anyone else." President Roosevelt signs the declaration at 4:10 p.m.

Australia's prime minister John Curtin, 56, declares, "I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free from any pangs about our traditional links of friendship to Britain." Prime Minister Robert Gordon Menzies, now 46, has resigned after 2 years in office, Country Party leader Arthur W. (William) Fadden, 46, has succeeded him for 5 weeks, and Labor Party leader Curtin has become prime minister and minister for defense.

Japan declares war on Britain as well as on the United States and proceeds with a plan to attack Singapore from the rear. Japanese forces land in Malaya and Thailand December 8. Former Siamese king Phra Pokklao (Prajadhipok, or Rama VII) has died in exile at Cranleigh, Surrey, May 30 at age 47. The Japanese request the right of passage through Thailand to facilitate their attack on Singpore, and after Thai forces have put up a brief fight the dictator Luang Phibunsongkhram orders them to lay down their arms. Bangkok and Tokyo sign a treaty of alliance (see 1942).

Japanese combat pilot Saburo Sakai, 25, shoots down a U.S. P-40 in the Philippines December 8 and will down a B-17 bomber in late January of next year (see 1945).

Chinese communists and nationalists end the uneasy period of cooperation against the Japanese that has existed since 1937. The New 4th Army general Ye Ting is arrested in January while visiting Nationalist headquarters; his 100,000-man New 4th Army is ambushed; 9,000 men are killed, wounded, or taken prisoner; and Ye himself will be held prisoner until 1946. The Japanese have spread fleas infected with bubonic plague in China's Suiyuan and Nighsia provinces, causing serious epidemics (see 1940); they have done so again in Shansi province, and dropped cholera, dysentery, and typhoid cultures into ponds and wells in Zhejiang province but have halted the program because so many of their own troops have fallen ill and 1,700 have died.

The League for the Independence of Vietnam (Viet Minh) is organized with the aim of seeking independence from France (see Korea, 1919; Ho Chih Minh, 1942).

Japanese torpedoes sink H.M.S. Prince of Wales and H.M.S. Repulse off the Malayan coast December 9 as they approach Singapore. Rescuers save 80 percent of the people on Prince of Wales.

Japanese forces land on Luzon in the Philippines December 10, and some 80,000 to 100,000 troops are landed at the Gulf of Lingayen December 22 for a major invasion. President Quezon has been reelected but has contracted tuberculosis (see 1942).

Japanese forces take Guam in the Marianas December 11.

Germany declares war on the United States December 11, thus making it possible for President Roosevelt to end U.S. neutrality in the European war. Italy echoes the German declaration, and Congress declares war on Germany and Italy. Romania declares war on the United States December 12; Bulgaria follows suit December 13 (Britain has declared war on Finland, Hungary, and Romania December 8).

President Roosevelt makes Ohio-born Rear Admiral Ernest J. (Joseph) King, 63, commander in chief of the combined U.S. Atlantic and Pacific fleets December 21 with the rank of full admiral. He has given Texas-born Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, 56, command of the Pacific Fleet December 17, reporting to Admiral King, who took the president to Newfoundland on the cruiser Augusta for his Atlantic Charter conference with Prime Minister Churchill and is highly regarded as a naval strategist. Nimitz succeeds Admiral Husband Edward Kimmel, 59, who has been relieved of his command, as has Lieut. Gen. Walter C. Short; both are held responsible for being caught unprepared by the surprise attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor.

The Seabees (CBs, or construction batallions) established within weeks of the attack on Pearl Harbor will build airstrips, floating drydocks, Quonset huts, and other installations on 300 Pacific islands in the next few years, often in the midst of combat. U.S. Navy engineer Admiral Ben Moreel, 55, chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks, and his assistants Admiral Lewis B. Combs, 46, and Admiral E. Jack Spaulding, 55, have spent 4 years planning the mobile construction force; starting from a base at Quonset Point, R.I., they will head a group of hastily-drafted civilian engineers, whose average age at first will be 37; the group will grow to number 10,000 officers and more than 325,000 men.

Wake Island in the central Pacific falls to the Japanese December 23 after 15 days of aerial and naval bombardment that began with an attack by 36 bombers just a few hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The island's half-completed air and submarine facilities fall into Japanese hands, and 1,616 Americans are captured (most are removed to China and Japan) (see 1945).

Japanese forces take Hong Kong December 25.

Venezuela's dictator Eleazar López Conteras steps down after 6 years in office and is succeeded by Gen. Isais Medina Angarita, who will rule until 1945, continuing his predecessor's development programs but restoring some political liberties.

President Roosevelt appoints former Columbia University economics professor Rexford Guy Tugwell governor of Puerto Rico (see 1940). Now 49, Tugwell has earlier in the year accepted appointment as chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico; he will work with Muñoz Marín in the next 5 years to improve the island's economic and social conditions, and although his policies will bring him into conflict with its rich sugar planters Puerto Rico's income will triple in the next 10 years (see 1947). The president has sent Hollywood actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. on an 11-week good-will and intelligence gathering mission early in the year to Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and Peru amid concerns that the Axis powers were subverting Latin American governments (see Rio conference, 1942).

human rights, social justice

President Roosevelt calls in his January 6 message to Congress for a world that provides protection for the "Four Freedoms"—freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom from fear (see Painting [Rockwell], 1943).

Polish police arrest Franciscan priest Maksymilian Maria (originally Raimund) Kolbe, 47, in February for helping Jews and the Underground. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1939 for anti-Nazi activities, he was released, but this time he is shipped to Auschwitz, volunteers his life in place of condemned prisoner Frandiszek Gajowniczek, and is injected with phenol August 14. His body is incinerated.

Estonian, Galician, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian Jews flee at the approach of advancing German troops, and some Jews fall victim to violence on the part of their neighbors: a massacre of as many as 1,600 Jewish men, women, and children at the village of Jedwabne, Poland, July 10 will be blamed for 60 years on the Gestapo before Polish authorities acknowledge that it was planned and perpetrated by local townspeople who coveted the Jews' homes and businesses (more than 400 of the Jews are incinerated alive in a thatch-roofed barn). Jews caught by the Germans are drafted into labor gangs, driven into ghettos, forced into military brothels, massacred with machine guns, or shipped in freight cars to detention camps, where many are found dead on arrival. Jewish shops, factories, department stores, libraries, synagogues, and cemeteries are plundered and destroyed.

Adolf Hitler gives the signal for the "Final Solution" (die Endlösung) to Europe's "Jewish problem." SS Lieut. Col. Adolf Eichmann, 35, proposes "killing with showers of carbon monoxide while bathing," but the cyanide gas Zyklon-B will prove cheaper and more efficient than running hoses from motorcar exhaust pipes into gas chambers (see 1942).

SS units machine-gun some 3,000 Jewish men, women, and children to death in the suburbs of Minsk and Mogilev while German military authorities stand by.

Josef Stalin issues Order Number 270 August 16, calling for the internment of any woman whose husband surrenders to the Germans.

Babi Yar 30 miles outside Kiev is the scene of a massacre that begins September 29 and continues for 2 days as Nazi invasion forces machine-gun to death between 50,000 and 96,000 Ukrainians of whom at least 60 percent are Jews. The victims have been forced to strip, and their bodies are rolled down the slopes of a ravine. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women are shipped to Germany and used as forced labor.

The Jasenovac concentration camp opened by the Germans in Croatia will be used to kill at least 85,000 Serbs, gypsies (Roma), and Jews (Serbs will cite much higher figures). Dinko Sakic, now 20, will head the camp beginning next year and run it until 1944.

Nearly 800 Romanian and Russian Jews board the 150-foot steamer Struma at Constanza on the Black Sea December 11, having paid the equivalent of $1,000 each for passage to Palestine. Romanian police have taken virtually everything of value from the vessel, including copper pots from her galley; her engine breaks down a few miles out, a passing tugboat captain repairs her in exchange for the passengers' gold wedding rings, she breaks down again 3 days later, Turkish tugs tow her into Istanbul but police there do not permit passengers to disembark (one family of four is allowed to leave following intervention by Muslim businessman Vehbi Koc), and the ship will be held for 70 days while the Parliament at London debates the issue of what to do (see 1942).

President Roosevelt appoints a Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) June 25 under Executive Order 8802. A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters has threatened a march by 50,000 blacks on Washington to protest unfair employment practices in war industry and the government, and the president has acted to prevent any disruption in defense production (see Randolph, 1925; 1948).

Panamanian women gain the right to vote on the same basis as men.

The Japanese Army conscripts thousands of young girls for the military brothels it has built since 1937 as its armies extend their reach into Southeast Asia and the South Pacific (see 1937). Most are from Korea and China (see 1991).

commerce

The Office of Production Management (OPM) created by President Roosevelt January 7 is headed by William S. Knudsen of General Motors with Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union as associate director general.

The unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision handed down February 3 in the case of United States v. Darby Lumber Co. upholds the constitutionality of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, overruling the Hammer v. Dagenhart decision of 1918. Solicitor General Francis Biddle has argued the case; now 54, he is appointed attorney general, succeeding Robert H. (Houghwout) Jackson, who has been named to succeed the late Pierce Butler as a justice of the Supreme Court.

British Minister of Labour Ernest Bevin, 60, announces the first steps in a massive mobilization campaign March 11 and begins registering 20- and 21-year-old women for service in vital industrial and agricultural jobs as well as in the auxiliary services. Women work round the clock in war plants to free men for active service. Married women with young children are exempt from duty, but day and night nurseries spring up to care for children of working mothers.

Radical British labour leader Tom Mann dies at Grassington, Yorkshire, March 13 at age 84.

Ford Motor Company agrees April 10 to recognize the United Auto Workers as the union representing all its workers nationwide and to joint negotiation of production-line speed and other issues (see 1938; Battle of the Overpass, 1937). Ford has recruited blacks to break a 10-day strike that has idled its giant River Rouge plant and attempted to play on divisive racial prejudices in order to thwart union organizers, but the contract will be a model for all U.S. industry.

The Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply (OPA) created by the president April 11 has New Deal economist Leon Henderson, 45, as its head, but wartime inflation increases the general price level by 10 percent for the year (see 1940; 1943).

Japan's Ministry of Labor opens more jobs to women that were formerly for men only (see 1939). The Patriotic Labor Corporation Order requires unmarried women aged 14 to 25 to participate in the war effort.

Japanese assets in the United States are frozen July 24 by order of President Roosevelt; trade between Japan and the United States is halted.

Standard and Poor's (S&P) is created at New York by a merger of the 28-year-old Standard Statistics Co. with the 74-year-old publisher Poor's. In addition to issuing dozens of financial publications, S&P will give ratings to bonds and commercial paper, and the S&P average will vie with the Dow Jones Industrial Average as an index of the New York Stock Exchange's ups and downs.

U.S. tax rates rise sharply in nearly all categories September 20 in an effort to raise more than $3.5 billion for war-related expenditures; a 10 percent luxury tax is imposed October 1. Congress authorizes another $6 billion in defense and Lend-Lease spending October 28. The U.S. Treasury issues war bonds to help reduce the amount of money in circulation. Priced to yield 2.9 percent return on investment, the Series E savings bonds come in denominations of $25 to $10,000. Hollywood star Dorothy Lamour sells so many war bonds that she is called "the bond bombshell," and Washington puts a private railroad car at her disposal for a bond tour (she will be credited with selling more than $300 million worth); film star Linda Darnell appears on the floor of the New York Curb Exchange November 18 to sell U.S. bonds and savings stamps for a fund-raising effort.

A Supplemental Defense Act approved by Congress December 15 provides for $10 billion in appropriations for Lend-Lease aid and for the U.S. armed forces.

Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average closes December 31 at 110.96, down from 131.13 at the end of 1940.

energy

Grand Coulee Dam begins generating power on the Columbia River in eastern Washington (see 1933). Contractors organized by Henry J. Kaiser and the late Warren Bechtel have built the world's largest hydroelectric installation—500 feet high, 500 feet thick at the base, and stretching 4,290 feet across the river. The first man-made structure to exceed in volume the pyramid of Cheops in Egypt, it contains nearly 12 million cubic yards of concrete, and while it has cost the lives of 77 men (out of thousands who worked on the project at an average wage of 85¢ per hour), it impounds 150-mile-long, 130-square-mile Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake as its reservoir, controls flooding, permits irrigation of 1¼ million acres of parched desert land, and has 24 giant turbines that make cheap electricity available to the region, undercutting the rates charged by private utility companies (six more turbines will be added in 1974).

Engineer Stephen Bechtel begins construction of a top-secret pipeline through the Canadian wilderness to Alaska.

Korea's Shuifeng Shuiba hydroelectric project (Supung-dam) is completed on the Yalu River after 4 years' work. Built by the Noguchi interests for Japanese colonial authorities, the dam is 525 feet high, 2,790 feet long, and forms a reservoir 20 miles long. By 1944 it will have a generating capacity of 450,000 kilowatt-hours.

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) chairman Harcourt A. Morgan resigns September 15 and is succeeded as head of the TVA's three-man board by David E. Lilienthal, now 42, who will retain the position until 1946 (see 1938). Morgan has worked to improve agriculture in the valley while Lilienthal has managed the TVA's power program, pushing through mammoth hydroelectric dam-building projects that have antagonized private power companies. TVA began building coal-burning steam plants last year to meet the growing demand for power that has exceeded the capacity of its hydroelectric plants (steam plants will account for 62 percent of its installed capacity within 45 years); TVA power will make the valley a mighty war-production resource in the next 4 years, using cheap electricity to turn out aluminum, nitrate explosives, steel, aircraft, textiles for uniforms, leather for boots, and all manner of other materials. By 1945 the TVA will be the nation's largest producer of electric power, and per-capita income in the region will have risen 73 percent over this year's level (see Kentucky Dam, 1944).

Onetime oil baron E. W. Marland dies in poverty of a heart ailment at his Ponca City, Okla., home October 3 at age 67, having long since lost his fortune.

U.S. sales of fluorescent lamps reach 21 million, up from 1.6 million in 1939 as factories and offices rush to install fixtures that can accommodate the lamps introduced by General Electric in 1938.

transportation

British flyer Amy Johnson drowns January 6 at age 37 when her plane ditches in the Thames estuary.

The first British Gloster-Whittle E. 29/39 turbojet test flown May 15 has an engine designed by Frank Whittle (see 1939); air flowing through the front of the engine is compressed and mixed with fuel before igniting in a continuous explosion, the expanding gases are ejected out the back, and the resulting 1,000 pounds of thrust is equal to that of the most powerful piston engines (see Me 262, 1942).

The Liberty ship Patrick Henry launched September 1 at Richmond, Calif., is the first of some 2,700 such vessels that will be built in the next few years. Naval architect and marine engineer William F. Gibbs, now 54, has designed the standardized cargo carrier, and contractor Henry J. Kaiser has persuaded President Roosevelt that he can mass-produce the freighters quickly, Roosevelt has overridden objections by the Maritime Commission and East Coast shipbuilders that ships welded together rather than riveted pose hazards in heavy seas, but it can take as long as 4 years to complete a ship using conventional methods, and losses to U-boats on the North Atlantic have heightened demand for bottoms that can deliver food, military equipment, and other goods to the beleaguered British. Kaiser late last year acquired 80 acres of swampland south of San Francisco, used earthmoving equipment to turn it into a shipyard, hired hundreds of welders, machinists, pipefitters, electricians, and other workers, and employed prefabrication techniques to complete what FDR calls an "ugly duckling" in 244 days. Her noisy steam engine gives her a speed of only 11 knots fully loaded, but she can carry up to 17 million tons of cargo. "Hurry-up Henry" establishes a chain of seven Pacific Coast shipyards north of Richmond, Calif., at the outbreak of the Pacific war in December and uses assembly line methods to set new speed records, pitting one yard against the other to speed production (see 1942).

Engineer Stephen Bechtel receives word that the Maritime Commission needs 60 cargo ships for America's allies; Bechtel has had no experience building ships, but he organizes shipyards that will build up to 20 ships per month in the next 4 years, producing a total of some 560 vessels.

Willys Motors and Ford Motor Company begin mass production of Jeeps for use by the U.S. Army and Allied forces (see 1940). The Willys MB design is accepted as standard in the summer and Willys submits a bid of less than $750 per vehicle, both companies are awarded contracts (Willys is required to turn over blueprints to Ford; American Bantam is given a conciliatory contract for Jeep trailers), Willys begins producing 125 vehicles per day in November, and the two companies will turn out nearly 649,000 Jeeps in the next 5 years, with Willys completing a new Jeep every 80 seconds at the peak of its production. The rugged, four-wheel-drive vehicle can have its wheels changed to run on railroad tracks, its four-cylinder engine has a capacity of 63 horsepower, and it can pull up to 56 tons of freight on a track; its name comes from letters used by Ford, "G" meaning Government, "P" meaning 80-inch wheelbase(see 1945).

The Lincoln Continental introduced by Ford Motor Company's Edsel Ford is the sleekest U.S. car yet made (see 1939).

U.S. auto production reaches 3.3 million, and there are 32.6 million cars on the U.S. road, up from 20 million in 1927 (see 1950).

U.S. motortruck production reaches 4.85 million, up from 3.5 million in 1931 (see 1951).

English automaker Herbert Austin dies at his Lackay Grange home in Worcestershire May 23 at age 75. Remembered as the Henry Ford of Britain, Austin has built a company that produced London taxicabs in addition to its Baby Austins and will make Austin-Healey sports cars after the war; automobile pioneer Louis Chevrolet dies at his Detroit home June 6 at age 62 (he is buried at Indianapolis).

The first U.S. diesel freight locomotives go into service for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe (see General Motors, 1935). Built by GM's Electromotive Division, the new 5,400-horsepower diesels eliminate water problems in desert country and reduce hotbox problems on downgrades with a dynamic braking system. Running time between Chicago and California drops from 6 days to 4, with only five brief stops en route, and the sound of the steam engine whistle begins to fade from the American scene (see 1957).

President Roosevelt establishes an Office of Defense Transportation December 18.

technology

English chemist John Rex Whinfield, 40, and his colleague James T. (Tennant) Dickson at the Calico Printer's Association of Manchester patent a new polyester fiber made from terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol (see nylon, 1939). Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) will market fabrics based on polyethylene terephthalate after the war under the name Terylene, E. I. du Pont will purchase U.S. rights in 1945, develop it further with modified nylon technology, and market it beginning in 1950 as Dacron (see Orlon, 1950; Mylar, 1952).

science

The transuranium element plutonium (atomic number 94) isolated at Berkeley by Michigan-born physicist Glenn (Theodore) Seaborg, 29, and Edwin M. McMillan has a Pu 239 isotope that shows promise of having a higher energy yield from nuclear fission than uranium (see 1939; nuclear reaction, 1942).

Vannevar Bush heads the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) created by President Roosevelt June 28 (see analog computer, 1930).

Archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans dies near Boars Hill, Oxford July 11 at age 90. His excavations in Crete turned up a pre-Phoenician script; German-born biochemist Rudolf Schoenheimer commits suicide at New York September 11 at age 43, having revolutionized metabolic studies by developing a technique of "tagging" molecules with radioactive isotopes; Nobel physical chemist Walther H. Nernst dies at Bad Muskau in Prussia November 18 at age 77.

medicine

Diabetes insulin therapy pioneer Sir Frederick G. Banting dies in an air crash at Musgrave Harbour, Newfoundland, February 21 at age 49.

Penicillin pioneer Howard W. Florey flies to Lisbon by Pan Am Clipper in June and proceeds to New York, where he appeals to the Rockefeller Institute for financial help in developing the antibiotic that will soon become the world's major weapon against infections and chronic diseases (see 1940). Florey and a companion have rubbed spores of the fungus mold into their clothing so that they would have something to demonstrate should the purified penicillin that they carried be somehow taken away from them en route. Ernst B. Chain urges the British government to apply for a patent on penicillin, but no action is taken and U.S. firms will obtain the patents. Pfizer & Co. at New York begins production in December, using deep-bowl fermenters employed earlier to produce acetone and citric acid (see world supply, 1942).

Paris-born Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons physician-physiologist André F. (Frédéric) Cournand, 46, and his New Jersey-born colleague Dickinson W. (Woodruff) Richards, 45, use a slight modification of the cardiac catheterization technique pioneered by Werner Forssmann in 1929 to investigate a patient's heart by means of a catheter inserted into an elbow vein. They find that they can measure blood pressure and other conditions inside the heart (see 1977; bypass surgery, 1967).

The Saturday Evening Post runs a story in March about Alcoholics Anonymous (see 1935). A local bank foreclosed on the mortgage of the Brooklyn house of cofounder Bill W.'s in-laws 2 years ago, he and his wife have been living in borrowed rooms or in temporary quarters above A.A.'s 24th Street clubhouse in Manhattan, but John D. Rockefeller Jr. last year gave a dinner for AA and was impressed enough to establish a small trust that provides Bill W. with $30 per week at a time when many families are living on less. Rockefeller rejected initial appeals to fund AA, saying that money would spoil its spirit, and the organization has spread through church groups. The magazine article produces a flood of letters, attendance at meetings begins to soar, and English novelist Aldous Huxley will call Bill W. "the greatest social architect of our time" (see Synanon, 1958).

Boston gynecologist George (Van Siclen) Smith and his epidemiologist wife, Olive (neé Watkins), at the Free Hospital for Women note that women who have suffered spontaneous abortions have lower blood levels of estrogen than women who come uneventfully to term; believing that administering estrogen will protect developing fetuses, they will prescribe diethylstilbestrol (DES) to 515 pregnant women between 1943 and 1948 (see Dodds, 1938); cooperating gynecologists in 48 other U.S. cities will give DES to 117 pregnant women in the same period, and by 1952 there will be more than 30 different brands of estrogen products on the market, including pills, injectable solutions, ointments, nasal sprays, and suppositories. The synthetic estrogen hormone DES has been used since 1938 to promote quicker fattening of livestock and poultry and is now prescribed for the prevention of miscarriage (it is also used in doses of 25 mg. per day for 5 days after intercourse to prevent conception) (see 1971).

communications, media

British authorities suppress London's Daily Worker January 21.

The comic strip "Archie" is created by New York writer and pulp magazine publisher John L. Goldwater, 25, with help from teen-aged artist Bob Montana. Archie, Jughead, Reggie, Betty, Veronica, and their prototypical teenaged friends inhabit a suburban Riverdale, U.S.A., which bears no resemblance to the East Harlem neighborhood in which Goldwater was raised by a foster mother (his own died in childbirth and his father abandoned the infant soon afterward); they will appear in as many as 750 newspapers worldwide, and comic books based on their antics will have sales of as many as 50 million per year.

Parade magazine begins publication in May for newsstand distribution. It has been founded by Marshall Field III; the Washington Post takes the picture magazine in August for distribution with its Sunday edition, and other papers acquire distribution rights.

Germany abandons Gothic type May 31 in favor of Roman type.

A giant smoker in a Times Square spectacular put up by Artkraft-Straus begins blowing five-foot-wide smoke rings (created by steam from Consolidated Edison Co.) every 4 seconds to promote Camel cigarettes. Designed by Douglas Leigh, the sign will continue until 1966, attracting attention as the figure is changed from time to time, becoming variously a soldier, sailor, marine, or, finally, a civilian (see 1942).

Illinois-born radio commentator H. R. Bowkage, 52, arrives at the White House December 7 at the same moment as press secretary Stephen E. Early and persuades him for the first time to install a radio microphone in the White House newsroom. Bowkage broadcasts the breaking news of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.

literature

The Brooklyn Pubic Library's central branch opens in April on Grand Army Plaza. A second floor will open in 1955 and there will be further expansions in 1972 and 1989.

The Antioch Review begins publication in the spring at the 89-year-old Ohio college. The literary journal will continue into the 21st century.

Nonfiction: Escape from Freedom by German-born U.S. psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm, 41, examines the meaning of freedom and authority; Nietzsche by Crane Brinton; World Order in Historical Perspective by Hans Kohn, who leaves Smith College to accept a chair at City College of New York; Berlin Diary by Chicago-born journalist William L. (Lawrence) Shirer, 37, who worked as a CBS radio correspondent from 1937 until this year; The Fall of Paris (Padeniye Parizha) by Ilya Ehrenburg is a vehement attack on the West; Black Lamb and Gray Falcon by Rebecca West, now 49, is a two-volume diary of her 1937 trip to Yugoslavia, a country whose Serbian population is being massacred by Croatians with help from German invasion forces; Twelve Who Ruled by Chicago-born Princeton historian R. R. (Robert Roswell) Palmer, 32, is about the French Revolution; The Colossus of Maroussi by novelist Henry Miller, who visited Greece 2 years ago; American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman by F. O. Matthiessen; The Mind of the South by South Carolina-born journalist W. J. (Wilbur Joseph) Cash, 40, whose masterpiece wins him a Guggenheim Fellowship; Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by Tennessee-born Time magazine film critic James Agee, 31, who has studied the plight of Alabama sharecroppers for the Farm Security Administration. Uncaptioned photographs by Walker Evans, now 37, confront Americans with the realities of rural poverty in the South; Business as Usual by Philadelphia-born Nation magazine associate editor I. F. Stone (originally Isidor Feinstein), 33; Reveille in Washington by Newburgh, N.Y.-born historian Margaret (Kenochan) Leech, 46; The Mysterious Science of the Law by Atlanta-born Harvard Law School instructor Daniel J. (Joseph) Boorstin, 26; Low Man on a Totem Pole by Illinois-born author H. (Harry) Allen Smith, 33, whose collection of autobiographical sketches and anecdotes about people whom he met and interviewed while working as a feature writer and rewrite man for the New York World-Telegram is a bestseller.

Philosopher Henri Bergson dies at his native Paris January 4 at age 81; foreign correspondent-author Dorothy Thompson at Lisbon January 31 at age 66; classicist Sir J. G. Frazer at Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, May 7 at age 87; W. J. Cash arrives at Mexico City, falls ill with dysentery, and hangs himself by his necktie in his Reforma Hotel room July 2 at age 40; former Harvard Shakespeare scholar George Lyman Kittredge dies at Barnstable, Mass., July 23 at age 81; jurist-political theorist Gaetano Mosca at Rome November 8 at age 83, having seen his ideas misinterpreted to support Fascism.

Fiction: Hadrian's Memoirs (Les Mèmoires d'Hadrien) by Marguerite Yourcenar; The Fancy Dress Party (La mascherata) by Alberto Moravia enrages Benito Mussolini, who personally censors the novel when he realizes that Moravia's South American dictator represents Il Duce; Conversation in Sicily (Conversazione inSicilia) by Sicilian-born novelist Elio Vittorini, 37; The Harvesters (Paesi tuoi) by Cesare Pavese; Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, who completed his novel about Stalin's 1937 Moscow show trials in a Vichy concentration camp; Scum of the Earth by Koestler, who shows the misery inside concentration camps; A Woman of the Pharisees (La Pharisienne) by François Mauriac, now 55, who has denounced fascism and works with the French Résistance; The PasquierChronicles (Chronique des Pasquier) by Georges Duhamel; Herself Surprised by Joyce Cary; A Curtain of Green (stories) by Mississippi writer Eudora Welty, 32; Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers; The Last Tycoon by the late F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose final novel, unfinished at his death last year, is based roughly on the late M-G-M producer Irving Thalberg; That None Shall Die by Washington, D.C.-born Jacksonville, Fla. surgeon-turned-novelist Frank G. (Gill) Slaughter, 33, who will go on to publish 56 books that will have sales of an estimated 60 million copies; What Makes Sammy Run? by New York-born novelist Budd (Wilson) Schulberg, 27, whose father is a leading Hollywood producer; Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain; The Journal of Albion Moonlight by Ohio-born experimental poet-novelist Kenneth Patchen, 29; The Seventh Cross (Das Siebente Kreuz) by émigrée German novelist Anna Seghers (Netty Radvanyi), 41; The Keys of the Kingdom by A. J. Cronin; H. M. Pulham, Esq. by John P. Marquand; Saratoga Trunk by Edna Ferber; Junior Miss (stories) by St. Louis-born Hollywood scriptwriter Sally Benson (née Sara Mahala Smith), 41; The Song of Bernadette by Franz Werfel, who has come to America to escape Nazi oppression; Wine of the Country by Hamilton Basso; Dagger of the Mind by Kenneth Fearing; Above Suspicion by Scottish-born U.S. mystery novelist Helen Clark MacInnes, 33; Traitor's Purse by Margery Allingham.

Novelist James Joyce dies of a perforated ulcer at Zürich January 13 at age 58; Sherwood Anderson at Colón, Panama, March 8 at age 64; Elizabeth Madox Roberts at Orlando, Fla., March 13 at age 54; Isaac Babel in a Soviet concentration camp March 17 at age 46; Virginia Woolf drowns herself March 28 at age 69 in the River Ouse near her Sussex home (she has had at least one nervous breakdown and fears another); Sir Hugh Walpole dies at his home near Keswick, Cumberland, June 1 at age 57; Hjalmar Soderberg at Copenhagen October 14 at age 72.

Poetry: Open House by Michigan-born Pennsylvania State teacher Theodore Roethke, 33; 55 Poems by New York-born poet Louis Zukofsky, 37; "David" by Calgary-born Canadian poet (Alfred) Earle Birney, 37, whose controversial verses about the mercy killing of a young mountain climber badly injured in a fall will be included in most Canadian high-school curricula; Poems de la France malheureuse by Jules Supervielle; La Crève-Coeur by novelist-poet Louis Aragon, now 43, who served with distinction against the Germans.

Poet Karin Boye dies by her own hand at Alingas, Sweden, April 24 at age 40; poet-playwright and 1913 Nobelist Rabindranath Tagore is moved from Shantiniketan to his native Calcutta for surgery but dies there August 7 at age 80 in the house where he was born, having written more than 2,000 songs (some Western admirers will rank him with Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare); Marina Tsvetaeva hangs herself August 31 at Yelabuga, a small town in the Tatar Autonomous Republic. Not yet 49, she was evacuated from Russia in the path of approaching German forces, but she and her teenage son have been destitute.

Juvenile: Curious George by German-born U.S. writer-illustrator H. A. (Hans Augusto) Rey, 43, and his wife, Margaret E., 35, whose monkey George will appear in six sequels (the Reys were living in Paris in June of last year, bicycled south before the Wehrmacht arrived, reached Lisbon, sailed to Rio, and arrived at New York in October of last year); My Friend Flicka by Cape May Point, N.J.-born author Mary O'Hara (Mary O'Hara Alsop Stuart-Vasa), 56, who has worked as a Wyoming rancher; I Discovered Columbus by Robert Lawson (an account of the Great Navigator by his parrot Aurelio).

Puffin Story Books are introduced by Britain's Penguin Books, Ltd., whose low-priced, paperback children's books revolutionize that category of publishing.

art

Painting: Nighthawks by Edward Hopper; New York under Gaslight by Stuart Davis; Bird by Wyoming-born abstractionist (Paul) Jackson Pollock, 29; That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do by Ivan Albright; Women with Bulldog by Francis Picabia, now 62; Still Life with Sausages by Pablo Picasso; Divers Against Yellow Background by Fernand Léger; Self-Portrait with Bonito (a parrot) by Frida Kahlo. Robert Delaunay dies at Montpelier, France, October 25 at age 56.

Mount Rushmore National Monument attracts visitors to South Dakota following the death of sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who suffered a fatal heart attack following surgery March 6 at age 73. Borglum has developed new methods of stoneworking to carve 60-foot high heads of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt out of the rock. His son Lincoln works to improve the collar and lapels on Washington's coat, Jefferson's collar, Lincoln's head, and Roosevelt's face, but Congress cut off funding for the project a week before his father's death (having appropriated a total of more than $987,000 for it), and the massive work will be left incomplete.

The National Gallery of Art opens at Washington, D.C., where a $15 million bequest from the late Pittsburg financier Andrew W. Mellon has financed construction of the rose-white Tennessee marble building (see 1938). When he died in 1937, Mellon left an art collection acquired at the persuasion of the London art dealer Baron Duveen of Milbank, now 72. The gallery will house other major collections as well.

photography

Photographs: New York-born LIFE photographer David E. Scherman, 25, takes pictures from a lifeboat April 17 of the German "merchant" ship that has sunk the Egyptian passenger liner Zamzam on which he and 201 others have been sailing en route to Cape Town. He conceals his exposed film in toothpaste tubes that are sticking out of his shirt pocket along with a toothbrush when the Germans land him and the others in Portugal. LIFE prints the pictures, and British naval units use them to identify and sink the surface raider Atlantis, which has sunk 22 liners and merchant ships on the Atlantic.

Yousuf Karsh gains worldwide fame with his portrait of Britain's Prime Minister Churchill, who has come to Ottawa after meeting in August with President Roosevelt off the coast of Newfoundland (see Karsh, 1932). The portrait shows Churchill's bulldog determination and launches Karsh, now 32, on a career as other statesmen, royal personages, industrial leaders, artists, and writers clamor to have him take their pictures.

theater, film

Theater: Angel Street by Patrick Hamilton 12/5 at New York's John Golden Theater (to Bijou Theater 10/2/1944), with Leo G. Carroll, South Dakota-born actress Judith Evelyn, 27, Vincent Price, 1,295 perfs.; Arsenic and Old Lace by New York-born playwright Joseph Kesselring, 39, 1/10 at New York's Fulton Theater with Josephine Hull, Jean Adair, Effie Shannon, Boris Karloff, Ashley Cooper, 1,437 perfs.; Mr. and Mrs. North by Owen Davis (who has adapted some of the stories by Richard Lockridge published in 1936) 1/12 at New York's Belasco Theater, with Albert Hackett, Peggy Conklin, 163 perfs.; Native Son by Richard Wright and Paul Green 3/24 at New York's St. James Theater, with New York-born actor Canada Lee (originally Leonard Cornelius Canegata), 38 (who appeared in the 1936 Federal Theater Project production of Macbeth), 114 perfs. (see 1940) novel; Watch on the Rhine by Lillian Hellman 4/1 at New York's Music Box Theater, with Paul Lukas, Mady Christians, Mount Kisco, N.Y.-born ingénue Ann Blyth, 12, George Coulouris, 378 perfs.; Mother Courage, A Chronicle of the Thirty Years' War (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder) by Bertolt Brecht 4/19 at Zürich's Schauspielhaus (Brecht has based his story on the 1669 novel Simplicicissimus by Hans Jakob von Grimmelshausen); Blithe Spirit by Noël Coward 7/2 at London's Piccadilly Theatre, with Margaret Rutherford as the spiritualist Mme. Arcati, Coward, Moya Nugent, 1,998 perfs.; The Wookie by California-born playwright-screenwriter Frederick Hazlitt Brennan, 40, 9/10 at New York's Plymouth Theater, with Welsh-born actor Edmund Gwenn (originally Edmund Kellaway), 55, sets by Jo Mielziner, 134 perfs.; Candle in the Wind by Maxwell Anderson 10/22 at New York's Shubert Theater, with Helen Hayes, Lotte Lenya, 95 perfs.; Junior Miss by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields (who have based it on the Sally Benson stories) 11/18 at New York's Lyceum Theater, with Patricia Peardon, 16, as Judy Graves, Ohio-born actress Lenore Lonergan, 13, as Fuffy Adams, 710 perfs.; Clash by Night by Clifford Odets 12/27 at New York's Belasco Theater, with Tallulah Bankhead, New York-born actor Lee J. Cobb (originally Leo Jacob), 31, Chicago-born actor Robert Ryan, 32, Viennese-born actor Joseph Schildkraut, 46, 49 perfs.

The United Service Organizations, Inc. (USO) chartered February 1 provides social, welfare, and recreational services to U.S. troops and will keep up their morale as conscription swells the ranks of the armed forces. The private agency has been created at the suggestion of Gen. George C. Marshall, who proposed the idea last year and has seen it implemented by representatives of the Salvation Army, YMCA, YWCA, National Jewish Welfare Board, and National Catholic Community Service, who are joined in March by the Travelers Aid Association. USO clubs and recreational centers start opening in the summer, and William Morris Agency head Abe Lastfogel enlists the support of the Screen Actors Guild, the musicians' union, and other groups to incorporate Camp Shows, Inc., in November (it quickly becomes the world's largest booking agency); the volunteer organization will grow to include Broadway actors, comedians, film stars, vaudevillians, jugglers, musicians, and public-spirited citizens who set up cafeterias, hotels, churches, and other facilities that will soon include the Stage Door Canteen at New York and the Hollywood Canteen at Los Angeles (see 1942).

Female impersonator Julian Eltinge dies at New York March 7 at age 57; actor Thomas B. Findley at Aylmer, Quebec, May 29 at age 67; playwright Arthur F. Goodrich of a heart attack in his apartment at New York's National Arts Club June 28 at age 63; Broadway showman Sam H. Harris in his Ritz Tower apartment at New York July 8 at age 69; actor-director Leonid Mironovich Leonidov at Moscow August 6 at age 68, having taught the principles of Stanislavsky at the State Institute of Theatre Arts since 1935; playwright-screenwriter Eugene Walter dies of cancer at his Hollywood apartment September 26 at age 67.

Radio: Inner Sanctum Mysteries 1/7 on NBC with Kenosha, Wis.-born actor Raymond E. (Edward) Johnson, 31, as host, a creaking-door sound effect, guests who will include Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Paul Lukas, Claude Rains, and Raymond Massey (to 10/5/1952); Duffy's Tavern 3/1 on CBS with Ed Gardner (originally Edward Poggenberg), 35, as the Brooklyn, N.Y., bartender Archie (to 1951); A Date with Judy 6/24 on NBC with Ann Gillis, 14, as Judy Foster; The Arkansas Traveler 9/16 on CBS with Arkansas-born comedian Bob Burns, 51; Bulldog Drummond 9/28 on New York's WOR with George Coulouris as British inspector Capt. Hugh Drummond, Everett Sloane as his assistant, Denny, and Clinton, Mass.-born actress Agnes Moorehead, 34.

Scottish film animator Norman McLaren, 27, joins the staff of Canada's 2-year-old National Film Board at the invitation of its commisioner John Grierson. While still a student at the Glasgow School of Art, McLaren developed an inexpensive way to animate directly on film; Grierson gives him free creative rein, and although Grierson will resign in 1945 to become director of mass communications at Paris, McLaren will remain in Canada and create further innovations that will give the Film Board an international reputation for superior documentaries and animated short subjects.

Films: Orson Welles's Citizen Kane with Welles, Joseph Cotten, Everett Sloane, Agnes Moorehead, Port Arthur, Texas-born actress Evelyn Keyes, 26, George Coulouris opens May 1 at New York's Palace Theater, which has been converted to use as a picture house for the occasion since no other theater will book the film. Publisher William Randolph Hearst has tried to block showing of Welles's allegory on the theme of idealism corrupted by power, threatening to bar any theater that shows it from advertising in his papers (the film is not reviewed or advertised in any Hearst newspaper, and RKO will shelve it for more than a decade).

Other films: Alexander Hall's Here Comes Mr. Jordan with Beacon, N.Y.-born actor Robert (originally Henry) Montgomery, 37, Evelyn Keyes; John Ford's How Green Was My Valley with London-born actor Roddy McDowall, 12, Donald Crisp, 61, Sara Allgood, Canadian actor Walter Pidgeon, 42; Gabriel Pascal's Major Barbara with Wendy Hiller, English actor Rex Harrison (originally Reginald Carey), 33; John Huston's The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Elisha Cook Jr.; Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca with Joan Fontaine, Laurence Oliver, St. Petersburg, Russian-born actor George Sanders, 35; Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels with Joel McCrea, Brooklyn, N.Y.-born atress Veronica Lake (originally Constance Ockleman), 21, William Demarest; Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours with Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell, Rudy Vallée. Also: William Dieterle's The Devil and Daniel Webster with Edward Arnold, Walter Huston; Sam Wood's The Devil and Miss Jones with Jean Arthur, Joplin, Mo.-born actor Robert Cummings, 31; Jacques de Baroncelli's Duchesse de Langeais with Edwige Feuillère; Michael Powell's Forty-Ninth Parallel with Anton Walbrook, Eric Portman, 38, Leslie Howard; Kenji Mizoguchi's The 47 Ronin with Chojuro Kawarazaki, Yoshizaburo Arashi; Charles Chaplin's The Great Dictator with Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Jack Oakie; King Vidor's H. M. Pulham, Esq. with Robert Young, Ruth Hussey, Hedy Lamarr, now 27 (born Hedwig Kiesler, Lamarr got her name from Louis B. Mayer of M-G-M, whom she met at London a few years ago after escaping from her Viennese first husband and his Nazi friends); Mitchell Leisen's Hold Back the Dawn with Charles Boyer, Olivia de Havilland; Sam Wood's Kings Row with Ann Sheridan, Robert Cummings, Ronald Reaga; Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve with Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda; William Wyler's The Little Foxes with Bette Davis; William Keighley's The Man Who Came to Dinner with Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan, Monty Woolley; Edward Cline's Never Give a Sucker an Even Break with W. C. Fields, Gloria Jean; Irving Rapper's One Foot in Heaven with Fredric March, Martha Scott; George Stevens's Penny Serenade with Cary Grant, Irene Dunne; Michael Curtiz's The Sea Wolf with Edward G. Robinson, John Garfield, Ida Lupino; Howard Hawks's Sergeant York with Gary Cooper; Mark Sandrich's Skylark with Claudette Colbert, Welsh-born actor Ray (originally Raymond Alton) Milland, 33; John Cromwell's So Ends Our Night with Fredric March, Margaret Sullavan; Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion with Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine; Garson Kanin's Tom, Dick, and Harry with Ginger Rogers, George Murphy, Burgess Meredith; George Cukor's Two-Faced Woman with Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas (now 36, Garbo goes into "temporary" retirement, saying that she wants "to be let alone," and will never make another film; having earned $3 million in her 16-year career, she helps Britain by identifying high-level Nazi sympathizers in Stockholm, providing introductions, and carrying messages for British agents); Marcel Pagnol's The Well-Digger's Daughter with Raimu, Fernandel, Josette Day, Charpin; George Waggner's The Wolf Man with Lon Chaney Jr., Chilean-born actress Evelyn Ankers, 23.

Pioneer cinematographer-director-inventor Edwin S. Porter dies of cancer at New York April 30 at age 72; actress Blanche Bates at San Francisco December 25 at age 68.

music

Hollywood musical: Ben Sharpsteen's Dumbo with Walt Disney animation, music by Frank Churchill, lyrics by Oliver Wallace.

Stage musicals: Lady in the Dark 1/23 at New York's Alvin Theater with Gertrude Lawrence, New York-born actor-singer Danny Kaye (originally David Daniel Kaminsky), 28, Louisville, Ky.-born actor Victor Mature, 28, Sioux City, Iowa-born Macdonald Carey, 27, music by Kurt Weill, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, songs that include "Jenny (the Saga of)," "My Ship," "Tchaikovsky," 162 perfs. (Kaye has married Sylvia Fine while working in the Catskill Mountain "borscht circuit" and she has helped him with her witty songs); Rise Above It (revue) 6/5 at London's Comedy Theatre, with Henry Kendall, Hermione Baddeley, Wilfred Hyde-White, 236 perfs. (a second edition opens in December for another 144 perfs.); Jump for Joy, A Sun-Tanned Revu-sical 7/10 at the Mayan Theater, Los Angeles, with an all-black cast, music by Duke Ellington, a social message designed (in Ellington's words) "to take the Uncle Tom out of the theater, eliminate the stereotyped image that has been exploited by Hollywood and Broadway, and say things that would make the audience think"), lyrics by Paul Francis Webster, Sid Kuller, Henry Newman, and Irving Mills, songs that include "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good"; Best Foot Forward 10/1 at New York's Ethel Barrymore Theater, with Rosemary Lane, Philadelphia-born actress Nancy Walker (originally Ann Myrtle Swoyer), 20, June Allyson, songs by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane that include "Buckle Down, Winsocki," 326 perfs.; Let's Face It 10/29 at New York's Imperial Theater with Danny Kaye, Eve Arden, Seattle-born ingénue Carol Channing, 20, San Diego-born actress Nanette Fabray (originally Nanette Fabares), 21, music and lyrics by Cole Porter, songs that include "You Irritate Me So," and Danny Kaye patter songs with lyrics by Sylvia Fine, 547 perfs.; Sons O'Fun 12/1 at New York's Winter Garden Theater with Olsen and Johnson, Carmen Miranda, Ella Logan, music by Sammy Fain and Will Irwin, lyrics by Jack Yellen and Irving Kahal, songs that include "Happy in Love," 742 perfs.

Budapest-born comic Joe Penner (originally Josef Pinter) dies of a heart attack in his Ritz-Carlton Hotel room at Philadelphia January 10 at age 36; Joseph Coyne in Surrey outside London February 17 at age 73; Jenny (Yansci) Dolly of the Dolly Sisters hangs herself in her Beverly Hills apartment after a long illness April 30 at age 48; Lew Fields of the comedy team Weber and Fields dies of pneumonia at Beverly Hills July 20 at age 73 with Weber at his bedside; minstrel Eddie Leonard (originally Lemuel Gordon Tonay) is found dead in a New York hotel August 29 at age 70; torch singer Helen Morgan dies penniless after a kidney operation at Chicago October 8 at age 41.

First performances: Symphonie Dances for Orchestra by Sergei Rachmaninoff 1/4 at Philadelphia's Academy of Music; Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra by Paul Hindemith 2/7 at Boston's Symphony Hall, with Gregor Piatigorsky as soloist; Concerto for Violin and Orchestra by Samuel Barber 2/7 at Philadelphia's Academy of Music, with Albert Spalding as soloist; Symphony No. 1 by New York-born composer Paul Creston (originally Joseph Guttoveggio), 34, 2/22 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Latin-AmericanSymphonette by New York-born composer Morton Gould, 27, 2/22 at Brooklyn; Ballad of a Railroad Man for Chorus and Orchestra by Roy Harris 2/22 at Brooklyn; Sinfonia da Requiem by Benjamin Britten 3/29 at New York's Carnegie Hall (Tokyo commissioned the work in 1939 for the 2,600th anniversary of the imperial dynasty in 1940 but rejected it, calling it too Christian); A Symphony in D for the Dodgers by Kansas City-born composer Robert Russell Bennett, 46, 5/16 in a radio concert from New York (Bennett has been orchestrating Broadway musical scores since 1919); Piano Sonata by Aaron Copland 10/21 at Buenos Aires; Symphony No. 2 by Virgil Thomson 11/17 at Seattle; Symphony in E flat major by Hindemith 11/21 at Minneapolis; Scottish Ballad for Two Pianos and Orchestra by Britten 11/28 at Cincinnati; Symphony No. 1 by U.S. composer David Diamond, 26, 12/21 at New York's Carnegie Hall.

English concert pianist Myra Hess, 51, is named Dame Commander of the British Empire.

Lüftwaffe night raiders destroy the Queen's Hall, London, with incendiary bombs May 10.

A BBC broadcast from London June 27 urges the subjugated peoples of Europe to adopt the Morse code signal for the letter V (for Victory)—three dots and a dash—and to whistle the opening motive of Symphony No. 5 by Ludwig van Beethoven whenever Nazi soldiers are around. London's Westminster chimes have added the four notes on the hour.

Composer Frank Bridge dies at Eastbourne, England, January 10 at age 61; pianist (and former Polish prime minister) Jan Paderewski at New York June 29 at age 80.

Popular songs: "Lili Marlene" by German composer Norbert Schultze (who also wrote "Bombs on England"), lyrics by World War I German soldier Hans Leip, now 45, who wrote them before going to the Russian front in 1916, combining the name of his girlfriend with that of a friend's girl), English lyrics by London publisher Jimmy Phillips and lyricist Tommy Connor, who adapt the song Allied troops have learned from prisoners of war and from German radio (German publishers will receive royalties beginning in 1958); "Blues in the Night" by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Johnny Mercer; "(There'll Be Blue Birds Over) the White Cliffs of Dover" by English songwriters Nat Burton and Walter Kent; "We Did It Before (and We Can Do It Again)" by Cliff Friend, lyrics by Charlie Tobias; "I Don't Want to Walk Without You" by London-born Hollywood composer Jule Styne, 36, and Frank Loesser; "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" by Eddie Seiler, Sol Marcus, Bennie Benjamin, Eddie Durham; "Take the A Train" by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn (see transportation [New York subway], 1933); "(I Like New York in June) How About You?" by Burton Lane, lyrics by Ralph Freed; "Oh Look At Me Now" by Joe Bushkin and John De Vries; "It's So Peaceful in the Country" by Alec Wilder; "Elmer's Tune" by Chicago undertaker's assistant Elmer Albrecht, lyrics by Duluth, Minn.-born writer Sammy Gallop, 26, and bandleader Dick Jergens; "Racing with the Moon" by Johnny Watson, lyrics by Watson's wife, Pauline Pope, and bandleader Vaughn Monroe; "This Love of Mine" by Sol Parker and Henry Sanicola, lyrics by Frank Sinatra; "Perfidia" by Mexican composer Alberto Dominguez, lyrics by Milton Leeds; "Why Don't You Do Right?" by blues songwriter Joe McCoy; "Yes Indeed!" by Sy Oliver; "Deep in the Heart of Texas" by Don Swander, 36, and his wife, June (née Hershey), 32 (who has never been in Texas); "Jersey Bounce" by Billy Plate, Tony Bradshaw, Edward Johnson, Robert B. Wright; "The Hut-Sut Song" by Leo V. Killion; "Cow-Cow Boogie" by Don Raye, Gene DePaul, and New York-born instrumenalist Bennett Lester "Benny" Carter, 34; "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" by Harry Warren, lyrics by Mack Gordon; "I, Yi, Yi, Yi, Yi (I Like You Very Much)" by Harry Warren, lyrics by Mack Gordon (for Carmen Miranda to sing in Irving Cummings's film That Night in Rio); "Why Don't We Do This More Often" by Allie Wrubell, lyrics by Charlie Newman; "Let's Get Away from It All" by Seattle-born Tommy Dorsey protégé Matthew Loveland "Matt" Dennis, 27, lyrics by Tom Adair; "Anniversary Waltz" by Al Dubin and Dave Franklin; Billie Holiday records "God Bless the Child" and "Gloomy Sunday"; Chicago-born jazz singer Anita O'Day (Anita Belle Colton), 21, records "Let Me Off Uptown" with the Gene Krupa band (O'Day began her career singing at a dance marathon during the Depression); the Andrews Sisters record "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" by Don Raye and Hughie Prince.

Coalinga, Calif.-born singer Jo Stafford, 23, joins the Tommy Dorsey band after several years' singing with the Stafford Sisters; Georgia-born jazz singer Joe Williams (né Joseph Goreed), 22, joins the Coleman Hawkins big band, which will be dissolved next year.

Songwriter A. B. "Banjo" Paterson of 1903 "Waltzing Matilda" fame dies at Sydney February 5 at age 76; Howard E. Johnson at New York May 1 at age 53; jazz pianist-composer Joseph La Menthe "Jelly Roll" Morton alone and penniless at Los Angeles July 10 at age 55, having blamed his failing health on a voodoo spell; songwriter Clifford Grey at Ipswich, England, September 26 at age 54; Gus Kahn at his Beverly Hills home October 8 at age 54.

sports

Jockey Eddie Arcaro rides Whirlaway to victory in the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, and Belmont Stakes to take the first of two Triple Crowns that he will win (see 1948). Missouri-born horseman Horace Allyn "Jimmy" Jones, 34, and his father, Ben, have trained the Calumet Farm 3-year-old for Warren Wright at Lexington, Ky.

Bobby Riggs wins in men's singles at Forest Hills, Sarah Palfrey Cooke, 18, in women's singles.

New York Yankees great Lou Gehrig dies at New York June 3 at age 37 (see 1939).

Yankee outfielder Joe DiMaggio sets a record 56 consecutive game hitting streak. Now 26, he hits safely at Yankee Stadium May 15 and goes on to surpass Willie Keeler's major league mark of 44 before finally going 0 for 4 July 17 in a night game at Cleveland's League Park, where Indian third baseman Ken Keltner makes two outstanding catches that rob the Yankee Clipper of what otherwise would have been solid hits. (DiMaggio's salary for the year is $32,000.)

Stan Musial goes to bat for the St. Louis Cardinals beginning late in the season and has a .426 average for 12 games. Stanley Frank Musial, 22, will have a lifetime average of .331 in 22 seasons and a career total of 3,630 hits.

Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox ends the season with a batting average of .406, becoming the first player to break .400 since 1930 (the feat will not be duplicated again in this century). It is the highest average since the 1924 Rogers Hornsby record of .424, and Williams's lifetime batting average for 2,292 games will be .344.

The Brooklyn Dodgers win their first pennant under the direction of Massachusetts-born manager Leo Ernest "the Lip" Durocher, 35, but the New York Yankees win the World Series, defeating the Dodgers 4 games to 1.

everyday life

Chess master Emanuel Lasker dies at New York January 11 at age 72. Wiped out by the Great Depression, he retired for some years to study philosophy, teach, and write but returned to tournament play at age 66 and became the first chess master to demand high fees, giving professionals higher financial status.

Boy Scouts of America founder Dan Beard dies at Suffern, N.Y., June 11 at age 90. A mountain adjoining Mt. McKinley in Alaska will be named for him.

crime

New York's homicide rate will fall to 3.5 per 100,000 in the next 5 years, down from 4.5 per 100,000 in the last 5 and its lowest level of this century.

A New York plainclothesman tells small-time, Flatbush-born gambler-bookmaker Harry Gross, 25, that paying "ice" (protection money) could keep him safe from arrest. Gross sets up his own "horse room," a venue where players can place bets and get race results by radio and telephone. Gross begins paying as much as $1,000 per month for police protection.

Gangster Abe "Kid Twist" Reles "falls" to his death November 12 from a fifth-story window of Coney Island's Half Moon Hotel while in the custody of a six-man police bodyguard. Reles last year informed to Brooklyn district attorney William O'Dwyer, his testimony attributed 130 hired killings between 1930 and 1940 to a national crime syndicate called Murder Inc., whose members have been accused of 63 murders for racketeers since 1934, and the testimony will lead to the execution of mob figures who include Louis "Lepke" Buchalter; police say Reles was trying to escape but there are suspicions that he was pushed to keep him from implicating the police. O'Dwyer says the death of Reles ruins the state's "perfect" case against mobster Umberto "Albert" Anastasia, now 39, but a King's County grand jury will severely censure O'Dwyer in 1945 for not having prosecuted Anastasia anyway (see Kefauver Committee hearings, 1950).

environment

A Field Guide to Western Birds and The Audubon Guide to Attracting Birds by Roger Tory Peterson are published to wide acclaim (see 1934).

agriculture

Mexico's wheat harvest falls by half as stem rust devastates crops in the nation's breadbasket—Queretaro, Guanajuato, Michoacan, and Jalisco. Mexico is obliged to spend $30 million (100 million pesos) each year to import corn and wheat, leaving less for desperately needed power generators, machinery, and chemicals from abroad.

The Rockefeller Foundation begins a program to improve Mexican agriculture at the urging of Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace. It sends University of Minnesota rust specialist Elvin C. Stakman, 56, Cornell soil expert Richard Bradford, 46, and Harvard plant geneticist Paul C. Mangelsdorf, now 42, to Mexico, and they submit a blueprint for redeveloping the country's rural economy. Mangelsdorf has worked with Donald F. Jones to develop a method of genetically transmitting pollen sterility without the costly and tedious fieldwork of detasseling.

food availability

Britain receives her first U.S. Lend-Lease shipments of U.S. food April 16, just in time to avert a drastic shortage; by December, 1 million tons of U.S. foodstuffs have arrived.

Russia suffers her most severe winter in 30 years; Leningrad has no heat, no electricity, and little food. The Lüftwaffe destroys food stocks stored in wooden buildings, and besieged Leningraders eat cats, dogs, birds, jelly made of cosmetics, and soup made from boiled leather wallets. Those able to work receive a bread ration of half a pound per day, others get only two slices, and the bread is often made of cheap rye flour mixed with sawdust, cellulose residues, and cottonseed cake. Thousands die of starvation; before the siege is lifted in 1944, 20 to 40 percent of Leningrad's 3 million people will have died in 900 days of hunger and related disease (see politics [Stalingrad], 1942). Soviet citizens outside Leningrad receive an estimated 1,800 calories per day, but people in occupied Finland, Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands receive fewer than 1,800, and those in the Baltic states, Poland, France, Italy, Greece (and the other Balkan countries) are lucky to get 1,500.

Dutch bakers stretch their supplies of rye flour with peas and barley, giving their bread a sour taste. The Dutch brew tea from rose hips and the leaves of various wild plants in lieu of coffee or real tea, which is rarely obtainable, and the only milk available is usually skim milk (taptemelk) or buttermilk. Meat and cheese are in short supply, as are butter and margarine, and chocolate and anise-flavored products almost never seen. Rapeseed oil (raapolie) is usually the only available vegetable oil.

Germany is the best-fed of Europe's combatant nations. A rationing plan provides Germans with at least 95 percent of the calories received in peacetime (2,000 calories per day).

Japan begins rice rationing as demands of the military place a strain on supplies for the home front (see 1943). Sugar is almost impossible to obtain, but saccharin is plentiful.

nutrition

Europeans in German-occupied countries are advised to eat vegetables raw or with as little cooking as possible in order to retain as many of their nutrients as possible, and to eat potatoes unpeeled in order to preserve their vitamin content. Few housewives follow these directions.

A National Nutritional Conference for Defense convened by President Roosevelt examines causes for the physical defects found in so many young men called up by the draft. Cincinnati-born Mayo Clinic nutrition and diabetes expert Russell M. (Morse) Wilder, 55, heads a group of experts in a study of the eating habits of 2,000 representative U.S. families (see 1943).

Only 30 percent of U.S. white bread is enriched with vitamins and iron. South Carolina becomes the first state to require enrichment.

The average fat content of U.S. frankfurters is 19 percent, up from 18 in 1935 (see 1969).

food and drink

U.S. newspaper reporters in the next few years will talk about G.I.s fighting for Mom and "good old American apple pie," even though apple pie did not originate in America.

The United States imports 53 million bunches of bananas, mostly from the Caribbean and Central America.

Cheerios breakfast food is introduced by General Mills; the oat-based cereal is 2.2 percent sugar.

Daniel Gerber's Fremont Canning Co. sells 1 million cans of baby food per week (see 1929; 1948).

Basic U.S. food prices by December are 61 percent above prewar prices.

M&Ms Plain Chocolate Candies are introduced by M&M Ltd., a company founded by Forrest E. Mars, who returned to the United States last year and opened a Newark, N.J., confectionery plant in partnership with R. Bruce Murrie, son of Hershey's chief executive officer William F. R. "Bill" Murrie (Mars will buy out Bruce Murrie's 20 percent interest in 1949) (see 1937). Their hard shells enable M&Ms to withstand heat, a feature that will soon win them popularity among U.S. servicemen and lead to the slogan, "The Milk Chocolate That Melts in Your Mouth—Not in Your Hands."

restaurants

The New York restaurant Le Pavillon opens October 15 at 5 East 55th Street under the direction of Henri Soulé, 38, a Basque from Biarritz who managed the Café de Paris before coming to New York in March 1939 with 30 kitchen workers and 33 maîtres d'hotel captains, waiters, and wine stewards to run the restaurant at the World's Fair's French Pavilion. Soulé charges $1.75 for a table d'hôte luncheon of hors d'oeuvre, plat du jour, dessert, and coffee.

population

The U.S. population reaches 132 million, Britain has 47 million, France 41, Germany with its annexed territories 110, the USSR with its annexed territories 181, Japan 105 (up from 89 million in 1936), Brazil 41, India 389, China close to 500 million.

1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950

Astronomy

Physicist Bengt Edlén [b. Gusum, Sweden, November 2, 1906, d. 1993] shows that the "coronium" lines in the solar corona are caused by strongly ionized iron, calcium, and nickel lines. (Astronomers had suspected an element unknown on Earth by analogy with helium discovered in the solar spectrum. They called the suspected element coronium.) From the degree of ionization the temperature of the corona is shown to be 1,000,000°C (1,800,000°F).

George Wells Beadle [b. Wahoo, Nebraska, October 22, 1903, d. Pomona, California, June 9, 1989] and Edward Lawrie Tatum [b. Boulder, Colorado, December 14, 1909, d. New York City, November 5, 1975] demonstrate that genes control chemical reactions in cells. Their theory becomes known as the "one-gene, one-enzyme hypothesis." See also 1958 Biology.

Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan create element 94, plutonium (Pu), named for Pluto, the next planet beyond Neptune. See also 1940 Chemistry; 1951 Chemistry. (See biography.)

Arnold Beckman invents a spectrophotometer that measures the chemical composition of a sample based on the wavelengths of light reflected by the sample.

The first television broadcast license for a system using 525 scanning lines is issued by the FCC in the United States. The same year the FCC grants broadcasters permission to use commercials for financing programs. The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) start transmitting programs and commercials in New York City. See also 1936 Communication; 1948 Communication.

On October 10 the Radio Club of Columbia University, under the direction of FM's inventor Edwin Armstrong, opens the first regularly scheduled FM station, WKCR. The opening words are "Good morning, hepsters, jitterbugs, and other lovers of culture." See also 1933 Communication.

Konrad Zuse's Z₃ computer, containing 2600 relays, is the first to use electromagnetic relays and a punched tape for data entry. It also makes use of an error-detecting code. The Z₃ is the first working universal computer controlled by a program. See also 1940 Computers; 1942 Computers.

Beauchamp E. Smith, Palmer Coslett Putnam, and coworkers in a series of experiments between 1937 and 1946 find that their windmill on Grandpa's Knob near Rutland, Vermont, with two blades and a tip-to-tip diameter of 53.3 m (175 ft), erected this year, is the most efficient. It delivers 1250 kw of electricity to the grid until it loses a blade in 1945 and is shut down. See also 1931 Energy.

Norton and Loring use X-ray diffraction methods to show that the relation between stress and extension known as Hooke's law is caused by openings in the crystal structure of a solid, just as Hooke wrote in 1679. See also 1679 Tools.

Americans Lyle David Goodhue and W.N. Sullivan of the Department of Agriculture introduce the first aerosol containers. The containers produce vapors containing insecticides and are soon christened "bug bombs."

The German I.G. Farbenindustrie begins to produce polyurethanes, plastics first developed between 1937 and 1939 by Otto Bayer. See also 1937 Materials.

Canadian-American surgeon Charles Brenton Huggins [b. Halifax, Nova Scotia, September 22, 1901, d. Chicago, Illinois, January 12, 1997] shows that administration of female sex hormones can be used to help control prostate cancer. See also 1903 Medicine & health; 1966 Medicine & health.

Russian-American microbiologist Selman Abraham Waksman [b. Priluki, Russia, July 22, 1888, d. Hyannis, Massachusetts, August 16, 1973] coins the term antibiotic to describe substances that kill bacteria without injuring other forms of life. See also 1940 Medicine & health; 1943 Medicine & health.

Soviet physicist Georgii Nikolaevich Flerov [b. March 2, 1913, d. November 19, 1990] discovers spontaneous fission of uranium; that is, no bombardment with neutrons is needed. He soon will recognize that references to uranium fission have disappeared from scientific journals, alerting him to the likelihood that scientists in other countries are working on fission-based weapons. He then will urge the Soviet government to institute such a program, which is begun shortly thereafter. See also 1939 Physics; 1951 Tools.

On the day before the Pearl Harbor attack by the Japanese that plunges the United States into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the order that leads to the American and British development of the atomic bomb (nuclear-fission bomb). See also 1945 Tools.

Honeywell installs the first electronic automatic pilot in several thousand bombers. See also 1932 Transportation; 1947 Transportation.

In May the Gloster E28/39 or Meteor is the first British airplane powered by a jet engine, an outgrowth of the engine design first patented by Frank Whittle in 1930. See also 1937 Transportation; 1944 Transportation.

Drama and Theater

• Maxwell Anderson: Candle in the Wind. This is a preachy melodrama about an American actress who remains in occupied Paris to be with the man she loves, an anti-Nazi journalist who is imprisoned.
• S. N. Behrman: The Talley Method. A social problem comedy concerning a talented surgeon's lack of humanity.
• Rose Franken (1895-1988): Claudia. Franken's comedy, her first since Another Language in 1932, about an immature woman with a mother fixation, is called by one reviewer "the best new American play of the season." The Texas-born playwright followed it with the less successful Outrageous Fortune (1943) and Soldier's Wife (1944).
• Moss Hart: The Lady in the Dark. Hart's first solo effort, a musical comedy with lyrics by Ira Gershwin and music by Kurt Weill, features an expressionistic method as a restless fashion editor explores her life through flashbacks and dreams shared with her therapist.
• Lillian Hellman: Watch on the Rhine. Of the eleven war plays on Broadway during the 1940-1941 season, Hellman's anti-Nazi play set in Washington, D.C., along with Sherwood's There Shall Be No Night, are the two successes.
• Joseph Kesserling (1902-1967): Arsenic and Old Lace. The comedy centers on two sisters who murder their lonely male lodgers with poisoned elderberry wine. It is believed that Kesserling's originally serious thriller was turned into an uproarious comedy by the play's producers, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. Kesserling was a New York-born actor and teacher.
• Clifford Odets: Clash By Night. Written at the time that Odets's marriage fell apart, this play portrays two characters, Mae and Jerry Wilenski, in the midst of a sordid love triangle.
• William Saroyan: Three Plays. These plays include The Beautiful People, Sweeney in the Trees, and Across the Board on Tomorrow Morning. All show the playwright's characteristic blend of unconventionality and optimism. As Saroyan writes in his foreword, "The comedy, tragedy, absurdity and nobility of these plays come from people whom the writer regards as beautiful." The Beautiful People opens on Broadway in 1941, financed by the playwright when no other backers could be found. It proves to be his last popular stage success.
• Delmore Schwartz: Shenandoah. In this verse play on the birth and naming of a Jewish child in the Bronx, a ghostly projection of the man whom the child is to become takes part as a figure in the chorus.
• Richard Wright and Paul Green: Native Son. Although considered powerful, groundbreaking theater, the dramatic adaptation of Wright's novel, directed by Orson Welles, fails to attract an audience and closes after only 114 performances.

Fiction

• William Attaway: Blood on the Forge. The author's second and last novel establishes Attaway's reputation as the chronicler of the great migration of blacks from the South to the industrial North. The novel dramatizes the tragic fate of three Kentucky sharecroppers who try to build new lives as they work in a Pennsylvania steel mill.
• Sally Benson (1900-1972): Junior Miss. A collection of Benson's popular New Yorker stories about the misadventures of an awkward twelve-year-old New York City schoolgirl, Judy Graves. Dramatized by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields also in 1941, they would subsequently be adapted as a popular radio drama, a movie, and a television musical. The Missouri-born writer also published collections of satirical short stories, People Are Fascinating (1936), Emily (1938), and Stories of the Gods and Heroes (1940).
• James Cain: Mildred Pierce. Cain tells the story of sex, money, and snobbery in a divorcée's business, love, and family life. A reviewer remarks that Cain's hard-boiled social realism resembles an "iron-fist in a silk stocking."
• Mary Ellen Chase: Windswept. The novelist delivers a characteristically muted but convincing portrait of family life along the Maine coast.
• Paul Engle: Always the Land. The poet's first novel takes an intimate look at Iowa farm life.
• James T. Farrell: Ellen Rogers. Thomas Mann calls this story of blighted love set in Chicago in the 1920s "one of the best love-stories I know, of unusual truthfulness and simplicity."
• Howard Fast (1914-2003): The Last Frontier. Complementing Walter Van Tilburg Clark's reassessment of frontier justice in The Ox-Bow Incident (1940), Fast describes a group of Cheyenne Indians in 1878 who, trying to escape to their homeland after deprivation and betrayal on a reservation, are relentlessly pursued by a powerful army unit. The novel is an important indicator of a paradigm shift in the myth of the American frontier. Fast, the author of many historical novels, was a member of the Communist Party between 1943 and 1956.
• Edna Ferber: Saratoga Trunk. Ferber's historical novel is set during the 1880s in Saratoga Springs, New York, and New Orleans.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Tycoon. Although only half completed before Fitzgerald's death, his satirical novel about Hollywood is praised as equal in quality to The Great Gatsby, enhancing the author's posthumous reputation.
• Martha Gellhorn: The Heart of Another. Gellhorn's collection of short stories is based on her experiences during the Spanish Civil War.
• Ellen Glasgow: In This Our Life. Glasgow's last novel traces the decline of the aristocratic Timberlake family of Virginia and concludes her series of novels (begun in 1897) treating the social history of the antebellum South.
• Marcus Goodrich (1897-1991): Delilah. This sea novel set in 1916-1917 on a destroyer based in the Philippines is praised by James Michener as equal to "Joseph Conrad's Youth or the best of Herman Melville." Goodrich, a newspaperman and screenwriter, as well as a novelist, served on a destroyer in the Pacific during World War II.
• Caroline Gordon: The Green Centuries. Gordon produces a historical novel set on the Kentucky frontier during the American Revolution.
• J. P. Marquand: H. M. Pulham, Esquire. Marquand's bestseller is a wry satire on the Boston Brahmin class. It offers the autobiographical reflections of the title character, who is preparing for his twenty-fifth reunion at Harvard. His modest successes are deemed empty compared to the promise of his college years.
• Carson McCullers: Reflections in a Golden Eye. McCullers's dark novel addresses homosexuality on an army base in the South. The scandalous subject matter disappoints many after the success of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. The novel's bleak tone reflects the turbulence in McCullers's life at the time and the failure of her marriage.
• Robert Nathan: They Went On Together. The novel, in a shift from Nathan's characteristic gentle fantasy to realism, concerns wartime evacuees seen through the eyes of two homeless children.
• Kenneth Patchen: The Journal of Albion Moonlight. Patchen's first novel is a powerful, stream-of-consciousness antiwar drama that would later serve the Beats as a manifesto for rebellion and social protest.
• Elizabeth Madox Roberts: Not by Strange Gods. Roberts's last book is a collection of stories set in the Kentucky backwoods.
• Mark Schorer: The Hermit Place. Schorer's second novel is a psychological study of two sisters who fall in love with a mysterious aviator who then dies.
• Budd Schulberg (b. 1914): What Makes Sammy Run? The writer's first novel is a satiric critique of America's obsession with fame and fortune. The grasping Sammy Glick rises to the top in Hollywood by double-crossing his friends. The book is regarded as a notorious roman à clef. Born in New York, Schulberg was the son of a film producer. He wrote the screenplay for the acclaimed film On the Waterfront (1954).
• Anya Seton (1906-1990): My Theodosia. The first of the writer's popular historical novels concerns the daughter of Aaron Burr. Born in New York City, Seton was the daughter of Canadian naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton.
• Irwin Shaw: Welcome to the City. Shaw's collection of short stories set in New York is described by a reviewer as "minor crises in the lives of minor people."
• Wallace Stegner: Fire and Ice. A college student flirts with Communism in Stegner's novel, which ultimately makes the case that any ideology is insufficient to explicate the range of human experience.
• Gertrude Stein: Ida. Stein's first novel in eleven years is a character sketch of a woman.
• George Rippey Stewart (1895-1980): Storm. Stewart, a Pennsylvania-born professor of English at the University of California, chronicles the twelve-day history of a hypothetical Pacific storm. His previous novels were East of the Giants (1938) and Doctor's Oral (1939).
• Jesse Stuart: Men of the Mountains. The Appalachian regionalist's story collection deals with Kentucky hill farmers and their daily routines.
• Booth Tarkington: The Heritage of Hatcher Ide. Tarkington continues his documentation of Midwestern life during the Depression. In the story, the title character returns from college, confident that a position is waiting for him in the family business, only to discover that the firm has collapsed. He must then adjust to a life of diminished prospects.
• Eudora Welty (1909-2001): A Curtain of Green, and Other Stories. Welty's first published work features an appreciative foreword by Katherine Anne Porter and mainly concerns extraordinary occurrences that affect ordinary people. Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, the locale for much of her fiction.
• Thomas Wolfe: The Hills Beyond. Published three years after Wolfe's death, the miscellany includes parts of an incomplete novel on the Joyner clan of North Carolina and a number of short character studies.

Literary Criticism and Scholarship

• Van Wyck Brooks: On Literature Today. Brooks delivers a harsh assessment of the perceived cynicism of writers such as John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, calling for a literature of affirmation rooted in "health, will, courage, and faith in human nature." The same themes are sounded in the author's other 1941 volume of criticism, Opinions of Oliver Allston.
• Kenneth Burke: The Philosophy of Literary Form. Burke justifies literary analysis through a variety of methods, including psychological, social, and structural. The work is seen as a synthesis of the aesthetic emphasis of the 1920s and the social emphasis of the 1930s. W. H. Auden calls Burke "unquestionably the most brilliant and suggestive critic now writing in America."
• Edward Dahlberg: Do These Bones Live? A volume of literary essays displaying the author's rhapsodic and aphoristic style. It includes criticism of Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman as well as literary modernists such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. It supports a mythical kind of writing to redeem everyday life. The work would be later revived as Sing O Barren (1947) and Can These Bones Live? (1960).
• F. O. Matthiessen: The American Renaissance. A seminal critical study of the flowering of American literature in the nineteenth century, with examination of figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman.
• John Crowe Ransom: The New Criticism. An explication of the leading tenets of the New Criticism, which would dominate the interpretation of literature throughout the 1940s. Ransom primarily explains what the New Criticism is not, defined largely by the critical error of straying too far from the text itself for extraneous psychological and moral judgments.
• Allen Tate: Reason in Madness. A collection of reviews, addresses, and critical essays asserting the claims of literature over science as the only true measure of human knowledge.
• Edmund Wilson: The Wound and the Bow. This collection of important critical essays on writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, and Edith Wharton includes an examination of Freudian literary theory and the relationship between Marxism and historical interpretation as regards literature. Wilson also publishes The Boys in the Back Room: Notes on California Novelists, a critical assessment of writers who lived in and wrote about California, such as James Cain, John O'Hara, William Saroyan, and John Steinbeck, along with notes on Nathanael West and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Nonfiction

• Louis Adamic: Two-Way Passage. An account of the impact of the war on foreign nationals in the United States and reactions to the war abroad, with a proposal that at war's end, immigrants should return to their homelands to become ambassadors of democracy and help found a United States of Europe. Despite reactions that Adamic is overly naive in his proposal, he would actually meet with President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, later describing the encounter in Dinner at the White House (1946).
• James Agee: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Agee's poignant account of the lives of Southern sharecroppers during the Depression, illustrated by the photographs of Walker Evans (1903-1975), is generally regarded as Agee's greatest achievement. Employing experimental narrative techniques to depict his subjects, the work demonstrates "Agee's extraordinary participation in the narrative," according to critic William Stott, which "set the book apart from other documentary writing of the thirties."
• Rachel Carson (1907-1964): Under the Sea Wind. The marine biologist's first book is a series of descriptive narratives on natural life on shore, in the open ocean, and at the sea bottom.
• Wilbur J. Cash (1900-1941): The Mind of the South. This is an analysis of the feelings, prejudices, and values of Southerners. Praised for its candor, the book is regarded by one reviewer as "one of the most revealing books we have yet had on any region in America." Cash commits suicide in Mexico City on July 1.
• John Dos Passos: The Ground We Stand On. In a series of biographical portraits of figures such as Roger Williams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, Dos Passos attempts to document the human impact of the pursuit of liberty.
• Theodore Dreiser: America Is Worth Saving. Dreiser's polemic makes a case for American isolationism by arguing that there is no obvious choice as to which regime deserves support: Nazi Germany or Britain, with its history of imperialism, colonial tyranny, and disguised fascism.
• Eugene Lyons (1898-1985): The Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America. On October 26 Columbia philosophy professor Corliss Lamont (1902-1995) sues publisher Bobbs Merrill, claiming that Lyons's book on radicalism in the 1930s portrays him as a Communist. Lyons served as the U.S. correspondent for the Soviet news agency Tass from 1923 to 1927, and as the United Press correspondent in Moscow.
• Archibald MacLeish: The American Cause and A Time to Speak. These collections of speeches include many on the meaning of democracy and the artist's responsibility in its defense. Another collection, A Time to Act, would appear in 1943.
• H. L. Mencken: Newspaper Days. Mencken continues his reminiscences in an account of the years 1899 to 1906, when he worked as a reporter, dramatic critic, and editor on the Baltimore Herald. Mencken claims truthfulness, "with occasional stretchers."
• Henry Miller: Colossus of Maroussi; or, The Spirit of Greece. After leaving Paris in 1939, Miller traveled to Greece, and his impressions are collected here, judged by both the author and others as one of Miller's finest works.
• Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971): The Nature and Destiny of Man. The Missouri-born theologian provides his philosophical view of the supernatural characteristics of mankind. Niebuhr was a professor at Union Theological Seminary from 1928 to 1960.
• Ernie Pyle (1900-1945): Ernie Pyle in England. A collection of the war correspondent's dispatches from December 1940 to March 1941.
• William Shirer (1904-1993): Berlin Diary. This is a compilation of Shirer's observations as a CBS radio correspondent in the years leading up to World War II. Shirer would publish a sequel, End of a Berlin Diary (1947), recording his return to Berlin after the war.
• John Steinbeck: Sea of Cortez. Written with marine biologist Edward F. Ricketts (1896-1948), this is a journal of the writer's travels and research in the Gulf of California. It is an important source document on the author's philosophy.
• E. B. White and Katharine White: A Subtreasury of American Humor. The Whites compile an anthology of humorists, from Benjamin Franklin to Alexander Woollcott, arranged in categories such as "Parodies and Burlesques," "Nonsense," and "The Critic at Work."
• William L. White (1900-1973): Journey for Margaret. The war correspondent describes the London blitz and how he brought a three-year-old English orphan back to America.
• Richard Wright: Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States. Wright provides text and a Marxist commentary on African American experience, with photographs by Edwin Rosskam.

Poetry

• W. H. Auden: The Double Man. The collection includes a long poem in the form of a New Year's letter to a friend about the implications of current events, along with short poems, anecdotes, essays, and quotations related to the long poem. It also features a sonnet sequence about the search for a meaningful personal and social life.
• William Rose Benét: The Dust Which Is God. This autobiographical novel in verse reflects social history and private experience from 1900 to the present. Maurice Swan of the New York Times predicts that if Americans "would suspend their distaste for poetry for just one book," Benét's earnest, impressionistic reflections "would go through the country like prairie fire." The elder brother of Stephen Vincent Benét, William Rose Benét wrote earlier volumes such as Merchants from Cathay (1913), Moons of Grandeur (1920), and Golden Fleece (1935).
• Louise Bogan: Poems and New Poems. A collection of intensely personal poems taken from her earlier books, with sixteen new poems written since 1937. Marianne Moore describes Bogan's art as "compactness compacted."
• Paul Engle: West of Midnight. Engle affirms American light in opposition to the darkness descending on Europe in a series of Whitmanesque celebrations of American values.
• Robinson Jeffers: Be Angry at the Sun. Jeffers's collection includes a long narrative poem, a dramatic dialogue, and shorter lyrics on current themes, all vehicles for the poet's pessimistic philosophical meditations on man's response to an indifferent universe.
• Naomi Long Madgett (b. 1923): Songs to a Phantom Nightingale. Accepted for publication in 1938, when its author was only fifteen, this is the African American poet's first collection. Born in Virginia, Madgett was a high school teacher in Detroit and a professor of English at Eastern Michigan University. Her best-known poem, "Midway," on the civil rights movement, is included in her 1965 collection Star by Star.
• Edgar Lee Masters: Illinois Poems. The poet continues his celebration of country and small-town life.
• Edna St. Vincent Millay: Collected Sonnets. A collection of 161 sonnets, all but two from the author's earlier volumes.
• Marianne Moore: The Arctic Ox and What Are Years? Moore's subjects in these two collections include the fall of France in World War II, the celebration of human freedom, and sharply delivered perceptions of animals, birds, insects, and flowers.
• Theodore Roethke (1908-1963): Open House. Roethke's first published volume heralds the arrival of an impressive new poetic voice, in verse that is tightly constructed, spare, but capable of delivering effective meditations on the self, death, and nature.
• Mark Van Doren: The Mayfield Deer. This long blank-verse narrative retells an American frontier legend of the feud that ensues when a boy shoots a lonely hunter's pet deer.
• William Carlos Williams: The Broken Span. Williams's collection of imagist poems rooted in commonplace experience is the last book his publisher, New Directions, brings out before a five-year hiatus in publishing, due to drastic wartime paper shortages.
• Louis Zukofsky: 55 Poems. One reviewer likens this collection of experimental verse to "sitting in a smoker at which Cummings, Williams, Crane, the editor of Transition, G. M. Hopkins, Marianne Moore, and Zukofsky toss ideas at each other."

For other uses, see 1941 (disambiguation).

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Establishments - Disestablishments - Awards v • d • e

Year 1941 (MCMXLI) was a common year starting on Wednesday (the link will display 1941 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar.

Contents:
Events of 1941 -  Jan. . Feb. . March . April -  May . June . July  .  Aug. -  Sept. . Oct. . Nov. .  Dec. -  Undated . Ongoing Births Deaths Nobel prizes Ship events See also -  Notes -  External links

Events

(Below, many events of World War II have the "World War II" prefix.)

January

• January 1 – Thailand Prime Minister Plaek Phibunsongkhram decrees January 1 as the official start of the Thai solar calendar new year (thus the previous year that began April 1 had only 9 months).
• January 4 – The short subject Elmer's Pet Rabbit is released, marking the second appearance of Bugs Bunny, and also the first to have his name on a title card.
• January 6 – Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivers his Four Freedoms Speech in the State of the Union Address.
• January 6 – The keel of the USS Missouri (BB-63) is laid at the New York Navy Yard in Brooklyn.
• January 10 – Lend-Lease is introduced into the U.S. Congress.
• January 13 – All persons born in Puerto Rico since this day are declared U.S. citizens by birth, through U.S. federal law 8 U.S.C. § 1402.
• January 15 – John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford E. Berry describe the workings of the Atanasoff–Berry Computer in print.
• January 19 – World War II: British troops attack Italian-held Eritrea.
• January 20 – Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes swears in U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt for his third term.
• January 21 – World War II – Battle of Tobruk: Australian and British forces attack Tobruk, Libya.
• January 22 – World War II: British troops capture Tobruk from the Italians.
• January 23 – Aviator Charles Lindbergh testifies before the U.S. Congress and recommends that the United States negotiate a neutrality pact with Adolf Hitler.
• January 27 – World War II – Attack on Pearl Harbor: U.S. Ambassador to Japan Joseph C. Grew passes on to Washington a rumor overheard at a diplomatic reception about a planned surprise attack upon Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
• January 30 – World War II – Australians capture Derna, Libya from the Italians.

Jan.21 Tobruk

February

• February 3 – World War II: The Nazis forcibly restore Pierre Laval to office in occupied Vichy France.
• February 4 – World War II: The United Service Organization (USO) is created to entertain American troops.
• February 6 – World War II – Fall of Benghazi to the Western Desert Force. Lieutenant-General Erwin Rommel is appointed commander of Afrika Korps.
• February 7 – World War II – Attack on Pearl Harbor: General Walter C. Short becomes Commanding General, Hawaiian Command.
• February 8 – World War II – The U.S. House of Representatives passes the Lend-Lease Act (260-165).
• February 9 – Winston Churchill, in a worldwide broadcast, pleads with the United States to show its support by sending arms to the British: "Give us the tools, and we will finish the job."
• February 12 – World War II: Erwin Rommel arrives in Tripoli.
• February 14 – World War II – Attack on Pearl Harbor: Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura begins his duties as Japanese ambassador to the United States.
• February 19-February 22 – World War II: Three Nights' Blitz over Swansea, South Wales: Over these 3 nights of intensive bombing, which last a total of 13 hours and 48 minutes, Swansea's town centre is almost completely obliterated by the 896 high explosive bombs employed by the Luftwaffe. A total of 397 casualties and 230 deaths are reported.
• February 23: Glenn T. Seaborg isolates and discovers plutonium.

March

• March – Captain America Comics #1 issues the first Captain America & Bucky comic.
• March 1 – World War II: Bulgaria signs the Tripartite Pact, thus joining the Axis powers.
• March 1 – W47NV begins operations in Nashville, Tennessee, becoming the first FM radio station.
• March 1 – Arthur L. Bristol becomes Rear Admiral for the U.S. Navy's Support Force, Atlantic Fleet.
• March 4 – World War II: British Commandos carry out a successful raid on the Lofoten Islands off the north coast of Norway.
• March 8 – World War II: The U.S. Senate passes the Lend-Lease Act (60-31).
• March 11 – World War II: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease Act into law, allowing American-built war supplies to be shipped to the Allies on loan.
• March 11 – The Kinsmen Club of Brantford is chartered.
• March 16 – A fleet of U.S. warships arrive in Auckland, New Zealand on a goodwill visit. On March 20, they visit Sydney, Australia.
• March 17 – In Washington, D.C., the National Gallery of Art is officially opened by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
• March 17 – British Minister of Labour Ernest Bevin calls for women to fill vital jobs.
• March 22 – Washington's Grand Coulee Dam begins to generate electricity.
• March 24 – World War II:Rommel launches his first offensive in Cyrenaica.
• March 25 – World War II: The Kingdom of Yugoslavia joins the Axis powers in Vienna.
• March 27 – World War II: An anti-Axis coup d'état in Yugoslavia forces Prince Paul into exile; 17-year-old King Peter II assumes power.
• March 27 – World War II – Attack on Pearl Harbor: Japanese spy Takeo Yoshikawa arrives in Honolulu, Hawaii and begins to study the United States fleet at Pearl Harbor.
• March 27 – World War II – Battle of Cape Matapan: Off the Peloponnesus coast in the Mediterranean, British naval forces defeat those of Italy, sinking 5 warships. Battle ends on March 29.
• March 30 – All German, Italian, and Danish ships anchored in United States waters are taken into "protective custody".

April

• April 4 – World War II: Axis forces capture Benghazi.
• April 6 – World War II: Germany invades Yugoslavia and Greece.
• April 9 – The U.S. acquires full military defense rights in Greenland.
• April 10 – World War II: The U.S. destroyer Niblack, while picking up survivors from a sunken Dutch freighter, drops depth charges on a German U-Boat (the first "shot in anger" fired by America against Germany).
• April 12 – World War II: German troops enter Belgrade.
• April 13 – The Soviet Union and Japan sign a neutrality pact.
• April 15 – World War II: The U.S. begins shipping Lend-Lease aid to China. Axis forces reach Halfaya Pass on the Libyan-Egyptian frontier.
• April 17 – World War II: The Yugoslav Royal Army capitulates.
• April 18 – World War II: Prime Minister of Greece Alexandros Koryzis commits suicide as German troops approach Athens.
• April 21 – World War II: Greece capitulates. Commonwealth troops and some elements of the Greek Army withdraw to Crete.
• April 23 – The America First Committee holds its first mass rally in New York City, with Charles Lindbergh as keynote speaker.
• April 25 – Franklin D. Roosevelt, at his regular press conference, criticizes Charles Lindbergh by comparing him to the Copperheads of the Civil War period. In response, Lindbergh resigns his commission in the U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve on April 28.
• April 27 – World War II: German troops enter Athens.

May

• May 1 – The breakfast cereal Cheerios is introduced as CheeriOats by General Mills.
• May 1 – Orson Welles' film Citizen Kane premieres in New York City.
• May 1 – The first Defense Bonds and Defense Savings Stamps go on sale in the United States, to help fund the greatly increased production of military equipment.
• May 5 – World War II: Emperor Haile Selassie enters Addis Ababa, which had been liberated from Italian forces; this date has been since commemorated as Liberation Day in Ethiopia.
• May 6 – At California's March Field, entertainer Bob Hope performs his first USO Show.
• May 9 – World War II: The German submarine U-110 is captured by the British Royal Navy. On board is the latest Enigma cryptography machine, which Allied cryptographers later use to break coded German messages.
• May 10 – World War II: The British House of Commons is damaged by the Luftwaffe in an air raid.
• May 10 – Rudolf Hess parachutes into Scotland, claiming to be on a peace mission.
• May 12 – Konrad Zuse presents the Z3, the world's first working programmable, fully automatic computer, in Berlin.
• May 15 – The first British jet aircraft, the Gloster E.28/39, is flown.
• May 15 – Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak begins as the New York Yankee center fielder goes one for 4 against Chicago White Sox Pitcher Eddie Smith.
• May 20 – World War II: The Battle of Crete begins as Germany launches an airborne invasion of Crete.
• May 21 – World War II: 950 miles off the coast of Brazil, the freighter SS Robin Moor becomes the first United States ship sunk by a German U-boat.
• May 24 – World War II: In the North Atlantic, the German battleship Bismarck sinks the HMS Hood, killing all but 3 crewman on what was the pride of the Royal Navy.
• May 26 – World War II: In the North Atlantic, Fairey Swordfish aircraft from the carrier HMS Ark Royal fatally cripple the Bismarck in a torpedo attack.
• May 27 – World War II: President Roosevelt proclaims an "unlimited national emergency."
• May 27 – World War II: The Bismarck is sunk in the North Atlantic, killing 2,300.

June

• June 5 – Four thousand Chongqing residents are asphyxiated in a bomb shelter during the Bombing of Chongqing.
• June 8 – World War II: British and Free French forces invade Syria.
• June 8 – A Serbian ammunition plant explodes at Smederevo on the outskirts of Belgrade, Serbia, killing 1,500.
• June 13 – TASS, the official Soviet news agency, denies reports of tension between Germany and the Soviet Union.
• June 14 – Mass deportations by Soviet Union authorities take place in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
• June 14 – All German and Italian assets in the United States are frozen.
• June 16 – All German and Italian consulates in the United States are ordered closed and their staffs to leave the country by July 10.
• June 20 – Walt Disney's live-action animated feature, The Reluctant Dragon, is released.
• June 22 – World War II: Italy and Romania declare war on the Soviet Union.
• June 22 – World War II: Germany attacks the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa.
• June 22 – World War II: Winston Churchill promises all possible British assistance to the Soviet Union in a worldwide broadcast: "Any man or state who fights against Nazidom will have our aid. Any man or state who marches with Hitler is our foe."
• June 22 – World War II: The First Sisak Partisan Brigade, the first anti-fascist armed unit in occupied Europe, is founded by partisans near Sisak, Croatia.
• June 23 – World War II: Hungary and Slovakia declare war on the Soviet Union.
• June 25 – World War II: Finland attacks the Soviet Union to seek the opportunity of revenge in the Continuation War.
• June 28 – World War II: Albania declares war on the Soviet Union.

July

• July – The British army's Special Air Service is formed.
• July 2 – World War II: Japan calls up 1 million men for military service.
• July 3 – World War II: Joseph Stalin, in his first address since the German invasion, calls upon the Soviet people to carry out a "scorched earth" policy of resistance to the bitter end.
• July 4 – The Mass murder of Polish scientists and writers is committed by German troops in the captured Polish city of Lwów.
• July 5 – World War II: German troops reach the Dnieper River.
• July 5 – July 19 – War is fought between Peru and Ecuador.
• July 7 – World War II: American forces take over the defense of Iceland from the British.
• July 7 – World War II: Serbia starts the first popular uprising in Europe against the Axis Powers.
• July 7 – World War II: German troops take over Estonia from the Soviets.
• July 13 – World War II: Montenegro starts the second popular uprising in Europe against the Axis Powers.
• July 14 – World War II: Vichy France signs armistice terms, ending all fighting in Syria and Lebanon.
• July 17 – Joe DiMaggio's 56 game hitting streak ends.
• July 19 – World War II: A BBC broadcast by "Colonel Britton" calls on the people of occupied Europe to resist the Nazis under the slogan "V for Victory".
• July 26 – World War II: In response to the Japanese occupation of French Indo-China, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt orders the seizure of all Japanese assets in the United States.
• July 26 – World War II: General Douglas MacArthur is named commander of all U.S. forces in the Philippines; the Philippines Army is ordered nationalized by President Roosevelt.
• July 30 – World War II: The U.S. gunboat Tutuila is attacked by Japanese aircraft while anchored in the Yangtze River at Chungking. Japan apologizes for the incident the following day.
• July 31 – World War II – Holocaust: Under instructions from Adolf Hitler, Nazi official Hermann Göring orders S.S. General Reinhard Heydrich to "submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question."

August

• August – Political Warfare Executive is formed in the United Kingdom.
• August 1 – The first Jeep is produced.
• August 6 – Six-year-old Elaine Esposito goes to an appendix operation in Florida and lapses into a coma. She dies in 1978, still in a coma.
• August 9 – Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill meet at Argentia, Newfoundland and Labrador. The Atlantic Charter is created as a result.
• August 12 – By one vote (203-202), the U.S. House of Representatives passes legislation extending the draft period for selectees and the National Guard from 1 year to 30 months.
• August 16 – The HMS Mercury, Royal Navy Signals School and Combined Signals School open at Leydene, near Petersfield, Hampshire, England.
• August 18 – Adolf Hitler orders a temporary halt to Nazi Germany's systematic euthanasia of the mentally ill and handicapped due to protests. However, graduates of the T-4 Euthanasia Program are then transferred to concentration camps, where they continue in their trade.
• August 22 – World War II – France: The German Occupation Authority announces that anyone found either working for or aiding the Free French will be sentenced to death.
• August 24 – World War II: A Luftwaffe bomb hits an Estonian steamer with 3,500 Soviet-mobilized Estonian men on board, killing 598 of them.
• August 25 – World War II: Operation Countenance begins with United Kingdom and Soviet forces invading Iran.
• August 27 – World War II – Pierre Laval is shot in an assassination attempt at Versailles, France.
• August 28 – World War II: The Soviets announce the destruction of the massive Dnieper River dam at Zaporozhye, to prevent its capture by the Germans.
• August 31 – The Great Gildersleeve debuts on NBC Radio.

September

• September 4 – World War II: The USS Greer becomes the first United States ship fired upon by a German submarine in the war, even though the United States is a neutral power. Tension heightens between the 2 nations as a result.
• September 6 – Holocaust: The requirement to wear the Star of David with the word "Jew" inscribed, is extended to all Jews over the age of 6 in German-occupied areas.
• September 8 – World War II – The Siege of Leningrad begins: German forces begin a siege against the Soviet Union's second-largest city, Leningrad. Stalin orders the Volga Deutsche deported to Siberia.
• September 11 – World War II: Franklin D. Roosevelt orders the United States Navy to shoot on sight if any ship or convoy is threatened.
• September 11 – World War II: Charles Lindbergh, at an America First Committee rally in Des Moines, Iowa, accuses "the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration" of leading the United States toward war. Widespread condemnation of Lindbergh follows.
• September 12 – World War II: The first snowfall is reported on the Russian front.
• September 15 – The Estonian Self-Administration, headed by Hjalmar Mäe, is appointed by the German military administration.
• September 16 – Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran is forced to resign in favor of his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, under pressure from the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union.
• September 27 – The first Liberty Ship, the SS Patrick Henry, is launched at Baltimore, Maryland.
• September 29 – World War II: The Moscow Conference begins; U.S. representative Averill Harriman and British representative Lord Beaverbrook meet with Soviet foreign minister Molotov to arrange urgent assistance for Russia.
• September 29 and September 30 – Holocaust: Babi Yar massacre – German troops, assisted by Ukrainian police and local collaborators, killed 33,771 Jews of Kiev, Ukraine.

October

• mid-month – First production P38E Lightning fighter produced by Lockheed.
• October 2 – World War II: Operation Typhoon begins as Germany launches an all-out offensive against Moscow.
• October 7 – John Curtin becomes the 14th Prime Minister of Australia.
• October 8 – World War II: In their invasion of the Soviet Union, Germany reaches the Sea of Azov with the capture of Mariupol.
• October 16 – World War II: The Soviet Union government moves to Kuibyshev (modern Samara), but Stalin remains in Moscow.
• October 17 – World War II: The destroyer USS Kearny is torpedoed and damaged near Iceland, killing 11 sailors (the first American military casualties of the war).
• October 18 – General Hideki Tojo becomes the 40th Prime Minister of Japan.
• October 21 – World War II: The Germans rampage in Yugoslavia, killing thousands of civilians.
• October 23 – Walt Disney's animated film Dumbo is released.
• October 24 – Franz von Werra disappears during a flight over the North Sea.
• October 30 – World War II: Franklin Delano Roosevelt approves US$1 billion in Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union.
• October 31 – After 14 years of work, drilling is completed on Mount Rushmore.
• October 31 – World War II: The destroyer USS Reuben James is torpedoed by a German U-boat near Iceland, killing more than 100 United States Navy sailors.

November

• November 6 – World War II: Soviet leader Joseph Stalin addresses the Soviet Union for only the second time during his three-decade rule (the first time was earlier that year on July 2). He states that even though 350,000 troops have been killed in German attacks so far, that the Germans have lost 4.5 million soldiers (a gross exaggeration) and that Soviet victory is near.
• November 7 – World War II: The Soviet hospital Ship Armenia is sunk by German planes while evacuating refugees, wounded military and the staff of several Crimean hospitals. It is estimated that over 5,000 people die in the sinking.
• November 10 – In a speech at the Mansion House in London, Winston Churchill promises, "should the United States become involved in war with Japan, the British declaration will follow within the hour."
• November 12 – World War II: As Battle of Moscow begins, temperatures around Moscow drop to -12 °C, and the Soviet Union launches ski troops for the first time against the freezing German forces near the city.
• November 13 – World War II: The aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal is hit by German U-boat U-81.
• November 14 – World War II: The HMS Ark Royal capsizes and sinks, having been torpedoed by U-81.
• November 14 – World War II – Attack on Pearl Harbor: Japanese diplomat Saburo Kurusu arrives in the United States to assist Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura in peace negotiations.
• November 17 – World War II – Attack on Pearl Harbor: Joseph Grew, the United States ambassador to Japan, cables to Washington a warning that Japan may strike suddenly and unexpectedly at any time.
• November 18 – World War II: Operation Crusader in North Africa begins
• November 19 – World War II: The Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney sinks off the coast of Western Australia, killing 645 sailors.
• November 21 – The radio program King Biscuit Time is broadcast for the first time (it later becomes the longest running daily radio broadcast in history and the most famous live blues radio program).
• November 24 – World War II: The United States grants Lend-Lease to the Free French.
• November 26 – U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signs a bill establishing the 4th Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day in the United States (this partly reverses a 1939 action by Roosevelt that changed the celebration of Thanksgiving to the third Thursday of November).
• November 26 – The Hull note ultimatum is delivered to Japan by the United States.
• November 26 – World War II – Attack on Pearl Harbor: A fleet of 6 aircraft carriers commanded by Japanese Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo leaves Hitokapu Bay for Pearl Harbor under strict radio silence.
• November 27 – A group of young men stop traffic on U.S. Highway 99 south of Yreka, California, handing out fliers proclaiming the establishment of the State of Jefferson.
• November 27 – World War II: Germans reach their closest approach to Moscow. They are subsequently frozen by cold weather and attacks by the Soviets.
• November 27 – World War II – Attack on Pearl Harbor: All U.S. military forces in Asia and the Pacific are placed on war alert.

December

USS Arizona ablaze after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor

• December 1 – World War II: Fiorello La Guardia, Mayor of New York City and Director of the Office of Civilian Defense, signs Administrative Order 9, creating the Civil Air Patrol under the authority of the United States Army Air Force.
• December 1 – World War II: A state of emergency is declared in Malaya and the Straits Settlements.
• December 2 – World War II – Attack on Pearl Harbor: The code message "Climb Mount Niitaka" is transmitted to the Japanese task force, indicating that negotiations have broken down and that the attack is to be carried out according to plan.
• December 4 – The State of Jefferson is declared in Yreka, California, with judge John Childs as a governor.
• December 6 – World War II – Soviet counterattacks begin against German troops encircling Moscow. Wehrmacht is subsequently pushed back over 200 miles.
• December 6 – World War II – The United Kingdom declares war on Finland.
• December 6 – World War II – Attack on Pearl Harbor: Franklin D. Roosevelt makes a personal peace appeal to Emperor Hirohito of Japan.
• December 7, (December 8, Japan standard time) – The Japanese Navy launches a surprise attack on the United States fleet at Pearl Harbor, thus drawing the United States into World War II. Tobruk's garrison is relieved.
• December 8 – World War II: The United States officially declares war on Japan.
• December 8 – World War II: The United Kingdom declares war on Japan.
• December 8 – World War II: China declares war on Japan.
• December 8 – World War II: The Netherlands declares war on Japan.
• December 8 – World War II: Japan launches invasions in Hong Kong, Malaya, Manila, and Singapore.
• December 8 – World War II: Japan launches invasions in the Philippines.
• December 10 – World War II: The British battleships HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse are sunk by Japanese aircraft in the South China Sea north of Singapore.
• December 11 – World War II: Germany and Italy declare war on the United States. The U.S. responds in kind.
• December 11 – World War II: American forces repel a Japanese landing attempt at Wake Island.
• December 12 – World War II: Hungary and Romania declare war on the United States.
• December 12 – World War II: India declares war on Japan.
• December 12 – World War II: The United States seizes the French ship SS Normandie.
• December 12 – World War II: The Kimura Detachment of the Japanese Imperial forces was occupied in Legaspi, Albay in Eastern Philippines.
• December 13 – Sweden's low temperature record of -53°C is set in a village within the Vilhelmina Municipality.
• December 19 – World War II: Hitler becomes Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the German Army.
• December 23 – World War II: A second Japanese landing attempt on Wake Island is successful, and the American garrison surrenders after a full night and morning of fighting.
• December 24 – World War II: British forces capture Benghazi.
• December 25 – World War II: The British and Canadians are defeated by the Japanese at Hong Kong.
• December 26 – World War II: Winston Churchill becomes the first British Prime Minister to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress.
• December 27 – World War II: British Commandos raid the Norwegian port of Vaagso, causing Hitler to reinforce the garrison and defenses, drawing vital troops away from other areas.

Undated

• The Valley of Geysers is discovered in Russia.
• Results of the Ives–Stilwell experiment are published, showing that ions radiate at frequencies affected by their motion.
• In Sweden, Victor Hasselblad forms the Hasselblad Camera Company.
• The Indochina Communist party, led by Ho Chi Minh, combines with the Nationalist party to form the Vietminh.

Ongoing

• Japanese Occupation of the Philippines (1941-1945)
• Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945)
• World War II (1939-1945)

Births

1941 in other calendars

Gregorian calendar	1941 MCMXLI
Ab urbe condita	2694
Armenian calendar	1390 ԹՎ ՌՅՂ
Bahá'í calendar	97 – 98
Berber calendar	2891
Buddhist calendar	2485
Burmese calendar	1303
Byzantine calendar	7449 – 7450
Chinese calendar	庚辰年十二月初四日 (4577/4637-12-4) — to — 辛巳年十一月十四日 (4578/4638-11-14)
Coptic calendar	1657 – 1658
Ethiopian calendar	1933 – 1934
Hebrew calendar	5701 – 5702
Hindu calendars
- Vikram Samvat	1996 – 1997
- Shaka Samvat	1863 – 1864
- Kali Yuga	5042 – 5043
Holocene calendar	11941
Iranian calendar	1319 – 1320
Islamic calendar	1359 – 1360
Japanese calendar	Shōwa 16 (昭和16年)
Korean calendar	4274
Thai solar calendar	2484
v • d • e

January

• January 3 – Van Dyke Parks, American composer, producer, and musician
• January 4 – John Bennett Perry, American actor
• January 4 – Maureen Reagan, American actress (d. 2001)
• January 5 – Hayao Miyazaki, Japanese filmmaker
• January 5 – Kevin Keelan, English footballer
• January 7 – Iona Brown, British violinist and conductor (d. 2004)
• January 7 – Manfred Schellscheidt, German American soccer coach
• January 7 – John E. Walker, English chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
• January 8 – Graham Chapman, British comedian (d. 1989)
• January 9 – Joan Baez, American singer and activitist
• January 11 – Dave Edwards, American musician (d. 2000)
• January 12 – Long John Baldry, British singer (d. 2005)
• January 14 – Faye Dunaway, American actress
• January 14 – Milan Kučan, Slovenian politician and statesman
• January 14 – David Johnston, retired Australian newsreader
• January 15 – Captain Beefheart, American singer
• January 18 – David Ruffin, American singer (The Temptations) (d. 1991)
• January 19 – Pat Patterson, Canadian professional wrestler
• January 21 – Plácido Domingo, Spanish-born tenor
• January 21 – Richie Havens, American musician
• January 24 – Neil Diamond, American singer and songwriter
• January 24 – Aaron Neville, American singer
• January 26 – Scott Glenn, American actor
• January 26 – Henry Jaglom, English film director
• January 27 – Beatrice Tinsley, English astronomer (d. 1981)
• January 30 – Dick Cheney, former Vice President of the United States
• January 30 – Tineke Lagerberg, Dutch swimmer
• January 31 – Dick Gephardt, American politician

February

• February 1 – Jerry Spinelli, American children's author
• February 3 – Dory Funk, Jr., American professional wrestler
• February 5 – David Selby, American actor
• February 5 – Kaspar Villiger, Swiss Federal Councilor
• February 6 – Howard Phillips, American politician
• February 7 – Peter Foxhall, Australian evangelist
• February 8 – Nick Nolte, American actor
• February 10 – Michael Apted, English film director
• February 12 – Naomi Uemura, Japanese adventurer (d. 1984)
• February 13 – Sigmar Polke, German painter
• February 19 – David Gross, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
• February 20 – Buffy Sainte-Marie, American singer
• February 26 – Tony Ray-Jones, British photographer (d. 1972)
• February 27 – Paddy Ashdown, British politician

March

• March 1 – Joo Hyun, South Korean actor
• March 4 – Adrian Lyne, English film director
• March 4 – John Aprea, American actor
• March 5 – Nona Gaprindashvili, Georgian chess player
• March 6 – Willie Stargell, American baseball player (d. 2001)
• March 13 – Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian prominent poet and writer of prose (d. 2008)
• March 14 – Wolfgang Petersen, German film director
• March 15 – Mike Love, American musician (The Beach Boys)
• March 16 – Robert Guéï, military ruler of Côte d'Ivoire (d. 2002)
• March 16 – Chuck Woolery, American game show host (
• March 18 – Wilson Pickett, American singer (d. 2006)
• March 20 – Kenji Kimihara, Japanese long-distance runner
• March 23 – Jim Trelease, American educator and author
• March 26 – Richard Dawkins, British scientist
• March 28 – Jim Turner, American football player
• March 29 – Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr., American astrophysicist, Nobel Prize laureate
• March 30 – Wasim Sajjad, President of Pakistan

April

• April 2 – Dr. Demento (Barret Eugene Hansen), American radio disc jockey and novelty music collector
• April 3 – Philippe Wynne, American musician (d. 1984)
• April 8 – Peggy Lennon, American singer (The Lennon Sisters)
• April 9 – Kaye Adams, American country singer
• April 11 – Shirley Stelfox, British actress
• April 12 – Bobby Moore, English football player and World Cup winning captain (d. 1993)
• April 13 – Michael Stuart Brown, American geneticist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
• April 14 – Julie Christie, British actress
• April 14 – Pete Rose, American baseball player
• April 23 – Paavo Lipponen, Prime Minister of Finland
• April 23 – Ed Stewart, English disc jockey
• April 24 – John Williams, Australian guitarist
• April 27 – Lee Roy Jordan, American football player
• April 28 – Ann-Margret, Swedish-born actress
• April 28 – K. Barry Sharpless, American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
• April 28 – Iryna Zhylenko, Ukrainian poet

May

• May 5 – Alexander Ragulin, Russian hockey player (d. 2004)
• May 11 – Eric Burdon, English singer (The Animals)
• May 13 – Senta Berger, Swedish actress
• May 13 – Ritchie Valens, American singer (d. 1959)
• May 15 – K.T. Oslin, American musician
• May 19 – Bobby Burgess, American dancer and singer
• May 19 – Nora Ephron, American film, producer, director, and screenwriter
• May 20 – Goh Chok Tong, Prime Minister of Singapore
• May 22 – Menzies Campbell, British politician
• May 22 – Paul Winfield, American actor (d. 2004)
• May 24 – Bob Dylan, American poet and musician
• May 26 – John Kaufman, English sculptor
• May 31 – Louis J. Ignarro, American pharmacologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

June

• June 4 – Erkin Koray, Turkish musician
• June 5 – Martha Argerich, Argentine pianist
• June 5 – Spalding Gray, American actor and screenwriter (d. 2004)
• June 6 – Neal Adams, American comic book artist
• June 8 – Robert Bradford, Irish footballer and politician (d. 1981)
• June 8 – Fuzzy Haskins, American musician (P-Funk)
• June 9 – Jon Lord, organist of Deep Purple, the "Lord of the Hammond organ"
• June 10 – Mickey Jones, American actor and musician
• June 10 – James A. Paul, American writer and non-profit executive
• June 12 – Marv Albert, American sports announcer
• June 15 – Harry Nilsson, American musician (d. 1994)
• June 21 – Joe Flaherty, American-Canadian actor
• June 10 – Valeri Zolotukhin, Soviet/Russian actor
• June 19 – Conchita Carpio-Morales, Filipino Supreme Court jurist
• June 22 – Michael Lerner, American actor
• June 24 – Bill Reardon, American politician and educator
• June 27 – Krzysztof Kieślowski, Polish film director (d. 1996)
• June 28 – Joseph Goguen, American computer scientist (d. 2006)

July

• July 1 – Alfred G. Gilman, American scientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
• July 1 – Myron Scholes, American economist, Nobel Prize laureate
• July 6 – Harold Leighton Weller, American conductor
• July 7 – Bill Oddie, English comedian and ornithologist
• July 10 – Jackie Lane, British actress
• July 11 – Tommy Vance, English disc jockey (d. 2005)
• July 12 – Benny Parsons, American race car driver (d. 2007)
• July 14 – Maulana Karenga, American author and activist
• July 14 – Andreas Khol, Austrian politician
• July 19 – Vikki Carr, American singer
• July 27 – Bill Baxley, Alabama politician
• July 28 – Riccardo Muti, Italian conductor
• July 29 – Jennifer Dunn, American politician (d. 2007)
• July 29 – David Warner, English actor
• July 30 – Paul Anka, Canadian-American singer and songwriter
• July 31 – Amarsinh Chaudhary, Indian politician

August

• August 3 – Martha Stewart, American television and magazine personality
• August 6 – Lyle Berman, American poker player
• August 8 – George Tiller, American physician (d. 2009)
• August 14 – Connie Smith, American singer
• August 20 – Slobodan Milošević, President of Serbia (d. 2006)
• August 22 – Bill Parcells, American football coach
• August 28 – Joseph Shabalala, South African musician (Ladysmith Black Mambazo)

September

• September 2 – David Bale, South African-born activist (d. 2003)
• September 2 – John Thompson, American basketball coach
• September 4 – Sushilkumar Shinde, Indian politician
• September 9 – Otis Redding, American musician (d. 1967)
• September 9 – Dennis Ritchie, American computer scientist
• September 10 – Christopher Hogwood, English conductor and harpsichordist
• September 10 – Gunpei Yokoi, Japanese computer game producer (d. 1997)
• September 13 – Tadao Ando, Japanese Architect
• September 14 – Alberto Naranjo, Venezuelan musician
• September 15 – George Saimes, American football player
• September 15 – Mirosław Hermaszewski, first Polish cosmonaut in space
• September 17 – Bob Matsui, U.S. Congressman from California (d. 2005)
• September 19 – Cass Elliott, American singer (d. 1974)
• September 20 – Dale Chihuly, American glass sculptor
• September 24 – Guy Hovis, American singer
• September 27 – Gay Kayler Ashcroft, Australian country music singer

October

• October 2 – Zareh Baronian, Archimandrite doctor, theologian of the Armenian Church, Bucarest
• October 4 – Elizabeth Eckford, American activist
• October 4 – Anne Rice, American writer
• October 5 – Eduardo Duhalde, President of Argentina
• October 8 – Jesse Jackson, American clergyman and civil rights activist
• October 9 – Trent Lott, former United States Senate Minority Leader and United States Senate Majority Leader
• October 10 – Peter Coyote, American actor
• October 13 – Paul Simon, American singer and composer
• October 16 – Tim McCarver, American baseball commentator
• October 20 – Anneke Wills, British actress
• October 23 – Mel Winkler, American actor
• October 25 – Helen Reddy, Australian singer and actress
• October 25 – Anne Tyler, American novelist
• October 28 – John Hallam, Irish actor
• October 28 – Hank Marvin, British guitarist, singer and songwriter
• October 27 – Gerd Brantenberg, Norwegian feminist author and gay rights activist
• October 30 – Theodor W. Hänsch, German physicist, Nobel Prize laureate

November

• November 1 – Nigel Dempster, British journalist, author, broadcaster and diarist (d.2007)
• November 5 – Art Garfunkel, American singer
• November 6 – Doug Sahm, American musician (d. 1999)
• November 18 – David Hemmings, English actor (d. 2003)
• November 23 – Derek Mahon, Irish poet
• November 25 – Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi, Pakistani author, spiritual leader and founder of the international spiritual movement Anjuman Serfaroshan-e-Islam (d. 2001)
• November 26 – G. Alan Marlatt, American psychologist
• November 27 – Eddie Rabbitt, American country musician (d. 1998)
• November 29 – Bill Freehan, American baseball player

December

• December 9 – Beau Bridges, American actor
• December 10 – Kyu Sakamoto, Japanese singer and actor (d. 1985)
• December 13 – John Davidson, American singer and actor
• December 18 – Prince William of Gloucester
• December 19 – Lee Myung Bak, 17th president of South Korea
• December 23 – Ron Bushy, American rock musician (Iron Butterfly)
• December 23 – Tim Hardin, American musician (d. 1980)
• December 24 – John Levene, British actor
• December 30 – Mel Renfro, American football player
• December 31 – Alex Ferguson, English football manager (Manchester United)

Deaths

January-February

• January 4 – Henri Bergson, French philosopher, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature (b. 1859)
• January 5 – Amy Johnson, English aviator (b. 1903)
• January 8 – Lord Robert Baden-Powell, English soldier and founder of the Boy Scouts (b. 1847)
• January 10
  • Frank Bridge, English composer (b. 1879)
  • Sir John Lavery, Irish artist (b. 1856)
  • Joe Penner, American comedian and actor (b. 1904)
• January 13 – James Joyce, Irish writer (b. 1882)
• February 6 – Banjo Paterson, Australian poet & journalist (b. 1864)
• February 9 – Aaron S. Watkins, American temperance movement leader (b. 1863)
• February 11 – Rudolf Hilferding, German economist and Minister of Finance (b. 1877)
• February 21 – Frederick Banting, Canadian physician, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (b. 1891)
• February 24 – Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière, German submariner (b. 1886)
• February 27 – William D. Byron, U.S. Congressman (b. 1895)
• February 28 – King Alfonso XIII of Spain (b. 1886)

March-July

• March 6 – Gutzon Borglum, American sculptor (Mount Rushmore) (b. 1867)
• March 8 – Sherwood Anderson, American author (b. 1876)
• March 15 – Alexej von Jawlensky, Russian painter (b. 1864)
• March 28
  • Virginia Woolf, English writer (b. 1882)
  • Kavasji Jamshedji Petigara, Indian police commissioner (b. 1887)
• April 13 – Annie Jump Cannon, American astronomer (b. 1863)
• April 16 – Josiah Stamp, 1st Baron Stamp, Bt, GCB, GBE, FBA, British civil servant, industrialist, economist, statistician and banker (b.1880)
• April 24 – Karin Boye, Swedish poetess (suicide) (b. 1900)
• April 28 – Luisa Tetrazzini, Italian coloratura soprano (b. 1871)
• May 16 – Minnie Vautrin, American missionary and heroine of the Nanjing Massacre (b. 1887)
• May 30 – Prajadhipok, Rama VII, king of Thailand (b. 1893)
• June 2 – Lou Gehrig, American baseball player (b. 1903)
• June 4 – Wilhelm II, last Emperor of Germany (b. 1859)
• June 6 – Louis Chevrolet, Swiss-born automobile builder and race car driver (b. 1878)
• June 29 – Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Polish pianist, composer, and third Prime Minister of Poland (b. 1860)
• July 4 – Antoni Łomnicki, Polish mathematician (b. 1881)
• July 10 – Jelly Roll Morton, African-American jazz musician and composer (b. 1890)
• July 11 – Arthur Evans, English archaeologist (b. 1851)
• July 25 – Allan Forrest, American actor (b. 1885)
• July 26 – Henri Lebesgue, French mathematician (b. 1875)

August-December

• August 7 – Rabindranath Tagore, Indian author, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1861)
• August 13 – James Stuart Blackton, American film producer (b. 1875)
• August 14 – Paul Sabatier, French chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1854)
• August 30 – Peder Oluf Pedersen, Danish engineer and physicist (b. 1874)
• August 31 – Marina Tsvetaeva, Russian poet (suicide) (b. 1892)
• September 12 – Hans Spemann, German embryologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (b. 1869)
• October 5 – Louis Brandeis, U.S. Supreme Court Justice (b. 1856)
• October 8 – Valentine O'Hara, Irish author and authority on Russia and the Baltic States (b. 1875)
• October 26 – Arkady Gaidar, Russian writer (b. 1904)
• October 29 – Harvey Hendrick, American baseball player (b. 1897)
• November 18
  • Walther Nernst, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1864)
  • Chris Watson, 3rd Prime Minister of Australia (b. 1867)
• November 21 – Henrietta Vinton Davis, American elocutionist, dramatist, impersonator, public speaker (b. 1860)
• November 26 – Niels Hansen Jacobsen, Danish sculptor and ceramist (b. 1861)
• December 3 – Christian Sinding, Norwegian composer (b. 1856)
• December 7 – Isaac Campbell Kidd, American admiral (died in the attack on Pearl Harbor) (b. 1884)
• December 12 – Cesar Basa, Filipino pilot (b. 1915)
• December 30 – El Lissitzky, Russian artist and architect (b. 1890)

Nobel prizes

• Physics – not awarded
• Chemistry – not awarded
• Medicine – not awarded
• Literature – not awarded
• Peace – not awarded

Ship events

• List of ship launches in 1941
• List of ship commissionings in 1941
• List of shipwrecks in 1941

External links

• 1941 Coin Pictures

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)