1942

1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950

political events

Japanese forces take Manila January 2, invade the Dutch East Indies January 10, but suffer their first major sea loss in late January at the Battle of Macassar Strait when U.S. and Dutch naval and air forces attack a Japanese convoy.

President Roosevelt calls in January for production in 1942 of 60,000 planes, 45,000 tanks, 20,000 antiaircraft guns, and 6 million deadweight tons of merchant shipping. His $59 billion budget submitted January 7 has more than $52 billion earmarked for the war effort, whose emphasis is initially on stopping Hitler in Europe.

An Inter-American Conference assembles 21 representatives at Rio de Janeiro January 15 to coordinate Western Hemisphere defenses against aggression (see 1941). Delegates from every country except Argentina and Chile attend. They adopt a unanimous resolution January 21 calling for severance of relations with the Axis powers, and the group sets up an Inter-American Defense Board in March. Mexico declares war on the Axis powers and sends pilots to serve in the Pacific.

The German cruisers Scharnhorst, Gneissenhau and Prinz Eugen escape from the occupied French harbor of Brest to the Baltic in February but avoid Allied naval vessels and aircraft (see 1943; Glorious sinking, 1940).

National Socialist Party cofounder Anton Drexler dies in obscurity at Munich February 24 at age 57.

Former first lord of the admiralty William W. Palmer, 2nd earl of Selborne, dies at his native London February 26 at age 82, having initiated the rebuilding of the Royal Navy into a force strong enough to oppose the German Navy in World War I; Admiral Bradley A. Fiske, U.S. Navy (Ret.), dies at New York April 6 at age 87, having seen many of his inventions developed and used to good effect by the navy.

The German battleship Tirpitz comes out of its Norwegian anchorage and attacks a Soviet-bound convoy of ships in March (see 1944).

U-boat activity off the U.S. Atlantic Coast continues to take a heavy toll of merchant ships bound for British and Soviet ports with war matériel, foodstuffs, and men, threatening to cut the lifeline that has enabled Britain and the Red Army to survive (see 1941). Washington orders a dim-out extending 15 miles from the coast April 28 to make it harder for the U-boats to sight their quarry at night, when most attacks occur (more effective on the surface, the submarines also attack at twilight and dawn). New York's Times Square signs, go dark at night above street level beginning May 18 at the navy's request (included is the 13½-year-old news "Zipper" on the Times Tower, but the man in the Camel cigarette sign that went up last year will continue throughout the war to emit rings of Con Edison steam as the man dons a uniform that will be changed periodically to vary his service). Volunteer civil defense air raid wardens make sure that people have drawn blackout curtains to minimize the amount of light that silhouettes merchant ships leaving the port of New York for Europe.

High-frequency detection devices begin to give Allied destroyers the ability to identify lurking U-boats as far as 50 miles away, and aircraft are used to drop depth charges that help to make life more difficult for the German submarine commanders, but a convoy assembled off Iceland in late June with hundreds of tanks, planes, and motorized vehicles comes under U-boat attack. The Admiralty at London decides that the merchant vessels will present less obvious targets if they scatter, it orders the escorting warships to fall back, the merchant vessels find it hard to maneuver in the icy sea, and only 11 of the vessels reach Murmansk, the rest having been sunk by German torpedo planes and U-boats, most of which are actually submersible torpedo boats that can dive for brief periods before, during, and after an attack but cannot remain submerged for long. Convoys are suspended in late August and will not resume until next year, but code breakers at Bletchley Park finally break the Germans' Triton code in December, enabling them to intercept messages from Admiral Doenitz to his U-boats (see 1943).

Thailand's military dictator Luang Phibunsongkhram declares war on Britain and the United States January 25 (see 1941). He makes himself field marshal and in the next 2 years will promote fashions such as wearing shoes and hats (see 1944).

The first Japanese destroyer to be sunk by a U.S. ship goes down in the Pacific February 8; a U.S. ship commanded by James C. Dempsey, 33, receives credit for the kill, but Allied activities in the Pacific remain primarily defensive, with higher priority given to sinking U-boats in the North Atlantic and halting the German aggression in Europe and North Africa.

Palembang in Sumatra falls February 13 to Japanese paratroopers who have landed 3 days earlier and take the city by amphibious assault.

Singapore falls February 15 and the Japanese rename it Syonan (Light of the South) February 17 (see 1941). Three Japanese divisions have landed on Singapore Island February 8 and 9; the big guns of the British naval base have fixed emplacements and point out to sea, making them useless against the Japanese, who have approached from the Malayan interior under the command of Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, 36. He receives the surrender of more than 130,000 British and Commonwealth troops under the command of Gen. Arthur Ernest Percival, 54. Included are 15,000 Australians, 5,000 of whom will die in Japanese prisoner of war camps. Australia's prime minister John Curtin insists that Aussie troops recalled from the Middle East be returned home and not used (as Prime Minister Churchill has wished) to defend Burma.

Dutch rear admiral Karel (Willem Frederik Marie) Doorman, 52, is given tactical command February 25 of a combined U.S., British, Dutch, and Australian fleet and ordered by Gen. Sir Archibald P. Wavell to defend the Java Sea against a Japanese invasion fleet. "I attack, follow me" ("Ik val aan, volgt mij"), Doorman signals the other 12 ships in his force, but he goes down with his flagship De Ruyter February 27 as the vastly superior Japanese force wipes out his squadron in the Battle of the Java Sea and lands troops in the Solomon Islands March 13, threatening the vital route to Australia.

Filipino President Manuel Quezon leaves Corregidor Island in Manila Bay and makes his way to the United States, having given $500,000 in gold to Gen. Douglas MacArthur as payment for his services. Gen. MacArthur leaves Corregidor with his wife and young son in March after issuing a statement saying, "I shall return" (the statement was written by his Filipino aide-de-camp Carlos P. [Peña] Romulo, 43, who has worked as a journalist, made radio broadcasts widely known as the "Voice of Freedom," and won a Pulitzer Prize last year for his prewar evaluations of the military situation in the Pacific). Romulo joins MacArthur and his family in the PT-boat that takes them through 500 miles of rough, mine-infested seas until they finally reach Brisbane, Australia.

U.S. troops on the Bataan peninsula in the Philippines surrender to Gen. Yamashita April 9. Lieut. Gen. Homma Masaharu, 54, has his men round up 70,000 U.S. and Filipino prisoners of war and march them 55 miles from Mariveles north to San Fernando, whence they are taken by rail to Capas, where they are obliged to walk eight more miles to a prison camp. Many are shot or hacked to death on the 3-day "death march," only 54,000 reach Camp O'Donnell, the rest having died en route or escaped into the jungle. Most of the 54,000 will be shot, beheaded, or die of disease or starvation in the camps (only about 4,000 Americans will survive). But guerrilla fighters in Luzon form a People's Anti-Japanese Army (Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon in the Tagalog language) under the leadership of socialist Luis Taruc, 28, to resist the invaders (see 1945; Huk Rebellion, 1946).

A strike force of 16 Mitchell B-25 bombers from the U.S. carrier Hornet conduct a daylight raid on Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe, and Osaka April 18 under the command of Major James H. "Jimmy" Doolittle, now 45 (Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson has given orders that Kyōto not be bombed lest its cultural treasures be damaged). The raid does relatively little harm (90 buildings are destroyed, 90 people killed), but it boosts U.S. morale. Three of the 83 U.S. flyers die in a crash landing in China; the Japanese capture 11 others and execute three as "war criminals," 69 make it to safety and receive a hero's greeting from Mme. Chiang Kai-shek; the Japanese exact revenge, killing thousands of Chinese.

Japanese forces cut the Burma Road now under construction and capture Lashio April 29 (see 1940). Mandalay falls May 2 as the Japanese complete their conquest of northern Burma. British and Chinese forces withdraw across the Chindwin River into India's Assam Province, but British officer Orde (Charles) Wingate, 39, obtains permission to organize a long-range counter-penetration force of three battalions, one of them made up of Ghurkas, the other two of Britons and Burmese. Having organized indigenous Ethiopian fighters to oust the Italians, Wingate calls his 3,000 men Chindits, trains them in jungle-fighting techniques, and sets out to retake territory from the Japanese, using horses, mules, gliders that land behind enemy lines, and supplies dropped by air (see 1944).

The U.S. garrison on Corregidor at the mouth of Manila Bay in the Philippines surrenders May 6 after 300 air attacks. Gen. Jonathan M. (Mayhew) Wainwright III, 59, and his 10,000 men are taken prisoner; many are sent to Unit 731 in Manchuria, where Shiro Ishii's men subject them to tests of biological weapons. The 6-year-old facility begins new field tests of such weapons against Chinese soldiers and civilians, unleashing anthrax, bubonic plague (see 1941), cholera, and other disease germs that create epidemics and kill tens of thousands.

The Japanese suffer their first major reverse and sustain heavy losses from May 4 to 8 in the Battle of the Coral Sea, 300 miles east of New Guinea. Having cracked Japan's Purple Code, U.S. Naval Intelligence has learned of the Imperial Navy's plan to attack Port Moresby in New Guinea, the naval high command rushes carriers to intercept the Japanese fleet, and when Japanese troops land at Tulagi May 3 they are hit by carrier-based planes from a task force commanded by Rear Admiral Frank J. (Jack) Fletcher, 56, whose pilots take off from U.S.S. Yorktown and sink a destroyer and some minesweepers and landing barges. In the first battle ever to pit aircraft carrier against aircraft carrier, opposing carrier groups find each other the next morning, carrier-based Japanese planes sink a U.S. destroyer and oiler May 7, carrier-based U.S. planes sink the light carrier Shoho and a cruiser; the Japanese sink the U.S. carrier Lexington May 8, although her commander, Admiral Frederick C. (Carl) Sherman, 54, survives with much of his crew. Land-based Allied bombers arrive to help the navy pilots, the carrier Shokaku withdraws, badly damaged, but although the Japanese cripple the U.S. carrier Yorktown they lose so many planes that their invasion force has to turn back to Rabaul, and they are halted in their efforts to invade Australia.

Napalm (napthenic acid and palmetate) developed by Columbus, Ohio-born Harvard organic chemist Louis F. Fieser, 43, is a jellied gasoline incendiary that will increase the effective range of flamethrowers and slow down the rate of burning. Created in response to a U.S. Army request, the cheap derivative of petroleum and palm oils will find wide use as a canister filler for bombs.

The antitank weapon tested for the first time in May at the Frankfort Arsenal in Kentucky has been developed by Capt. Leslie A. Skinner, 40, U.S. Army, and Lieut. Edward J. Uhl, 24, U.S. Navy. Servicemen will call the M1 Rocket Launcher a bazooka because it looks like the musical instrument used by radio and film comedian Bob Burns.

House of Commons leader Sir (Richard) Stafford Cripps, 53, arrives in India with an offer of dominion status for a United India (see Government of India Act, 1935). Mahatma Gandhi calls it "a postdated check on a crashing bank." Indian National Congress party leader Jawaharlal Nehru, now 52, also rejects it. The National Congress passes a motion August 8 demanding that the British quit India immediately, authorities jail Gandhi and other leaders, but a massive civil disobedience campaign creates the biggest crisis in India since the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. Pro-Congress crowds take over the streets of Bombay (Mumbai), police fire on the rioters (five are killed), and the British lose control in Patna and Bihar (see Wavell, 1943). "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire," says Prime Minister Churchill November 10 in a speech at the Mansion House (but see 1947).

The Battle of Midway June 4 ends in 5 minutes with Japan losing three of her five carriers (a fourth is so badly damaged that a U.S. submarine sinks her June 5). Commanded by Baltimore-born Admiral Raymond (Ames) Spruance, 56 (who has succeeded the ailing William "Bull" Halsey), the only three U.S. Pacific fleet carriers to have survived the Battle of the Coral Sea have ambushed a huge Japanese fleet bound for Midway Island under the command of Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, 46, who was in charge of the carrier fleet that attacked Pearl Harbor and has hoped to use Midway as a launching site for an assault on the Hawaiian Islands. The opposing commanders are more than 30 miles apart and cannot see each other's ships, but Naval Intelligence has alerted Spruance to Nagumo's plans, and three squadrons of torpedo bombers from the U.S. 5th Fleet carriers Hornet, Enterprise, and Yorktown attack the enemy carriers on a suicide mission, flying without fighter escorts; Japanese fire kills 68 of the 82 aviators, none of whose torpedoes finds their marks (the torpedoes are defective), but the attack draws the Japanese Zero fighters down close to the water, and when U.S. SBD-3 Dauntless dive-bombers come in from 15,000 feet there are no enemy planes to stop them. They badly damage the carriers Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu, the Akagi and Kaga sink soon afterward, the Soryu withdraws to the west and sinks that evening, planes from the Enterprise hit the carrier Hiryu later in the day, and she sinks June 5. Although Yorktown is lost June 7, the stunning U.S. victory reverses the gains made by Japan at Pearl Harbor and will prove to be a turning point in the war (Admiral Nagumo will be killed in 1944).

Japanese forces occupy Attu and Kiska in the Aleutians June 7, having been sent north to distract the Americans from Tokyo's real objective, Midway Island. The commander of U.S. troops in Alaska has told the War Department that his 20,000 men do not have the resources needed to repel a full-scale enemy invasion, President Roosevelt has ordered construction of a highway that will link the territory to the lower 48 by year's end, construction has begun April 11, but Japanese planes have bombed Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians June 3, inflicting more than 100 casualties.

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), created by President Roosevelt's executive order June 13, is an espionage group headed by World War I hero and former New York State assistant attorney general William J. Donovan, now 59, who has been senior partner in the Wall Street law firm Donovan, Leisure, Newton and Lombard. "Wild Bill" Donovan ran for governor against Herbert Lehman in 1932 and was an outspoken critic of the New Deal. Conversations with British spymaster William S. Stephenson have convinced him of the need for counter-propaganda and clandestine operations; President Roosevelt asked him in July of last year to head an agency that would collect and analyze strategic intelligence; and Donovan will soon have 1,500 agents working undercover in Europe and Asia (see CIA, 1947).

China's Chiang Kai-shek captures Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh but releases him under pressure from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) because he has been leading resistance to the Japanese (see Viet Minh, 1941; 1945). Both Chiang and the Viet Minh receive U.S. support: cargo planes deliver supplies from India over "the hump" (the Himalayas); Chiang's Florida-born chief of staff Gen. Joseph Warren "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, 59, begins the 478-mile Burma-India Ledo Road to link up with the old Burma Road. By mid-December British and Indian troops are forcing the Japanese in Malaya to retreat into Burma and forcing those in Burma to fall back.

Japanese planes drop incendiary bombs over Oregon September 9 but fail in their effort to start forest fires.

The FBI captures eight German marines June 28 about a week after they have come ashore in civilian clothes from U-boats on Long Island and Florida beaches, some near Amagansett, some near Jacksonville. All have lived in America and been recruited by the Nazis; some have landed near Amagansett with $100,000, explosives, and orders to blow up production and transportation targets, but have gone on a spending spree before giving themselves up. One of the Germans has betrayed the mission, his call to the FBI was initially brushed off as a hoax, but he has finally convinced agents that he was on the level. The FBI blunder has embarrassed J. Edgar Hoover (the FBI claimed credit for intercepting the saboteurs), and his agents arrest 325 Germans (many of them members of the German-American Bund), 65 Italians, seven Japanese, one Hungarian, and two Romanians in the New York area and discover incriminating evidence on some, including maps of U.S. defenses found on a member of the Japanese Association. President Roosevelt tells his attorney general Francis Biddle that he will resist efforts to give the saboteurs an open trial in a court of law. U.S. Army lawyer Col. Kenneth Royall objects, citing the landmark 1866 Supreme Court decision in Ex Parte Mulligan, but the Supreme Court holds a special session July 31 and unanimously affirms Roosevelt's power to order the military trial (Ex Parte Quirin). A military tribunal tries the eight would-be saboteurs at Washington, D.C., all eight are found guilty, six are electrocuted August 8, two receive prison sentences, including the German who called the FBI.

Tobruk in Libya falls June 21 to Gen. Rommel, who takes 25,000 British prisoners (see 1941). Rommel's panzer divisions have begun their offensive May 27. Adolf Hitler promotes Rommel to field marshal as Axis forces sweep east to El Alamein, 70 miles from Alexandria, before being checked by the 8th Army, commanded as of August 6 by Gen. Bernard L. Montgomery, 54.

A Yugoslav government-in-exile is inaugurated at London January 11 with liberal Serbian jurist and former University of Belgrade vice-chancellor Slobodan Jovanovic, 72, as prime minister (see 1941). He will continue in the office until late June 1943.

Hungarian moderates oust Premier László Bárdossy in March, and the regent Miklós Horthy asks politician Miklós Kállay, 55, to form a new government, which takes office March 9 with Kállay as prime minister (see 1941). He sets out to reverse the policies of his predecessor, distance itself from Nazi Germany, allow the press and left-wing parties to function normally, and give more protection to the Jews than they enjoy almost anywhere else on the Continent (see 1944).

Marshal Pétain reinstates Pierre Laval as French premier under pressure from German occupation forces April 14.

Rolls-Royce test pilot Ronald W. Harker takes off in an RAF Mustang P-51 (Mark IA) fighter plane from an airbase at Duxford April 30, finds it 30 miles-per-hour faster than a Spitfire VB at similar power settings and with nearly twice the range, and reportedly recommends that the North American Aviation-built plane be equipped with a 1,000-horsepower Rolls-Royce Merlin engine (see 1941). U.S. plants will produce 15,575 Mustangs in the next few years, all but 1,580 with Rolls-Royce engines, and an Australian plant will turn out 100. North American Aviation's Inglewood, Calif., plant will manufacture as many as 857 in 1 month, and the planes will be parked in rows outside the plant waiting for pilots to deliver them. At least 25 countries will operate P-51 Mustangs, some of them for more than 35 years.

The IL-2 Stormovik dive bomber designed by Soviet engineer Sergei Vladimirovich Ilyushin, 48, goes into volume production for use against the USSR's German invaders. Some 36,000 of the heavily armored planes will be produced, and the IL-2 will serve as the Soviet equivalent of the U.S. DC-3 introduced in 1935.

Three Soviet armies launch a campaign May 12 to retake Kharkov from the Germans. Marshal Semyon Konstantinovich Timoshenko, 45, has 640,000 men and 1,200 tanks to throw against Col.-Gen. Ewald von Kleist in the battle for Kharkov, but tank specialist Friedrich Paulus, 51, comes to von Kleist's aid and the Germans wipe out every Soviet armored formation, taking more than 250,000 prisoners (see 1943).

The RAF raids Cologne on the night of May 30 in the first 1,000-bomber attack on German industrial targets. Handley Page has been manufacturing Halifax heavy bombers and transports for the RAF.

Pennsylvania-born West Point graduate and World War I combat pilot Gen. Carl "Tooey" Spaatz, 51, takes command of the U.S. 8th Air Force in England in July and makes plans for a daylight bombing offensive against targets in German-occupied Europe. Germany's Messerschmidt Me 262 Schwalbe (Swallow) turbojet makes its first flight July 18 (see transportation, 1939) and proves much faster than piston-engine planes. Powered by two Junkers 004 engines with 1,980 pounds of thrust each, the fighter plane has a top speed of 540 miles per hour, a cruising speed of 460 mph, a range of 650 miles, and a ceiling of 38,000 feet, but Allied bombings, development issues, and cautious Lüftwaffe leadership delay quantity production (see 1943).

Canadian commandos raid Dieppe on the French coast August 19, crossing the pebble beach with orders to destroy radar installations and silence big guns; 1,000 British commandos and 50 U.S. Rangers participate, Indian-born British captain Patrick (Anthony) "Pat" Porteous, 24, leads an effective bayonet charge despite suffering wounds, but the ill-planned attack is bungled. German defenders repulse the invaders within 9 hours, giving the Allies a lesson in how not to attack their coastal defenses; the 5,000-man Canadian division loses 67 percent of its strength: 3,350 men—177 dead, 633 wounded, 2,547 missing, most of them captured.

The Battle of Stalingrad begins August 22. German forces under the command of Gen. Erich von Manstein have captured Sevastopol in the Crimea July 2 after a month-long siege that has reduced the city and seaport to rubble (see 1941); they launch an offensive against the Volga River center for shipment of oil from the Caucasus, a city of 500,000 whose defenses are headed by Marshal Rokossovsky, now 46, Marshal Vasily I. Chuikov, 42, and Marshal Aleksandr M. Vasilevsky, 47. Field Marshal Paulus commands the attacking force that occupies 90 percent of the city within a few weeks but cannot take its tank factory, whose workers drive their vehicles from the production line straight into battle. The Russians delay their counterattack until the ground is frozen, giving their vehicles solid ground on which to maneuver (see 1943).

The Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) established by act of Congress in mid-May is headed by Houston Post editor Oveta Hobby (née Culp), 37, who in 1931 married Texas governor William D. Hobby, 27 years her senior. Black women oppose her appointment because she is known to share the racist views prevalent in Texas, but 3,902 black women will serve in the WAAC. Rep. Edith Nourse Rogers has had the Corps in mind since 1917 and sponsored the legislation, which is designed to free men for active service by putting women in non-combat jobs.

Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service (WAVES) authorized by act of Congress July 30 to support the navy is headed by Wellesley College president Mildred H. McAfee, 42. Only 68 black women will serve in the WAVES.

The Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron established September 10 flies U.S. aircraft to bases in noncombat areas. Members have civilian status and earn $3,000 per year.

The B-29 bomber makes its maiden flight at Seattle September 21 but will not be used in combat until the fall of 1944. The Army Air Corps has become the Army Air Force in March, its chief of staff is Pennsylvania-born Gen. H. H. (Henry Harley) "Hap" Arnold, 56, and despite doubts by many that such a huge craft could ever get off the ground he has pushed since 1939 for the development of the strategic bomber that he calls the "Superfortress." Powered by four 2,200-horsepower Wright Double Cyclone engines, the 99-foot-long plane weighs 69,160 pounds empty, 105,000 pounds when loaded with bombs, carries an 11-man crew, has a maximum speed of 365 miles per hour and a range of 5,830 miles, can reach an altitude of nearly 32,000 feet, but initially tends to overheat and catch fire. Production will proceed nevertheless in a $3 billion gamble that massive bombing will win the war (see 1944).

Gen. Montgomery's British 8th Army gains a victory at El Alamein October 30 and forces the Afrika Korps to retreat into Libya. A British-U.S. force of 400,000 commanded by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower lands at Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers November 7 and 8 in an armada of 500 transports convoyed by 350 naval vessels. Vichy French garrisons are overpowered after brief fighting, the Allies take the governor's palace at Algiers on the afternoon of the 8th, and the French government-in-exile is moved from London to Algiers.

Soviet Field Marshal Georgi K. (Konstantinovich) Zhukov, now 46, launches Operation Mars in late November, sending seven armies with 817,000 men in 83 divisions against German positions west of Moscow while Operation Uranus is throwing back the Germans in a massive counteroffensive near Stalingrad. Soviet troops advance in bad weather across difficult terrain, and initially they enjoy spectacular successes, but by the time the strongly entrenched German forces have halted Operation Mars 3 weeks later it has cost the Red Army nearly 350,000 dead, wounded, or missing, and Zhukov has lost more than 1,600 of the 2,352 tanks he has committed. Moscow suppresses news of the colossal failure.

German troops take over France's Zone Non-Occupée November 11. Marshal Pétain appoints Pierre Laval as his successor November 17, empowering him to make laws and issue decrees.

French crews scuttle most of the fleet at Toulon November 27 to keep it from falling into German hands; the Vichy government's Admiral Jean-François Darlan, 61, has arranged an armistice and is assassinated at Algiers December 24. His successor as High Commissioner in French Africa is Gen. Henri Honoré Giraud, 63, who was captured by the Germans in 1940 but has escaped, been picked up by a British submarine, and landed in North Africa.

Britain's "cockleshell heroes" blow up German merchant ships at Bordeaux and damage a mine-laying vessel the night of December 11. Five two-man crews of Royal Marines in canoes from the Royal Navy submarine Tuna have set out 4 nights earlier in the Bay of Biscay, three of the five have been lost en route, the four surviving men attach limpet mines to the sides of the German ships, two of the four are captured by the Germans and shot, the other two walk 100 miles to the French village of Ruffec, whence Résistance members spirit them to Spain.

U.S. Marines storm the beaches of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands August 7 on orders from Admiral King and begin a long effort to wrest the island from Japanese control. Oregon-born Marine pilot Marion E. (Eugene) Carl, 26, and other pilots arrive August 20 and soon engage in the first dogfights with Zero fighters over the island. Carl is shot down September 9 and floats for 4 hours before being picked up by a native in a canoe. Sidney, N.Y.-born Marine commander Evans F. Carlson, 46, has led a surprise attack on Makin Island in the Gilberts earlier in August; using experience gained while fighting the Japanese in China from 1927 to 1929 and again as a President Roosevelt's observer with guerrillas in 1938, he has introduced the Chinese term "gung ho" ("work together") into the Marine Corps and directs his "Carlson's Raiders" in a month-long raid beyond Japanese lines on Guadalcanal in November. The risky effort to gain control of Guadalcanal will nevertheless come close to disaster; Japanese resistance on the island will continue for another 5 months.

Japan's foreign minister Shigenori Togo resigns September 1 after less than a year in office, having become unhappy with Gen. Hideki Tojo's aggressive foreign policy.

A Japanese torpedo hits the U.S. light cruiser Juneau off Guadalcanal November 13 and she goes down with most of her 700-man crew. About 100 men—most of them badly wounded, some with missing limbs—help each other into three life rafts, but although some reach a small island after a week of thirst, delirium, and savage shark attacks, only 10 survive. Among the dead are the five Sullivan brothers—George, 29; Francis, 26; Joseph, 23; Madison, 22; and Albert, 20—who enlisted en masse in their Iowa hometown after Pearl Harbor.

The 45,000-ton Iowa class U.S. battleship New Jersey launched at the Philadelphia Navy Yard December 7 is an armor-plated behemoth 887 feet long. It can attain a speed of more than 33 knots, carry more than 1,500 in crew, has three triple 16-inch guns plus 81 smaller guns, and will remain in service until 1991.

The first surface-to-surface guided missile is launched December 24 at Peenemünde by German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun, now 30, who tests the buzz bomb that he has designed under the direction of Major Walter R. Dornberger, now 47 (see exploration, 1932). Their research operation outgrew its facilities at the Kummersdorf Army Proving Grounds in 1937 and a large new facility was erected at Peenemüunde on the Baltic Sea (see V-2 buzz bomb, 1944).

Former Argentine president Marcelo de Alvear dies at his native Buenos Aires March 23 at age 73.

Brazil declares war on Germany and Italy in August but does not declare war on Japan (the country has 250,000 Japanese nationals or Japanese-born citizens); most other Latin-American countries have broken relations with the Axis powers in January but remain neutral.

Ecuador and Peru sign a treaty setting the 1,050-mile border between their two countries, but a 49-mile stretch in the Cordillera del Condor region is not demarcated.

human rights, social justice

The Wannsee Conference at Berlin January 20 formalizes a blueprint for annihilating every Jew in Europe. SS Lieut. Col. Adolf Eichmann has called the conference in order to gain approval for a more efficient way of killing Jews—and one less taxing on his SS men—than machine-gunning them. The meeting lasts a mere 90 minutes but is attended by 15 of the Reich's top leaders. Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler begins a methodical murder of all European Jews within German reach (see 1940). Some 8,000 Greek Jews from Salonika are transferred to concentration camps in the mountains of Macedonia; another 45,000 will be deported in the next 3 years, leaving scarcely 500 in the city (see Poland, Denmark, 1943).

Turkish police take over the refugee ship Struma at Istanbul February 23 and tow her up the Bosphorus to the Black Sea, where she is set adrift without a working engine (see 1941). A Soviet submarine sinks the ship at dawn February 24, those aboard who are not killed outright are left to flounder in the icy cold water, and all but one of the 779 people aboard die within hours (the only survivor is 18-year-old David Stoliar, who had fled Romania with his girlfriend and her parents).

British agents help Czech patriots assassinate deputy Gestapo chief and Reich "protector" of Czechoslovakia Reinhard Heydrich May 31 at age 38 (President-in-exile Benes has given orders for the hit). The death of der Henker (the Hangman) brings swift and terrible retribution: the Germans burn the Czech village of Lidice in Bohemia June 6 after executing every male in reprisal for the assassination of Heydrich. Only one man reportedly escapes; the female population is abused.

Nazi authorities at Kraków arrest Oskar Schindler April 29 for violating the Race and Resettlement Act (see 1940). He has been seen kissing a young Jewish girl at his kitchenware factory during a birthday party the previous day, but well-placed bribes to SS and Abwehr officials soon gain his release. The Germans begin deporting Kraków's Jews to labor camps in June, deportations by year's end will have reduced the city's Jewish population from 17,000 to about 4,000, but Schindler's factory will have grown from 4,000 square meters to 45,000 and its payroll to nearly 800 men and women, including 370 from the Kraków ghetto whose records will have been falsified with Schindler's approval (see 1943).

Amsterdam's Roman Catholic hierarchy speaks out against the harsh treatment of Jews by German occupation authorities, who redouble their roundups and deportations.

Paris police round up some 30,000 Jews in pre-dawn raids July 16 under terms of an agreement made by Prime Minister Laval. The 2,000 gendarmes lock about 13,000 people into the Winter Velodrome stadium for 8 days without water or toilet facilities (they include invalids, pregnant women, infants, and children). German officials have promised not to deport any French Jews to Germany if the French will arrest foreign Jews, and Laval claims that he can save 75,000 lives, but the Germans bus thousands out of the city and the French National Railroad Service (SNCF) cooperates in taking them to Nazi death camps, closing and locking the doors of boxcars (wagons) containing the deportees; only 30 will survive.

Nazi leader Klaus Barbie, 28, is appointed chief of the Gestapo at Lyons, where in the next 2 years he will interrogate, torture, and execute some 4,000 French prisoners, many of them Résistance members, and deport some 7,500 others, including 44 Jewish children, aged 3 to 13, and their five teachers, who will be sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. Of the 76,000 French Jews sent in 77 train convoys to the death camps beginning March 27 of this year about 2,500 will survive (see 1945).

Switzerland closes her borders to Germans who are persecuted solely because they are Jewish, even though it is clear that Jews are being systematically annihilated by the Nazi regime. The Swiss have required German passports for Jews to be stamped with a "J" since 1938, and although they will admit 51,000 civilian refugees by the spring of 1945, and 21,000 of them will be Jews, most of the Jews will have slipped into the country illegally and then been allowed to remain.

U.S. diplomat Howard Elting, 35, sends a cable August 11 advising the State Department at Washington, D.C., that "based on the highest German authorities" the Nazis have plans "to exterminate at one blow this fall three and a half to four million Jews." A vice counsel to the Geneva consulate, Elting uses language drafted by Berlin-born World Jewish Congress representative Gerhart Riegner, 30, but although he attaches a memorandum vouching for Riegner's credibility the State Department remains skeptical and does not act on Riegner's request that the information be transmitted to Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, head of the American Jewish Congress. Riegner has also given the information to British diplomats at Geneva, they pass it on to the British Foreign Office, and Rabbi Wise receives it via a member of Parliament who heads the British Section of the World Jewish Congress. Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles summons Wise to Washington November 24 and authorizes him to release the news (see 1944).

The Germans convert the concentration camp at Maidanek that opened outside Lublin 2 years ago into a death camp in the fall and use it to kill Jews, first from Bohemia and Moravia, then from Poland, the Netherlands, and Greece, who are shot down en masse in the neighboring forest (see 1943).

Buchenwald concentration camp commander Karl Koch of the SS is relieved of his command and will be executed in 1945 after being convicted of corruption and graft. His wife, Ilsa, has become notorious for beating prisoners with her riding crop, requiring them to participate in degenerate orgies, and collecting book covers, gloves, and lampshades made from the tattooed human skin of dead inmates (see 1947).

All German gypsies (Roma) are ordered deported to the concentration camp at Auschwitz by a decree issued December 16 (see 1938). A special section of the camp will be set aside for gypsies, and some 20,000 will die there. Nearly 25,000 of Romania's gypsies (2.5 percent of the total) will be deported to Transnistria, where all but 1,500 will die (while at least 250,000 Romanian Jews will die), but although somewhere between 90,000 and 196,000 of Europe's several million gypsies (more than 220,000 out of 700,000 total according to some estimates) will have been killed by 1945 the Nazis will not be consistent in their persecution of the Roma as they have been and will continue to be vis-à-vis the Jews. The gypsies will nevertheless be singled out for more persecution than any other group besides the Jews.

Executive Order 9066 issued by President Roosevelt February 19 calls for internment of some 110,000 Japanese-Americans living in coastal Pacific areas. California's attorney general Earl Warren, 50, is running for governor and has urged the measure against opposition from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, among many others. Federal agents later round up about 200 of the 2,500 Japanese nationals in New York and its suburbs and take them into custody, no internment actions are taken against Japanese-Americans in the Hawaiian Islands or the U.S. East and Midwest, nor against alien Germans or Italians, but native-born U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast are rounded up along with Japanese aliens and will be placed in "relocation centers" (some people will call them concentration camps) in remote areas of Arizona (Gila, Poston), Arkansas (Jerome, Rohwer), inland California (Manzanar, Tule Lake), Colorado (Granada), Idaho (Minidoka), Utah (Topaz), and Wyoming (Heart Mountain), where they will live in tar-papered barracks heated with coal stoves and guarded by military police armed with rifles. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) makes no protest and will remain mum on the matter for years, but 22-year-old Japanese-American Fred Korematsu and others refuse to obey the order and appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court (see 1943). The interned Japanese-Americans (two-thirds are U.S. citizens) will lose an estimated $400 million in property, of which Washington will repay $38.5 million.

The Swiss Red Cross delivers packages of dried U.S. blood plasma to a Yokohama prisoner-of-war camp. Japanese Army bacteriologist and physician Ryoichi Naito visited the United States before the war, tried to obtain a vial of yellow-fever virus from the Rockefeller Institute, later observed the freeze-drying process developed by Sharp & Dohme at the University of Pennsylvania, returned home with a vacuum pump, conducted experiments with it, and subsequently gave the freeze-drying technology to his mentor Shiro Ishii, who has used it for germ-warfare research near Harbin, Manchuria, where he has employed Chinese and Russian prisoners, including women and children, as human guinea pigs, studying frostbite, pathogens, and starvation under conditions that continued until the prisoners' deaths. Naito gains War Ministry approval to construct a plasma-drying facility at the Army Medical School in Yokohama, sets up seven blood collection centers throughout the city, and draws blood from women donors, but he will soon have to give up the program as enemy firebombs make it unsafe to line up to give blood (see medicine, 1951).

Japanese authorities in Sumatra establish an internment camp for Dutch, British, and other western women: 200 of its 600 inmates will die of disease or starvation.

Federal employee Elmer Henderson boards a Southern Railway train at Washington, D.C., May 17 for a trip to Atlanta on government business. When he goes to the dining car for dinner he finds that two tables at the end of the car are reserved for black passengers unless white passengers want them, three of the four seats at those tables are occupied by whites, the steward refuses to seat Henderson at the remaining seat, he goes without dinner, and he files a complaint with the Interstate Commerce Commission (seePlessy v. Ferguson, 1896). The Southern Railway responds by setting aside two tables at the end of the car exclusively for blacks and rigging up a curtain to separate those tables from the rest of the dining car (see 1949).

The U.S. Supreme Court rules 6 to 3 June 1 in Betts v. Brady that neither the Sixth nor the Fourteenth Amendment requires a state to provide defense counsel for an indigent defendant except in a rape or murder case (see 1932; but see also Gideon v. Wainwright, 1963).

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) founded by University of Chicago students employs passive resistance tactics pioneered by Mahatma Gandhi in India; headed by Texas-born activist James (Leonard) Farmer, 22, as national chairman, CORE will stage sit-ins to end racial segregation and discrimination (see 1961).

Ethiopia outlaws slavery, but the practice will continue in parts of the country and elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East.

Afrikaner political leader James Hertzog dies at Cape Town November 21 at age 76, having isolated South Africa's blacks from the political process and laid the groundwork for what later will be called apartheid. He has alienated both militant Afrikaners and those fighting the Germans.

philanthropy

Oregon lumberman Simon Benson dies at Los Angeles August 5 at age 90, having said, "No one has the right to die and not leave something to the public and for the public good." He retired at age 60 to devote all his time to philanthropy and public service.

exploration, colonization

Explorer-mystic Sir Francis E. Younghusband dies at Lychett Minster, Dorset, July 31 at age 79.

commerce

The Beveridge Report (Social Insurance and Allied Services) advanced by Indian-born economist Sir William H. Beveridge, now 63, is a comprehensive plan embodying proposals for postwar "cradle-to-grave" social security in Britain. Master of Oxford's University College, Sir William chairs Britain's Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services (see medicine [National Health Service], 1948).

The War Production Board (WPB) set up by executive order January 16 is headed by Missouri-born former Sears, Roebuck executive Donald M. (Marrs) Nelson, 52. General Electric Co. president Charles E. Wilson gives up his $175,000-per-year job at President Roosevelt's request to join the WPB.

An Emergency Price Control Act voted by Congress January 30 gives the Office of Price Administration (OPA) power to control prices (see 1941). The Farm Bureau Federation and other groups oppose price controls but consumers welcome them (see 1946).

Congress appropriates $26.5 billion for the navy February 2, bringing total war costs since June 1940 to $116 billion. Another $42.8 billion is appropriated for the army June 30, and by July 1 the nation is spending $150 million per day on what President Roosevelt calls an "arsenal of democracy."

Labor leader Tom Mooney dies at San Francisco March 6 at age 61; former NRA director Hugh S. Johnson at Washington, D.C., April 15 at age 59.

The Revenue Act of 1942 is the largest in U.S. history. Designed to produce $9 billion, it includes a provision for a 5 percent victory tax on all incomes above $624 per year for the duration of the war and increases the number of taxpayers from 13 million to 50 million. Taxes on excess profits and other sources of income require rich Americans to shoulder much of the burden, producing for the first and only time a significant redistribution of wealth (see Pay-As-You-Go, 1943).

President Roosevelt creates an Office of Economic Stabilization October 3 with authority to control farm prices, rents, wages, and salaries; he asks Supreme Court Justice James F. Byrnes, 63, to resign and become its director. An order issued by Byrnes October 27 limits salaries to $25,000 per year.

Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy by economist Joseph A. Schumpeter says that capitalism will eventually fall victim to its own success and be replaced by some form of public control, or socialism.

Brazil establishes a state mining concern (Companha do Vale do Rio Doce) that will play a key role in developing the Amazon Basin.

More than 3.6 million American men remain unemployed, but the number has fallen from 9.5 million men and women in 1939. The ranks of the unemployed dwindle rapidly as war plants, shipyards, oil fields, and recruiting offices clamor for manpower; labor union membership increases to 10 million, up from 3.4 million in 1932, and 2 million women enter the workforce. By November, 13 million women are working, 2.5 million of them in war industries, and experts say the nation will need another 6 million women workers by the end of 1943. Women who never worked before take factory and shipyard jobs previously reserved for men; "Rosie the Riveter" becomes a national symbol (a widely distributed poster drawn by J. Howard Miller depicts Rose Monroe [née Will], 22, who was left with two young children to support when her husband was killed in an automobile accident and who has gone to work in a Ypsilanti, Mich., aircraft parts factory, where actor Walter Pidgeon found her to use in a promotion film for war bonds. Bandleader Kay Kyser has written a song entitled "Rosie the Riveter" inspired by a Long Island war-plant worker. President Roosevelt orders the dismantling of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) December 4, there being no further need for a government agency to create jobs.

The U.S. Mint issues zinc-coated steel pennies under an Emergency Coinage Act designed to release copper for war production (silver nickels are issued to free nickel for the war effort). By the time the last wartime coins are issued in 1945 they will be made from salvaged shell casings.

Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average closes December 31 at 119.40, up from 110.96 at the end of 1941.

retail, trade

Filene's executive and Boston civic leader Louis E. Kirstein dies of pneumonia at Boston December 10 at age 75.

energy

Japanese paratroops land in mid-February on Sumatra's oil refineries outside Palembang and quickly take over wells for use by the Imperial Navy, keeping the Dutch and British from disabling production facilities.

Attorney General Thurman Arnold brings charges of criminal conspiracy in March against Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey, accusing the company of having covertly supplied Germany's I. G. Farben chemical colossus with proprietary information related to synthetic-rubber production. President William S. Farish pleads no contest, pays a $5,000 fine (Jersey Standard and several subsidiaries are also fined $5,000 each), and agrees to stop hiding from the United States certain patents for artificial rubber that Jersey Standard has provided to Farben since 1933. (Standard has also been providing gasoline and tetraethyl lead to fuel U-boats and the Lüftwaffe.) Standard's chairman Walter C. Teagle announces his retirement November 21; Farish dies of a heart attack at Milbrook, N.Y., November 29 at age 61.

Clinton, Iowa-born Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey chemical engineer Donald L. (Lewis) Campbell, 38, and three associates come up with a cheaper, more efficient way to "crack" hydrocarbons into smaller molecules and thereby increase the ability to produce aviation fuel (and synthetic rubber) from a fixed amount of crude oil (see Houdry process, 1936). Owners of the Houdry patent have demanded $50 million for use of their process, Standard Oil engineers have tried without success to duplicate it, but Campbell, Homer Z. Martin, Eger V. Murphree, and Charles W. Tyson find that a powdered catalyst mixed with air or oil vapor behaves just like a fluid, creating a chemical reaction as it moves through the raw petroleum; carbon in the hydrocarbon attaches to the catalyst in a steady and continuous breaking-up process that allows a 6,000 percent increase in U.S. output of aviation fuel; within 60 years fluid catalytic cracking will be used in refineries worldwide that produce nearly 500 million gallons of gasoline per day.

Washington orders nationwide U.S. gasoline rationing in September, chiefly to reduce rubber consumption. Rationing has begun in May on the East Coast, where U-boat sinkings have reduced tanker shipments, but more than 200 congressmen have requested and received X stickers entitling them to unlimited supplies of gasoline. All U.S. motorists are assigned A, B, or C stickers as of December 1. Those with A stickers are allowed four gallons per week, this will later be reduced to three gallons, but nearly half of all motorists obtain B or C stickers that entitle them to supplementary rations because their driving is essential to the war effort, or public health, or for similar reasons. Truckers receive T stickers permitting them unlimited amounts of gasoline or diesel fuel, but pleasure driving is banned and a 35-mile-per-hour speed limit established on highways.

transportation

The last new U.S. automobile that will be produced until 1945 rolls off the Ford assembly line February 10 as auto plants turn to producing tanks, Jeeps, aircraft, and other war matériel on cost-plus contracts under the direction of the War Production Board.

New York's East River Drive opens May 26 with ceremonies led by Mayor La Guardia. The roadbed between 23rd and 34th streets is filled with bricks and rubble left from air raids on London and donated by the British, but the new drive that cuts Manhattan off from the East River is poorly drained and will flood in heavy rains.

The Alcan International Highway opens November 21 through wilderness to link Fairbanks, Alaska, with Dawson Creek, British Columbia. Canadian troops and about 2,000 civilian contractors have helped 10,607 U.S. Corps of Engineers soldiers (3,695 of them black) to build the 1,522-mile road in just 8 months.

The Canadian transportation giant Bombardier Inc. has its beginnings in a Montreal company that makes snowgoing equipment. It will produce Ski Doo snowmobiles and expand to make passenger trains, mass-transit railcars, utility vehicles, amphibious planes, large and small aircraft, and boats.

The French Line passenger ship S.S. Normandie that went into service in 1935 has been gutted by fire and capsizes at her New York pier February 9 while being converted for troop transport service. Renamed the U.S.S. Lafayette January 1 after U.S. seizure, she will be righted, towed away, and scrapped.

The 6-year-old Cunard-White Star passenger ship-turned-troop carrier S.S. Queen Mary collides with the British cruiser Curaçao off Norway October 2 and sustains a huge gash in her hull. The cruiser sinks with a loss of 338 men, the Queen Mary's damage is repaired, and news of the incident will be suppressed until 1945.

The Liberty Ship Robert E. Peary launched November 9 by the Kaiser Shipyards is delivered November 12—7½ days after her keel was laid (see 1941). Henry J. Kaiser has built the first steel mill on the Pacific Coast to produce steel for his shipyards, and he builds a magnesium plant as well. He also manufactures aircraft, Jeeps, and other war matériel in plants acquired for the purpose (see aluminum, 1945).

The IL-2 Stormovik dive bomber designed by Soviet engineer Sergei Vlandimirovich Ilyushin, 48, goes into volume production for use against the USSR's German invaders. Soviet factories will produce some 36,000 of the heavily armored planes, and the IL-2 will serve as the Soviet equivalent of the U.S. DC-3 introduced in 1936.

technology

A tire-rationing plan issued in January by the OPA is insufficient, experts warn. Far Eastern sources have supplied all but 3 percent of U.S. crude rubber needs, but they are now cut off by the Japanese and the nation's stockpile of rubber is only 660,000 tons. Civilian consumption has been running at the rate of between 600,000 and 700,000 tons per year, and U.S. synthetic rubber plants produced only 12,000 tons last year (see 1940). "Unless corrective measures are taken immediately [to conserve rubber], this country will face both a military and a civilian collapse," say Wall Street sage Bernard Baruch, Harvard University president James Bryant Conant, and Chicago University physicist Arthur Holly Compton.

Procter & Gamble chemical engineer Victor Mills receives a call from his onetime University of Washington mentor (and vinyl inventor) Waldo Semons, who is working with B. F. Goodrich Co. to develop synthetic rubber for tires (see 1926). Semon has been using Ivory Soap as an emulsifier to help speed up his process, but something is disrupting that process. It suddenly occurs to him that Ivory Soap is not 100 percent pure, Mills has the P&G factory make up a batch without any perfume, it works, and the company will supply Goodrich with special Ivory flakes for synthetic rubber production throughout the war.

Mexico agrees in September to sell its entire production of guayule for U.S. rubber production until the end of 1946.

Hewlett-Packard cofounder David Packard designs a voltmeter more reliable than anything on the market and priced lower than any competitive product (see 1939). The company will enter the microwave field next year with a radar-jamming device and signal generators for the Naval Research Laboratory (see 1951).

Engineer-industrialist Robert Bosch dies at Stuttgart March 9 at age 80, having advocated industrial arbitration and free trade while producing precision machines and electrical equipment in plants worldwide; chemist Francis Irenée du Pont dies of a streptococcal infection at New York March 16 at age 68, having received more than 100 patents for contributions to explosives, petrochemicals, and synthetic rubber.

science

More than 40 physicists witness the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction on a controlled basis December 2 in a former squash racquets court beneath the West Stands at the University of Chicago's Stagg Field; Enrico Fermi, Arthur H. Compton, Leo Szilard, Eugene P. Wigner, and Ernest O. Wollan are among those who observe the phenomenon (see plutonium, 1941). Now 40, Wigner is employed by the federal government's atomic-bomb project (code name: Manhattan Engineering District) at Los Alamos, N.M., along with Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, California Institute of Technology physicist J. (Jules) Robert Oppenheimer, 38, and others. Security is so tight at Los Alamos that the place is never identified as such in any documents, but the KGB's Operation Enormous has infiltrated the Manhattan Project from the start, and its scientists include New York-born Harvard physics major Theodore "Ted" Hall, 19, an idealist who is fearful that the United States will become fascist if it wins the war and has gone to New Mexico determined to leak atomic secrets to the Soviet Union (see 1944).

Biochemist Lawrence J. Henderson dies at Cambridge, Mass., February 10 at age 63; Nobel physicist and crystallographer Sir William H. Bragg at London March 12 at age 79; Nobel physicist Jean Perrin at New York April 17 at age 71; archaeologist-Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie at Jerusalem July 28 at age 89; anthropologist Franz Boaz at New York December 21 at age 84.

medicine

The entire world supply of penicillin is barely enough to cure one serious case of meningitis, but penicillin saves New Haven (Conn.) Hospital patient Anne Miller (née Scheafe), 33, from death in March after sulfa drugs have failed to arrest her streptococcal infection, which has kept her hospitalized for a month with periods of delirium and temperatures that have spiked as high as 106° F.; batches of the antibiotic are rushed to Boston in November to help burn victims of the Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire avoid infection (see 1943; Florey, 1941).

French medical researcher André Loubatiére pioneers oral drugs for diabetics with his finding that sulfa drugs, developed in Germany 7 years ago, are closely related chemically to para-amino benzoic acid (PABA) and produce a lowering of blood sugar levels without restricting dietary sugar intake (see 1937).

French medical researcher Bernard Halpern, 37, and others produce the first antihistamine to be used successfully in humans. Antergan (phenbenamine) combats the substance that serves as a mediator in the pathogenesis of allergic diseases such as rhino-conjunctivitis, urticaria (hives), and asthma (see Bovet, 1944).

German-born U.S. biochemist Konrad (Emil) Bloch, 30, and David Rittenberg discover that the two-carbon compound acetic acid is the major building block in the 30 or more steps in the biosynthesis of cholesterol (see 1913). The work of Bloch and his various colleagues will facilitate research on the relation between blood serum cholesterol levels and atherosclerosis (see nutrition [Keys], 1953).

Spinal anesthesia is introduced in U.S. obstetrics, allowing women to feel nothing from the waist down yet remain conscious. The technique requires the use of forceps since the mother cannot push out the fetus (critics say the new procedure merely helps health professionals justify higher fees), but it will become routine at many hospitals.

The Kaiser Foundation Health Plan has its beginnings in a 54-bed hospital at Oakland, Calif., dedicated by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser. A pioneer health maintenance organization, the Foundation will often be called Kaiser-Permanente after the creek in the Santa Cruz Mountains where Kaiser built his first cement plant.

religion

Father Divine (George Baker) leaves New York and moves to a palatial "heaven" at Philadelphia (see 1916). He will remain there until his death in 1965.

"There are no atheists in foxholes," says chaplain William T. (Thomas) Cummings, 38, at a field service on Bataan Peninsula before its fall to the Japanese April 9. Father Cummings will die of dysentery in 1945 aboard a prison ship jammed with captured troops who have little water or air.

communications, media

The Voice of America (VOA) makes its first broadcast to Europe February 24 under the auspices of the 8-month-old U.S. Foreign Information Service (FIS) with announcer William Harlan Hale saying in German, "Here speaks a voice from America" and promising to tell listeners the truth, whether the news is good or bad. President Roosevelt established the service at the suggestion of playwright and presidential speechwriter Robert Sherwood and named Sherwood first director of the FIS. Sherwood has rented studio space at New York, recruited a staff of journalists, hired theatrical producer John Houseman to head up the New York office, and begun producing material for privately-owned U.S. shortwave stations to beam to Europe, having said in 1939, "We are living in an age when communication has achieved fabulous importance. There is a new decisive force in the human race, more powerful than all the tyrants. It is the force of massed thought—thought which has been provoked by words, strongly spoken." The FIS made its first broadcast to Asia in December of last year (in Amoy, Cantonese and Mandarin, and Tagalog), the February 24 broadcast uses medium- and long-range BBC transmitters to relay its signals, and by year's end the VOA is reaching listeners in Afrikaans, Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Farsi, Finnish, Flemish, French, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Thai, and Turkish as well as German and English (see 1943).

Radar provides crucial warning of Japanese air attacks at the battles of Midway and the Coral Sea, but it is conventional radar without magnetrons (see 1940). Maine-born Raytheon Corp. engineer Percy (Le Baron) Spencer, 47, has suggested an innovative manufacturing process that simplifies production and improves performance; his German-born colleague Fritz A. Gross, 31, develops a unique shipboard radar detection system that enemy ships cannot observe, and Raytheon has beaten much larger companies to gain war contracts (see 1943).

The U.S. Supreme Court upholds a New York City ordinance forbidding distribution of printed handbills bearing commercial advertising (Valentine v. Chrestensen). The court hears in arguments March 31 that a Florida man acquired a former U.S. Navy submarine, moored it at a pier on the East River, and printed a handbill to solicit admission-paying visitors; city police halted distribution, and Owen J. Roberts delivers the majority opinion April 13, inventing a "commercial speech" doctrine that will stand for years: "The respondent contends that . . . he was engaged in the dissemination of matter proper for public information . . . If that evasion were successful, every merchant who desires to broadcast advertising leaflets in the streets need only append a civic appeal, or a moral platitude, to achieve immunity from the law's command."

The Office of War Information (OWI) created by President Roosevelt June 13 is headed by Indiana-born CBS commentator and novelist Elmer (Holmes) Davis, 52. The OWI takes over responsibility for the Voice of America, which will soon have 23 transmitters beaming messages in 27 languages.

U.S. forces on Guadalcanal find that the Japanese have broken U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Corps codes, so they use 29 Navajo volunteer "code talkers" to transmit radio messages in their native language; the enemy can never figure out that Washindon be Akalh B-kosilai means "United States Marines" (it is estimated that outside of 50,000 tribespeople only 30 people in the world have any knowledge of Navajo and none is Japanese; Federal officials have tried for generations to suppress the guttural Navajo tongue, which has a complex, irregular syntax and no alphabet, but the volunteers are among those who have kept it alive, and although they lack words for modern military terms they work out a two-tier code in which English words are represented by different Navajo words; e.g., the Navajo word tas-chizzle for swallow means a torpedo plane, jay-sho for buzzard means bomber, da-he-tih-hi for humming bird means fighter-plane, and chay-da-gahi for turtle means tank). With help from the code talkers, Marine commanders are able to issue orders, report on enemy troop movements, and coordinate intricate operations without fear of message interception (see politics [Saipan], 1944).

Radio and sound-recording pioneer Valdemar Poulsen dies at his native Copenhagen in July at age 72.

U.S. patent 2,292,387 issued August 11 to film star Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil covers a secret communications system designed to provide jam-proof wireless control of long-range torpedoes. Lamarr's first husband, Fritz Mandel, was a domineering arms manufacturer who socialized with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini; before escaping to London (by drugging the maid, putting on the maid's uniform, and climbing out a window) she sat in on Mandel's business meetings, learned that his people were trying to find a way to control weapons by radio signals, and realized that changing radio frequencies on a continuous and random basis would protect them from jamming. She met Antheil at a dinner party given by Janet Gaynor, he came up with a system that uses a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies, the two donate the system to the U.S. Navy, it will not be used for torpedo-guidance systems until the 1960s, and the patent will remain classified until 1985, but military computer chips will incorporate the frequency-hopping idea in the late 1950s (see 1957).

The first New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle appears February 15. The Times has hired expert Margaret Petheridge Farrar, now 44, to design the puzzles, and they will appear on a daily basis beginning in 1950. Farrar will continue in the job until she retires in 1968.

Yank begins publication June 17 under the direction of Col. Egbert White, 48, who puts out the weekly armed forces magazine with help from Chattanooga Times general manager Adolph Shelby Ochs, Saturday Evening Post editor Robert Martin Fuoss, and Liberty magazine art editor Alfred Strasser. White worked as a sergeant on Stars and Stripes in 1918 and has risen through the ranks. "The Sad Sack" by former Walt Disney cartoonist George Baker, 26, attracts many readers.

Negro Digest begins monthly publication at Chicago. Arkansas-born publisher-insurance executive John (H.) Harold Johnson, 24, has worked his way up from office boy at the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Co. while studying at the University of Chicago and Northwestern. He has borrowed $500 against his mother's furniture to start his company, his first issue has sales of only 3,000, but circulation will soar to 100,000 when Eleanor Roosevelt writes a piece for its feature series "If I Were a Negro" (seeEbony, 1945).

Houston Chronicle founder Marcellus E. Foster dies of a heart attack at his Houston home April 1 at age 71; newspaper and racing form publisher Moses L. Annenberg is released from Lewisburg Penitentiary June 3 and dies of a brain tumor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., July 20 at age 64. He leaves seven daughters and one son, Walter H. (Hubert), now 34, who carries on the family's business and will make it grow multifold; magazine publisher Condé Nast dies of a heart attack at his native New York September 19 at age 68; "Barney Google" comic-strip creator Billy DeBeck of cancer at Chicago November November 11 at age 52 (Fred Laswell will soon dump Barney, feature his sidekick Snuffy Smith, and carry on the strip until his own death in 2001).

The 116-year-old Paris daily Le Figaro suspends publication November 22 and will not resume until August 1944.

literature

The New York Times Book Review publishes its first bestseller list August 9, having published lists on an intermittent basis for 7 years based on sales figures from one book wholesaler (see 1911).

Nonfiction: "The Myth of Sisyphus" ("Le Mythe de Sisyphe") (philosophical essay) by French man of letters Albert Camus, 29, who has joined the Résistance against German occupation forces; Victory Through Airpower by Alexander de Seversky; The Coming Battle of Germany by magazine publisher William B. Ziff argues that the Allies must use the airplane as an offensive weapon and cargo carrier to overcome German U-boats; Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus by Boston-born Harvard history professor Samuel Eliot Morison, 55, who has made several voyages following the route of the Great Navigator. Morison is appointed historian of naval operations with the rank of lieutenant commander and will write a History of U.S. Naval Operations in World War II that will fill 15 volumes; Man's Poor Relations by anthropologist Earnest A. Hooton; Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race by London-born U.S. anthropologist (Montague Francis) Ashley Montagu, 37, who has studied at Columbia under Franz Boas and notes that there is more genetic variability within races than between races; Letters from Syria by Freya Stark, who works with the British Information Ministry to counter Axis propaganda in Aden, Yemen, Egypt, Iraq, and India; One Man's Meat (essays) by New Yorker magazine writer E. B. White, who will expand the book for a 1944 edition that will remain in print through the end of the century; Our Hearts Were Young and Gay by former Ladies' Home Journal managing editor Emily Kimbrough, 42, and actress Cornelia Otis Skinner, 41; West with the Night by Beryl Markham (see transportation, 1936); Generation of Vipers by Beverly, Mass.-born author Philip (Gordon) Wylie, 40, introduces the term "Momism" to describe emasculating American matriarchy.

Writer Stefan Zweig commits suicide in exile at Petrópilis outside Rio de Janeiro February 22 at age 62 along with his second wife; Léon Daudet dies at Saint-Remy-de-Provence July 1 at age 74; philosopher (and former Cornell University president) Jacob Gould Schurman at New York August 12 at age 88.

Fiction: Flight to Arras (Pilote de la guerre) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; The Stranger (L'etranger) by Albert Camus; The Family of Pascual Duarte (La familia de Pascual Duarte) by Spanish novelist Camilo José Cela (Trulock), 26; Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner; My Uncle Dudley by Nebraska-born novelist Wright Morris, 32; The Company She Keeps by Seattle-born New York novelist Mary (Therese) McCarthy, 30; The Robber Bridegroom (novella) by Eudora Welty; Pied Piper by English novelist Nevil Shute (Nevil Shute Norway), 43; To Be a Pilgrim by Joyce Cary; The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck; The Just and the Unjust by James Gould Cozzens; Breakfast with the Nikolides by Rumer Godden; Return to the Future by Sigrid Undset, who escaped to America 2 years ago when German forces invaded Norway; The Road to the City (La Strada che va in citta) (two short novels) by Italian novelist Allesandra Tourninbarte (Natalia Ginzburg), 26, daughter of physician-biology professor Carlo Levi, whose own novel will appear in 1945; Tales from Bective Bridge (stories) by Irish short-story writer Mary Lavin, 30 (with an introduction by Lord Dunsany, who has encouraged her); Frenchman's Creek by Daphne du Maurier; Dragon Seed by Pearl S. Buck; Meet Me in St. Louis (stories) by Sally Benson; Put Out More Flags and Work Suspended by Evelyn Waugh; "The Catbird Seat" (story) by James Thurber in the November 14 issue of the New Yorker magazine; Assignment in Brittany by Helen MacInnes; Lay On, Mac Duff! by Michigan-born mystery novelist Charlotte Armstrong, 37, whose detective MacDougal Duff is a former history professor.

Novelist Albert Payson Terhune dies at his New Jersey farm, Sunnybank, February 18 at age 69; Robert Musil at Geneva April 15 at age 62. He fled Germany after the 1938 Anschluss and was refused refuge by the United States.

Poetry: And Suddenly It's Night (Ed e subito sera) by Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo, 41; The Great Hunger by Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, 37, whose 1939 book A Green Fool was an autobiography; Blood for a Stranger by Tennessee poet Randall Jarrell, 28; Person, Place, and Thing by Baltimore-born poet Karl (originally Carl Jay) Shapiro, 28, who was drafted in the army late last year and is serving in the South Pacific; Poems by Oklahoma-born Harvard English instructor John Berryman, 27; The Garden Is Political by Nova Scotia-born U.S. poet John Malcolm Brinnin, 35; Wake Island by Muriel Rukeyser; Brownstone Eclogues by Conrad Aiken; Street Songs by Edith Sitwell.

Juvenile: The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton.

Twelve Little Golden Books are published for U.S. children. Each is 42 pages long and priced at 25¢; sales reach 1.5 million copies within 5 months.

Author Carolyn Wells dies at New York March 26 at age 79, having written some 170 books, including mysteries and humorous writings as well as children's books; L. M. Montgomery dies at Toronto April 24 at age 67.

art

Painting: L'Aubade and Reclining Nude (his mistress Dora Maar) by Pablo Picasso; Dancer in an Armchair with Checkered Floor by Henri Matisse, who depicts his dancer friend Carla Avogadro; Patience by Georges Braque; L'Oiseau bleu, Bath Mitten, and Still Life with Bottle by Pierre Bonnard; Male and Female by Jackson Pollock; Woman by Willem de Kooning, whose work shows the influence of Picasso; American Clipper (watercolor) by Lyonel Feininger. Walter Sickert dies at Bath January 23 at age 81; Grant Wood at Iowa City February 12 at age 49. An Art of This Century exhibition opens at New York October 20 under the direction of copper heiress Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim, 44, who has married German painter Max Ernst.

Sculpture: Construction from a Circle by Swiss sculptor-graphic artist Max Bill, 33, who has studied architect at Germany's Bauhaus and will soon become active as an industrial designer; Francesca by Italian sculptor Giacomo Manzu (originally Manzoni), 33, whose seated nude wins the Grand Prix of the Rome Quadrienalle (he has been creating variations on nude girls seated on kitchen chairs since 1933, cardinals in their tall mitres since 1936, and had his first one-man show 5 years ago).

Sculptress-museum founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney dies of heart disease at New York April 18 at age 67. She leaves a bequest that will be used to build a new Whitney Museum of American Art (see 1966).

photography

Photographer William H. Jackson dies at New York June 30 at age 99, having made his reputation in the 1870s with pictures of the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, and other western landscapes.

theater, film

Theater: Uncle Harry by Welsh-born playwright Thomas Job, 40, 5/20 at New York's Broadhurst Theater (to Hudson Theater 9/12), with Eva La Gallienne, Joseph Schildkraut, Chicago-born actor Karl Malden (originally Malden Sekulovich), 28, 430 perfs.; The Apollo of Bellac (L'Apollon de Bellac) by Jean Genet 6/16 at Rio de Janeiro; Janie by Josephine Bentham and Herschel Williams 9/10 at New York's Henry Miller Theater, with Gwen Anderson, Clare Foley, Herbert Evers, Nancy Cushman, 321 perfs.; The Eve of St. Mark by Maxwell Anderson 10/7 at New York's Cort Theater, with Aline MacMahon, Nichols, N.Y.-born actor William Prince, 29, Matt Crowley, Martin Ritt, 291 perfs.; Without Love by Philip Barry 11/10 at New York's St. James Theater, with Katharine Hepburn, Elliott Nugent, Audrey Christie, 113 perfs.; The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder 11/18 at New York's Plymouth Theater, with E. G. Marshall, Florence Eldridge, Fredric March, Florence Reed, Tallulah Bankhead, Montgomery Clift, 359 perfs.; Queen after Death (La Reine morte; ou Comment on tue les femmes) by Henri de Montherlant 12/8 at the Comédie-Française in occupied Paris.

Actor Otis Skinner dies at his New York home January 4 at age 83; actor-playwright J. Harry Benrimo at New York March 26 at age 67; playwright Rudolph Besier at Elmhurst, England, June 13 at age 63; actor-playwright John Willard at Los Angeles August 30 at age 56; producer Harrison Grey Fiske at New York September 3 at age 81; actress Helen Westley at Middlebush, N.J., December 12 at age 67.

Radio: Suspense 6/16 on CBS with stories played by leading actors (to 1962); It Pays to Be Ignorant 6/25 on New York's WOR-Mutual station with vaudeville veteran Tom Howard, 56, as quiz master in a spoof on Information Please. Howard's daughter Ruth and her husband, Robert Howell, came up with the idea while working on an out-of-town station, and the panelists (George Shelton, Lulu McConnell, and Harry McNaughton) have trouble answering questions such as "What color was George Washington's White Horse?" and "Which player on a baseball team wears a catcher's mask?" The show will move to WABC and then to the CBS network (to 1949; it will air under the name Ignorance Is Bliss in Britain); The Abbott and Costello Show 10/8 on NBC with Asbury Park, N.J.-born comedian William "Bud" Abbott, 47, and his Paterson, N.J.-born partner Lou Costello (originally Louis Cristillo), 36. Both are vaudeville veterans and will gain fame for their "Who's on first?" routine.

The USO that has been entertaining servicemen since last year begins sending performers overseas to boost morale as the Axis powers threaten to take over the world. Comedians Bob Hope, Jerry Colonna, Jack Benny, Joe E. Brown, Danny Kaye, and vaudeville veterans will make the troops laugh; the Andrews Sisters will be among those who sing for them; Bing Crosby, Betty Grable, Dorothy Lamour, Lana Turner, Edward G. Robinson, and Frances Langford are among the screen stars who will rub shoulders with the men; and thousands of young women on the home front will dance with draftees and enlistees at USO clubs throughout the war (by June of next year the USO will have 739,000 volunteers, and by March 1944 it will have 3,035 recreational clubs). German, Italian, and Japanese soldiers and sailors will have no such morale builders.

Films: David Hand's Bambi with Walt Disney animation; Michael Curtiz's Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart ("Here's looking at you, sweetheart"), Swedish-born actress Ingrid Bergman, 27 ("Play it, Sam"), Paul Henreid, Claude Rains ("Round up the usual suspects"), Conrad Veidt, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Dooley Wilson, screenplay by Howard Koch, Julius Epstein, 34, and Epstein's brother Philip (Julius receives $15,208 and no residuals); Lucas Demare's The Gaucho War (La Guerra Gaucha); Noël Coward and David Lean's In Which We Serve with Coward, John Mills, 34, Celia Johnson, 34, Michael Wilding, 30 (score by Coward); Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons with Joseph Cotten, Beverly Hills, Calif.-born actor Tim Holt (Charles John Holt Jr.), 24, Indiana-born actress Anne Baxter, 19, Dolores Costello, Agnes Moorehead; George Stevens's The Talk of the Town with Jean Arthur, Ronald Colman, Cary Grant. Also: Raoul Walsh's Gentleman Jim with Errol Flynn, Canadian-born actress (Margaret) Alexis (Fitzsimmons) Smith, 21; Stuart Heisler's The Glass Key with Brian Donlevy, Veronica Lake, Hot Springs, Ark.-born actor Alan (Walbridge) Ladd, 28; Robert Stevenson's Joan of Paris with Michelle Morgan (Simone Roussel), 22, Trieste-born actor Paul Henreid (originally von Hernreid), 34; Lloyd Bacon's Larceny, Inc. with Edward G. Robinson, St. Joseph, Mo.-born actress Jane Wyman (originally Sarah Jane Fulks), 28, Broderick Crawford, Jack Carson; Billy Wilder's The Major and the Minor with Ginger Rogers, Ray Milland; Elliott Nugent's The Male Animal with Henry Fonda, Olivia de Havilland; William Wyler's Mrs. Miniver with Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon; Irving Rapper's Now, Voyager with Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Gladys Cooper; Luchino Visconti's Ossessione with Massimo Girotti, Clara Calamia; Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's One of Our Aircraft Is Missing with Godfrey Tearle, Eric Portman; Preston Sturges's The Palm Beach Story with Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrae, Rudy Vallée; Mervyn LeRoy's Random Harvest with Ronald Colman, Greer Garson; Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be with Jack Benny, Carole Lombard; George Stevens's Woman of the Year with Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy.

German authorities in occupied France forbid showing of English-language films; the last one shown is Frank Capra's 1939 masterpiece Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Carole Lombard dies at age 32 along with her mother and 20 other passengers in a TWA plane crash at Las Vegas January 16 as she flies home to her husband, Clark Gable, from a USO engagement; John Barrymore collapses during a rehearsal for a radio show and dies of pneumonia at Hollywood May 29 at age 63; director James Cruze dies of a heart ailment at Hollywood September 3 at age 58; May Robson at her Beverly Hills home October 20 at age 84; Edna May Oliver of an intestinal disorder at Hollywood November 9 at age 59; playwright Carl Sternheim at German-occupied Brussels November 3 at age 64.

The Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News syndicate acquires Hedda Hopper's Hollywood gossip column and gives it wide distribution (see 1936). Hopper feuds with Louella Parsons and other rivals.

music

Hollywood musicals: Michael Curtiz's Yankee Doodle Dandy with James Cagney as George M. Cohan, choreography by LeRoy Prinz; Busby Berkeley's For Me and My Gal with Judy Garland, Gene Kelly; David Butler's The Road to Morocco with Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour, music by James Van Heusen, lyrics by Johnny Burke, songs that include "Constantly," "Moonlight Becomes You," and the title song; George Marshall's Star-Spangled Rhythm with Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour, Ray Milland, Veronica Lake, Beverly Hills-born actress Susan Hayward (Edythe Marrener), 23, Alan Ladd, Paulette Goddard, Cecil B. De Mille, songs that include "That Old Black Magic" by Harold Arlen, music by Johnny Mercer; William A. Seiter's You Were Never Lovelier with Fred Astaire, New York-born actress Rita Hayworth (Margarita Carmen Cansino), 23, music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Johnny Mercer, songs that include "Dearly Beloved," "I'm Old Fashioned," and the title song; the late Victor Schertzinger's The Fleet's In with William Holden, Dorothy Lamour, Betty Hutton, Eddie Bracken, music by Schertzinger (who died at age 52 while completing the film last October), lyrics by Johnny Mercer, songs that include "Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry" and "Tangerine"; Irving Cummings's Springtime in the Rockies with Betty Grable, Carmen Miranda, New York-born actor Cesar Romero, 35, Brooklyn, N.Y.-born comedian Jackie Gleason, 26, Charlotte Greenwood, songs that include "I Had the Craziest Dream" by Harry James, lyrics by Mack Gordon; Mark Sandrich's Holiday Inn with Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, music and lyrics by Irving Berlin, songs that include "White Christmas," a holiday number that will break all marks for phonograph record sales.

Stage musicals: Star and Garter 1/24 at New York's Music Box Theater, with Bobby Clark, stripteaser Gypsy Rose Lee (Rose Louise Hovick), 18, Georgia Sothern in an extravaganza mounted by showman Mike Todd, songs that include Harold Arlen's "Blues in the Night," 609 perfs.; By Jupiter 6/2 at the Shubert Theater, with Ray Bolger, music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart, 427 perfs.; Sky High 6/4 at London's Phoenix Theatre, with Hermione Baddeley, Hermione Gingold, Walter Cresham, 149 perfs.; This Is the Army 7/24 at the Broadway Theater, with an all-soldier cast for the benefit of the Army Emergency Relief Fund, music, book, and lyrics by Irving Berlin, songs that include "I Left My Heart at the Stage-Door Canteen," the title song, and songs from Berlin's 1918 musical Yip-Yip-Yaphank, 113 perfs.; Show Time (vaudeville revue) 9/16 at the Broadhurst Theater (after 20 weeks at Los Angeles and San Francisco), with George Jessel, Jack Haley, Ella Logan, the De Marcos, the Berry Brothers, book by Fred F. Finklehoffe, 342 perfs.

Joe Weber of Weber and Fields dies after a 2-month illness at Los Angeles May 10 at age 74 (see Fields, 1941); Effie Ellsler dies of a heart attack at Hollywood October 9 at age 87; Dame Marie Tempest after a brief illness at London October 15 at age 78; George M. Cohan at his Fifth Avenue, New York, home November 5 at age 64 (he is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery—just 45 minutes from Broadway); comedienne-director Laura Hope Crews dies after a month's illness at New York November 13 at age 62.

Opera: Philadelpia-born soprano Margaret Harshaw, 33, makes her Metropolitan Opera debut 11/22 singing the role of the second Norn in the 1876 Wagner opera Die Götterdämmerung. She will remain with the Met until 1963; New York-born tenor Jan Peerce (originally Jacob Pincus Perelmuth), 36, makes his Metropolitan Opera debut 11/29 singing the role of Alfredo in the 1853 Verdi opera La Traviata.

Soprano Emma Calve dies at Millau, France, January 6 at age 83.

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in Nazi Germany gives a debut recital at Berlin's Beethoven Saal; she will be the outstanding lieder singer for decades.

Ballet: Romeo and Juliet 4/6 at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, with Jerome Robbins (née Rabinowitz), 23, Hugh Laing, Antony Tudor, Alicia Markova, Sono Osato, music by the late Frederick Delius, choreography by Tudor; Pillar of Fire 4/8 at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, with Hugh Laing, Antony Tudor, Nora Kaye (as Hagar), music by Arnold Schoenberg, choreography by Tudor; Rodeo 10/16 at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, with Agnes George de Mille, 37, music by Aaron Copland, choreography by de Mille; Metamorphoses 11/25 at New York's City Center, with Tanaquil LeClerq, Todd Bolender, music by Paul Hindemith, choreography by George Balanchine; Gayeneh 12/9 at Molotov, with music (including a "Saber Dance") by Armenian Soviet composer Aram Khatchaturian, 39.

Choreographer Michel Fokine dies of pneumonia at New York August 22 at age 62.

First performances: Diversions on a Theme for Piano for Left Hand and Orchestra by Benjamin Britten 1/16 at Philadelphia's Academy of Music (see Wittgenstein, 1917); Imaginary Landscape No. 3 by Los Angeles-born composer John (Milton) Cage (Jr.), 29, 3/1 at Chicago (scored for electric oscillator, buzzers of variable frequency, Balinese gongs, generator whine, coil, tin cans, marimba); Symphony No. 7 (Leningrad) by Dmitri Shostakovich (who was airlifted out of the beleaguered city last year) 3/1 at Moscow; Second Essay for Orchestra by Samuel Barber 4/16 at New York's Carnegie Hall; Lincoln Portrait (Symphonic Poem) by Aaron Copland, Mark Twain by Jerome Kern, and The Mayor La Guardia Waltzes by Virgil Thomson 5/14 at Cincinnati; Bachianos Brasileiras No. 9 for Orchestra by Heitor Villa-Lobos 6/6 at New York; Choros No. 6, No. 9, and No. 11 by Villa-Lobos 7/5 at Rio de Janeiro.

Stereophonic sound pioneer Alan Blumlein dies in late June at age 38 along with some colleagues and everyone else aboard when their Halifax bomber crashes while they conduct tests on what will eventually become the H2S blind-bombing radar system.

Popular songs: "Warsaw Concerto" by English composer Richard Addinsell, 38; "When the Lights Go on Again" by Eddie Seiler, Sol Marcus, Bennie Benjemen; "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition" by Frank Loesser; "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" by Duke Ellington, lyrics by Bob Russell; "A String of Pearls" by Jerry Gray, lyrics by Eddie De Lange; "In the Blue of Evening" by Alfred A. D'Artega, lyrics by Tom Adair; "Tango Neighborhood" ("Barrio de Tango") by Argentinian composer Anibal (Carmelo) Troilo, 28, lyrics by Homero Manzi; "Mister Five by Five" by Gene De Paul and Don Ray (for the film Behind the Eight Ball); "My Devotion" by Ric Holman and Johnny Napton; "There Will Never Be Another You" by Harry Warren, lyrics by Mack Gordon (for the film Iceland); "I've Heard that Song Before" by Jule Styne, lyrics by Sammy Cahn (for the film Youth on Parade); "Serenade in Blue" by Harry Warren, lyrics by Mack Gordon; "Who Wouldn't Love You?" by Carl Fischer, lyrics by Bill Carey; "Jingle Jangle Jingle" by Joseph J. Lelley, lyrics by Frank Loesser; "One Dozen Roses" by bandleader Dick Jergens and Walter Donovan, lyrics by Roger Lewis and Country Washburn. North Dakota-born vocalist Peggy Lee (originally Norma Deloris Egstrom), 22, records Joe McCoy's "Why Don't You Do Right" with Benny Goodman's band; the Andrews Sisters sing "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" by Lew Brown, Charlie Tobias, and Sam H. Sept in Edward Cline's film Private Buckaroo; Texas-born vocalist Ella Mae Morse, 18, sings "Cow-Cow Boogie" for the newly-established Capitol Record label and has a million-copy bestseller (she also records "Mr. Five-by-Five").

The first "golden record" is presented February 10 to Glenn Miller, whose 1941 hit "Chattanooga Choo Choo" has been sprayed with gold by RCA-Victor in recognition of the record's having sold more than 1 million copies. Miller disbands his orchestra late in the year and will join the Army Air Force as a major, organize a large orchestra for the USO, and broadcast to troops in every theater of the war (but see 1944).

Chicago-born American Federation of Musicians president James C. (Caesar) Petrillo, 50, calls a general strike against U.S. record companies for failing to pay royalties to musicians. President Roosevelt protests that music is essential to wartime morale, but the strike will continue for 27 months until the companies agree to meet the AFM's demands. Petrillo will remain AFM president until 1958, establishing the Music Performance Trust Fund to pay for free benefit concerts nationwide, keeping musicians employed, and contributing to charitable causes while he works to protect his membership from being hurt by technological changes in the entertainment and recording industries.

Songwriter Fred Fisher hangs himself at his New York home January 14 at age 45, having suffered from an incurable disease; songwriter Frank Churchill's health fails and he kills himself with a shotgun on his ranch near Newhall, Calif., May 14 at age 41; former Duke Ellington jazz bass Jimmy Blanton dies of tuberculosis at Monrovia, Calif. July 30 at age 21 (approximate).

sports

Frederick R. "Ted" Schroeder, 20, wins in men's singles at Forest Hills, Pauline Betz, 22, in women's singles.

Virginia-born golfer Samuel Jackson "Sam" Snead, 30, wins his first PGA championship, having won the Canadian Open three times since 1938; Byron Nelson wins his second Masters Tournament victory.

The Boston Braves call up their Buffalo-born, left-handed farm-team pitcher Warren Edward Spahn, 21, who appears in four games before being drafted into the army (see 1945).

The St. Louis Cardinals win the World Series, defeating the New York Yankees 4 games to 1.

everyday life

President Roosevelt institutes year-round daylight saving time ("War Time") beginning February 2 (see 1918). It will continue until September 30, 1945 (see 1966).

Chess master José Raul Capablanca suffers a stroke while watching a game at the Manhattan Chess Club March 7 and dies the next day at age 53.

The WAVES wear uniforms designed by Mainbocher, who moved to New York 2 years ago. The WACS wear uniforms designed by Hattie Carnegie (see 1919), who has modified her "little Carnegie suit."

Claire McCardell designs stretch leotards to provide an extra layer of warmth for college girls living in dormitories that are chilly because of wartime fuel shortages (see 1938). She will promote the use of ballet slippers for street wear to counter shoe rationing and will soon design a denim wraparound housedress (she will call it the "popover") intended for women whose servants have left for jobs in war plants.

French designer Pauline Trigère, 29, goes into business with her brother and sister at New York, where she has worked since her arrival from Paris in 1937. She will become famous for the understated look of her long wool dinner sheaths and short-sleeved coats while favoring for her own attire a leopard-skin coat with leopard-skin skirt.

Fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert establishes the Coty American Fashion Critics' Awards, having married New York Journal-American publisher Seymour Berkson in 1936 and founded the International Best Dressed List in 1940; the first award goes to designer Norman Norell, who was fired by Hattie Carnegie after creating the costumes for the 1941 musical Lady in the Dark and teamed up with Seventh Avenue garment maker Anthony Traina to create Traina-Norell; he will work with Traina until 1960 to make the Seventh Avenue garment industry rival pre-war Paris as a fashion center.

Flames engulf Boston's Cocoanut Grove nightclub on Saturday night, November 28. Its exits have been bolted since Prohibition days, when it was a speakeasy, either to protect it from police raids or to keep patrons from leaving without having paid their tabs; nearly 1,000 patrons pack the club, 492 die of burns or smoke inhalation in 8 to 10 minutes, and 270 are injured in the worst such incident since the Iroquois Theater fire of 1903 (see Natchez fire, 1940). The dead include Vincennes, Ind.-born cowboy film star Buck Jones (originally Charles Gebhardt), 43, and more than 50 servicemen who have been enjoying the club's $1.50 dinner, dance band, and drinks (no cover charge). The horror will lead to the passage and enforcement of stricter safety laws for restaurants and nightclubs.

U.S. marriage rates increase dramatically as women wed men of draft age (some of whom marry in hopes of getting deferment); wives of GIs receive $50 allotment checks and $10,000 life-insurance policies.

The U.S. Supreme Court rules 7 to 2 December 21 in Williams v. State of North Carolina that Nevada divorces are valid throughout the United States.

crime

New York's City Council outlaws pinball machines in a law that takes effect in January. Mayor La Guardia has pushed through the measure, saying that schoolboys are stealing nickels and dimes from their mothers' pocketbooks to feed the machines that are feeding the underworld (slot-machine "king" Frank Costello relocates his activities to New Orleans). The mayor smashes machines with a sledgehammer for news photographers; most of the confiscated machines are dumped into the Atlantic, and the ban will continue until 1976, when a player will demonstrate to the City Council that new flippers and levers have made pinball a game of skill, not chance.

U.S. Naval Intelligence officers approach Charles "Lucky" Luciano at Dannemora Prison in the wake of the February 9 S.S. Normandie fire, and mobster Meyer Lansky persuades Luciano to have his men co-operate with the government in preventing sabotage on the mob-controlled Manhattan docks (the Brooklyn docks are largely controlled by Carlo Gambino, now 40). Luciano is transferred from Dannemora to a minimum-security facility.

Criminal elements associated with the Mafia steal gasoline- and food-ration stamps, selling them on the black market and enriching themselves as they did in the Prohibition years before 1933. They also begin to develop a profitable business in blackmailing homosexual men prominent in business, the law, and government.

architecture, real estate

Architect Ralph Adams Cram dies at Boston September 22 at age 78.

environment

Camp David outside Thurmont, Md., has its beginnings in the Shangri-La retreat built for President Roosevelt on a 134-acre site cleared 3 years ago in the Catoctin Mountain Park, a 90-minute drive from the White House. Initially named for the Tibetan paradise in James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon, the area will be enlarged to 200 acres, it will be surrounded by maximum-security fencing, and when Gen. Eisenhower becomes president in 1953 he will rename the hideaway after a grandson; later presidents will use Camp David to varying degrees, sometimes for summit conferences.

Hooker Chemicals and Plastics Co. acquires Love Canal north of Niagara Falls from the Niagara Power and Development Co. Begun in 1892 by entrepreneur William T. Love to divert water from the upper Niagara River for an electric power plant, it was never completed; the city of Niagara Falls bought it at public auction in 1920 to use as a municipal landfill, Hooker will use it as a dump for nearly 22,000 tons of chemical waste that will include benzylchlorides, hexachlorocylohexanes, chlorobenzenes, dodecyl, and sodium sulfides, creating dikes across the canal to impound areas of water (see 1953).

An earthquake in Turkey November 26 registers 7.6 on the Richter scale and leaves an estimated 4,000 dead; a second quake December 20 registers 7.3 and kills somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000 Turks.

agriculture

Soviet geneticist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov dies of malnutrition at Saratov January 26 at age 55 in the concentration camp where he has been confined since 1940. Vavilov's anti-intellectual rival T. D. Lysenko advises Josef Stalin to switch from traditional grain crops to millet, which requires less moisture.

J. R. Geigy's New York office receives a 100-kilogram shipment of the "miracle powder" DDT from its home office at Basel (see Müller, 1939). It goes almost unnoticed until company chemist Victor Froelicher translates the claims for DDT into English and sends a sample to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The army has given the USDA's entomology research station at Orlando, Fla., responsibility for developing new pesticides that will protect troops from malaria, typhus, and other insect-borne diseases; field tests quickly demonstrate DDT's high degree of effectiveness against mosquitoes and lice (see 1944).

Japanese-American farmers interned under Executive Order 9066 see others take over their fields. They have tilled only 3.9 percent of California's farmland but have controlled 42 percent of the state's commercial truck crops—22 percent of the U.S. total—including as much as 90 percent of California's artichokes, cauliflower, celery, peppers, spinach, strawberries, and tomatoes. Rumors have circulated about "Jap" flower and vegetable fields planted "arrowlike" pointing to nearby military installations. The Native Sons of the Golden West and likeminded "patriots" have coveted the truck gardens, fruit stands, grocery stores, restaurants, and other property of the now dispossessed Japanese-Americans, many of whom work as volunteers in the sugar-beet fields of Utah, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming and are credited with saving the crop. The first Mexican "braceros" (farm workers) arrive in California as the internment of Japanese workers creates a demand for agricultural labor.

Florida becomes the leading U.S. producer of oranges, passing California.

U.S. farmers are generally able to obtain all the gasoline they need for their tractors, trucks, and other machines despite rationing.

Elvin C. Stakman of the Rockefeller Foundation persuades Washington State plant pathologist J. George Harrar, 36, to leave his new post as head of the state university's plant pathology department at the end of the school year and lead the program to redevelop Mexico's rural economy (see 1941; 1943).

Americans cultivate "Victory Gardens" in backyards and communal plots as vegetables become scarce, especially in California, where two-thirds of the vegetable crop has been grown by Japanese-Americans. Forty percent of all U.S. vegetables are produced in nearly 20 million Victory Gardens but the number will fall as interest flags.

Organic Gardening and Farming begins publication at Emmaus, Pa., where electrical equipment manufacturer and dramatist manqué J. I. (Jerome Irving) Rodale, 43, bought an old farm 2 years ago. One of eight children of a grocer on New York's Lower East Side, Rodale was a sickly boy who built up his strength with body-building and self-improvement courses. He has read the work of English agronomist Sir Albert Howard (see 1940) and convinced himself that organic farming (a term he invented) has been held back by a conspiracy of money-grubbing chemical fertilizer and pesticide manufacturers, who make large grants to the agricultural colleges. Department of Agriculture experts say highly mechanized modern farming would be impossible if it were dependent on bulky organic fertilizers, which are prohibitively inefficient to ship and handle, and would require far more manual labor, but Rodale discounts such objections. He sent out 10,000 flyers to farmers 2 years ago in an effort to get subscribers for a magazine that he called Organic Farming, failed to sell even one subscription, has changed the magazine's name, and finds some modest success among elderly gardeners (see nutrition [Prevention magazine], 1950).

Britons "Dig for Victory" and raise vegetables in backyard gardens.

food availability

Famine kills some 1.6 million Bengalese as fungus disease ruins the rice crop near Bombay (Mumbai).

Oxfam (initially Oxford Committee for Famine Relief) is founded by Oxford University classical scholar Gilbert Murray, now 76, and others to help families whose lives have been destroyed by the war. Groups in towns all over the United Kingdom collect parcels of food and clothing, and Oxfam will become a worldwide organization aimed at fighting hunger.

Millions of Europeans live in semi-starvation as German troops cut off areas in the Ukraine and North Caucasus that have produced half of Soviet wheat and pork production. Food supplies fall to starvation levels in German-occupied Greece, Poland, and parts of Yugoslavia.

U.S. sugar rationing begins in May after consumers have created scarcities by hoarding 100-pound bags and commercial users have filled their warehouses. One-sixth of U.S. sugar supplies have come from the Philippines, now in Japanese hands. Ration boards ask householders to state how much sugar they have stockpiled and ration stamps are deducted to compensate; the weekly ration averages eight ounces per person but will rise to 12 ounces. Soft drink companies are allowed enough sugar to meet quotas of 50 to 80 percent of the production attained in the base year 1941, but with no limit on sales to the armed forces. Coca-Cola Co. will set up small bottling plants overseas to keep servicemen supplied with 5¢ bottles of its beverage.

Britain begins rationing sweets July 26.

U.S. hoarding of coffee leads to rationing, which begins in November with consumers limited to one pound every 5 weeks (enough for one cup per day).

nutrition

Forty-two percent of U.S. white bread is enriched with B vitamins and iron, up from 30 percent last year. Louisiana and South Carolina enact laws requiring that corn staples be enriched.

British flour extraction rates rise to 85 percent to stretch wheat supplies. The higher extraction rate raises levels of vitamins and minerals in British bread (which remains unrationed; see 1917). Frederick James Marquis, Lord Woolton, 59, has been food minister since 1940 and will be credited with keeping Britain fed during Hitler's campaign to starve her out.

Dublin has an epidemic of rickets, caused by eating whole-grain bread: the phytic acid in wheat bran blocks absorption of calcium, and this, combined with the fact that so many Dubliners get little calcium to begin with, results in fully half the city's children suffering from the deficiency disease.

Metropolitan Life Insurance Company of New York issues tables of "ideal" weights, giving figures for men and women of different "frame size" classes at different heights. Actuaries have said for at least 20 years that an applicant is a much better risk if he or she weighs 20 pounds below average and a much worse risk if he weighs even 10 pounds above average. The Met Life tables have an age scale that goes up to 30, the assumption being that weight gain is inevitable in middle age, and the "ideal" weights will be found to be far too high (see 1959).

consumer protection

U.S. troops stationed in Britain are forbidden to drink local milk, which is not pasteurized. Many diseases that affect Britons are ascribed to unpasteurized milk (see 1900).

food and drink

British and U.S. families change their eating habits as domestic servants leave to take jobs in war plants, shipyards, hospitals, and the like; many housewives take such jobs themselves, and sales of convenience foods increase as women have less time to spend in the kitchen.

A General Maximum Price Regulation Act voted by Congress April 28 freezes 60 percent of U.S. food items at store-by-store March price levels. Food prices have shot up by 53 percent since Pearl Harbor: apples sell at 10¢ each, a head of lettuce 28¢, a watermelon $2.50, oranges $1/doz.

U.S. troops carry K rations packed by Chicago's Wrigley Co. Named for University of Minnesota nutritionist Ancel Keys, 38, they contain "defense" biscuits and compressed Graham biscuits, canned meat or substitute, three tablets of sugar, four cigarettes, and a stick of chewing gum in each combat ration. The breakfast ration includes also a fruit bar and soluble coffee, the dinner ration flavored and plain dextrose tablets and a packet of lemon-juice powder, the supper ration bouillon powder and a bar of concentrated chocolate called "Ration D." Religious groups have helped to fund a study conducted by Keys at the university's Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene; it is intended to help the Allies cope with concentration-camp survivors, refugees, and prisoner-of-war camp survivors who have lived under circumstances bordering on starvation; Keys has used volunteer conscientious objectors, and they have subsisted on carefully measured but meager rations of dark bread, macaroni, potatoes, rutabaga, and turnips—the kinds of foods that refugees might scavenge (see nutrition, 1953).

Instant Maxwell House coffee has its beginnings in the soluble coffee for K rations developed for the armed forces by General Foods (see Nescafé, 1938).

The Chemex coffeemaker introduced by the New York-based Chemex Corp. is a simple, functional drip brewer designed by German chemist and artist Peter Schlumbohm, 46 (see Silex, 1915); made of an hourglass-shaped piece of Pyrex, it has a wood-and-leather handgrip at its middle but is hard to clean. The Melitta cone-drip system invented in 1908 will not be introduced in America until 1963; most Americans will continue meanwhile to drink inferior percolator coffee.

The U.S. Army announces that it will offer a $750,000 contract to anyone able to supply it in quantity with a cheap, soluble orange juice powder (see 1945; Minute Maid, 1947).

U.S. soft drink companies are allowed enough sugar to meet quotas of 50 to 80 percent of the production attained in the base year 1941 but with no limit on sales to the armed forces.

Kellogg's Raisin Bran, introduced by Kellogg Co., is 10.6 percent sugar (see 1928; Sugar Frosted Flakes, 1952).

Dannon Yogurt is introduced at New York by Swiss-born Spanish emigré Joe Metzger, who goes into business with Isaac Carasso. Metzger employs his son Juan, 23, at the company's Bronx factory, which initially turns out 200 eight-ounce jars per day for sale at 11¢ each, mostly to the ethnic local yogurt market, but Dannon will relocate to Long Island City next year and increase production.

Idaho potato processor John Richard "Jack" Simplot, 33, wins a government contract to supply dehydrated potatoes to the armed forces. Simplot dropped out of school at age 14, sorted potatoes, rented 40 acres of land near Declo, raised hogs to supplement the income he derived from growing potatoes, plowed back his profits, and soon became the nation's largest shipper of fresh potatoes. A millionaire by age 30, he built a dehydrator last year and by 1945 will have supplied about 33 million pounds of dehydrated potatoes to the military (see frozen french fries, 1953).

Dairy companies reduce milk deliveries to alternate days by government order to conserve rubber, gasoline, trucks, and manpower; in some cities, horse-drawn milk wagons reappear.

population

The Planned Parenthood Federation created January 29 focuses on child spacing and making reproductive health information more widely available (see Sanger, 1927). Members of the Birth Control Federation of America have decided to rename the organization created in 1939 through a merger of Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League and the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau (see 1955).

Japan encourages large families by rewarding mothers who have borne many children and displays slogans urging women to reproduce. The government distributes maternity memoranda booklets to promote healthy deliveries and infant care.

1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950

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Astronomy

Static detected by British army physicist (James) Stanley Hey [b. Lake District, England, May 3, 1909] and his colleagues on February 27-28 is identified as coming from a solar flare -- the first recognition that flares emit radio waves. The static had previously been attributed to intentional jamming by the Germans. See also 1946 Astronomy.

Grote Reber makes the first radio maps of the universe, locating individual radio sources, including the radio galaxy Cygnus A, about 700,000,000 light-years away. See also 1946 Astronomy.

Salvador Luria, Italian-American microbiologist, obtains the first good electron photomicrographs of a bacteriophage. See also 1916 Biology; 1945 Biology. (See biography.)

Ulf von Euler discovers the neurotransmitter piperidine. See also 1935 Biology; 1946 Biology.

Konrad Emil Bloch [b. Neisse, Germany, January 21, 1912, d. Burlington, Massachusetts, October 15, 2000] and David Rittenberg discovered that the two-carbon compound acetic acid is the major building block in the 30 or more steps in the body's formation of cholesterol, a waxlike alcohol found in all animal cells. See also 1964 Biology.

American chemist Louis Fieser [b. Columbus, Ohio, 1899, d. 1977] develops napalm, jellied gasoline that can be used as an incendiary weapon.

John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry complete the ABC or Atanasoff-Berry Computer, considered the prototype of all later electronic computer designs. It uses binary arithmetic, logic circuits, and a form of memory. However, the ABC is not fully operational when Atanasoff and Berry are called to other duties connected with the war effort. The basic ideas of the ABC are passed on to the designers of ENIAC, who improve on them. See also 1939 Computers; 1945 Computers.

William Bradford Shockley [b. London, February 13, 1910, d. Palo Alto, California, August 12, 1989] starts his research at Bell Labs on semiconductors. It results in the development of the transistor in 1947. On December 29, 1939, Shockley had noted in his laboratory notebook that it should be possible to replace vacuum tubes with semiconductors. See also 1947 Electronics.

On December 2 the message "the Italian navigator has entered the New World" is used to signal start-up of the first nuclear reactor, a controlled chain reaction in a pile of uranium and graphite at the University of Chicago designed by Enrico Fermi. See also 1939 Physics; 1943 Energy.

The British government begins building the domes that house radar antennas from fiberglass, one of the first large-scale applications of this composite material formed from glass fibers embedded in a polyester resin. See also 1937 Materials.

American chemist Frank Harold Spedding [b. Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, October 22, 1902, d. December 15, 1984], a specialist in the heavy elements, produces in November two tons of extremely pure uranium for use in developing the nuclear bomb. The material is sent in cylinders 5 cm (2 in.) high and 5 cm in diameter to Chicago, where it will fuel the first nuclear reactor.

About this time John Denoye and Bill Gross of Johnson & Johnson develop duck tape (later re-christened "duct tape") for the U.S. army as a waterproof tape for sealing ammunition containers. It combines cotton mesh sealed with polyurethane and a strong rubber-based adhesive. Soldiers soon find that it has many uses, including mending boots, patching tents, and repairing equipment. After the war, manufacturers will change the original khaki color to today's familiar metallic gray.

After the yellow fever vaccine used to inoculate thousands of U.S. army personnel is shown to have caused hepatitis B in many of them, a new vaccine is developed that does not require the use of human blood serum. See also 1937 Medicine & health.

Shoichi Sakata and Takesi Inoue present their two-meson theory to account for the differences between the Yukawa exchange particle (now known as the pion) and the cosmic-ray meson (now known as the muon). When first discovered, the cosmic-ray meson was thought to be the particle predicted by Hideki Yukawa because of similarities in mass. See also 1937 Physics; 1946 Physics.

The Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon ("atomic bomb") gets under way in the United States. (See essay.)

On October 3 Wernher von Braun and his staff in Germany launch the prototype of the V2 rocket, the A4, satisfactorily for the first time from their Peenemünde development laboratories on the Baltic coast. Powered by alcohol and liquid oxygen, the 12-ton rocket travels 200 km (120 mi) in 296 seconds, reaching a speed of 5300 km (3300 mi) per hour and a height of 97 km (60 mi). See also 1938 Transportation; 1944 Transportation.

LORAN (Long Range Air Navigation) begins operation for the first time along the Atlantic seaboard of North America. See also 1928 Transportation.

Drama and Theater

• Maxwell Anderson: The Eve of St. Mark. Anderson's contribution to the war effort, the only success of the twelve war plays on Broadway during the 1942-1943 season, dramatizes in heroic and at times maudlin terms the sacrifice of an American farm boy, who dies at Bataan.
• Irving Berlin: This Is the Army. Berlin's patriotic army revue, an update of his World War I all-soldier show, Yip Yip Yaphank (1918), opens on Broadway on July 4 and includes three hundred soldiers in its cast.
• Joseph Fields (1895-1966): The Doughgirls. Fields's comedy about women cohabitating with men in overcrowded wartime Washington is decried by some as immoral, but it proves to be one of the season's biggest hits. Fields, the son of popular performer Lew Fields (1867-1941), collaborated with Jerome Chodorov to write My Sister Eileen (1940), Junior Miss (1941), and Wonderful Town (1953).
• William Saroyan: Razzle-Dazzle. Short plays, ballets, and vaudeville acts are interspersed with introductory essays on their composition--all evidence of the playwright's eccentric vitality and his attempt to fashion a popular art form.
• Thornton Wilder: The Skin of Our Teeth. For his allegorical drama reflecting the history of mankind in the experiences of the Antrobus family of Excelsior, New Jersey, Wilder draws on traditional domestic comedy, movie slapstick, and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake for inspiration. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama, the play has established itself as one of the most popular, innovative, and acclaimed American dramas.

Fiction

• Samuel Hopkins Adams: The Harvey Girls. This historical novel set in the 1890s concerns the Fred Harvey chain of restaurants and the girls who worked in them.
• Nelson Algren: Never Come Morning. Algren documents crime and poverty on Chicago's West Side in the story of aspiring boxer Bruno Bicek. The novel solidifies Algren's reputation as a "Chicago novelist" and an exponent of the style known as native American realism.
• Gertrude Atherton: The Horn of Life. Adding to her fictional chronicle of San Francisco, Atherton paints a portrait of a distinguished family in decline against the backdrop of the city during the 1920s.
• Sally Benson: Meet Me in St. Louis. Episodes from the life of the Smith family of St. Louis from 1903 to 1904. Benson's novel would be adapted as a movie musical in 1944.
• Kay Boyle: Primer for Combat. A novel in diary form of life in France under German occupation.
• Pearl S. Buck: Dragon Seed. Buck's propaganda novel concerns a small group of Chinese farmers near Nanking who try to hold on to their land in the face of the advancing Japanese troops. Family solidarity and devotion are tested by the horrors of modern warfare.
• James M. Cain: Love's Lovely Counterfeit. Described by one reviewer as "the dingdong daddy of the what-terrible-people school of novelists," Cain dramatizes a series of double-crosses in a Midwestern city, solidifying his reputation as America's most literary pulp writer.
• James Gould Cozzens: The Just and the Unjust. Cozzens's dramatization of a Connecticut murder trial and its interlocking web of community relationships is praised for its accomplished objectivity and is cited as evidence of a superior novelist's coming of age.
• Lloyd C. Douglas (1877-1951): The Robe. Based on the imagined life of the Roman soldier in charge of Christ's crucifixion, Douglas's religious epic is one of the decade's biggest sellers. It spawns a host of subsequent "New Testament" novels. Douglas was an Indiana-born clergyman whose first book, The Magnificent Obsession (1929), appeared when he was more than fifty. His other popular historical novel, set during the time of Christ, is The Big Fisherman (1948).
• Howard Fast: The Unvanquished. Fast's historical novel depicts another era in which American's resolve was tested under adversity--the bleak winter of 1776-1777-- from the perspective of George Washington's command. Washington grows in leadership ability despite continual setbacks, eventually prevailing by defeating the Hessians at Trenton. The novelist's ability to depict a heroic though human Washington is widely praised.
• William Faulkner: Go Down, Moses and Other Stories. Faulkner's short story collection deals with the McCaslin clan and includes one of his most admired works, "The Bear." Reviewers alternately recognize evidence of Faulkner's maturity and greatness as a writer and express their irritation at the "hopelessly tangled skeins" of his sentences, creating opaqueness rather than lucidity.
• Kenneth Fearing: Clark Gifford's Body. Fearing's experimental novel is a modern echoing of John Brown's raid and concerns the abortive seizure of a radio station.
• Ernest Hemingway: Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time. Hemingway supplies an introduction for this compilation of factual and fictional war stories he selected together with William Kozlenko.
• MacKinlay Kantor: Happy Land. A novella about a young sailor killed in the Pacific and the recollections of his father, a Midwestern pharmacist, about the principal events in their lives. As Robert Van Gelder observes in his review, "The story is as sentimental as any Currier & Ives print, but it is effective and it fits its time."
• Mary McCarthy (1912-1989): The Company She Keeps. Described as "A Portrait of the Intellectual as a Young Woman," McCarthy's first novel is a sexually frank, satiric portrait of pretty, neurotic, bohemian Margaret Sargent and her misadventures among the New York City intelligentsia. McCarthy was born in Seattle, orphaned at the age of six, and educated at Vassar College. She was a book reviewer for The Nation and the New Republic and the drama critic for the Partisan Review.
• Wright Morris (1910-1998): My Uncle Dudley. Morris's first novel is a picaresque story of a Californian who returns home to Chicago. Morris was a Nebraska native who would draw on his Midwestern background for many of his works.
• Dawn Powell: A Time to Be Born. A satire on Manhattan high life, Powell's novel follows the career of a ruthlessly successful woman novelist.
• Upton Sinclair: Dragon's Teeth. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the third volume in the author's Lanny Budd series covers the years between 1930 and 1934, including Budd's experiences in Germany and his attempt to free a Jewish friend from Dachau.
• John Steinbeck: The Moon Is Down. Steinbeck's attempt to show German soldiers in human rather than monstrous terms draws strong condemnation. Steinbeck's dramatic adaptation opens on Broadway on April 7.
• James Thurber: My World--and Welcome to It. Essays, stories, and drawings that originally had appeared in The New Yorker. The book includes Thurber's most famous story, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."
• Eudora Welty: The Robber Bridegroom. Welty's first novel relocates this Grimms's folktale to the Natchez Trace area of Mississippi at the end of the eighteenth century.

Literary Criticism and Scholarship

• Alfred Kazin (1915-1998): On Native Grounds. Kazin's debut critical volume provides a masterly interpretation of American prose writers and culture between 1890 and 1940. Lionel Trilling concludes that, based on Kazin's dispassionate and erudite judgment, "our literature of the last forty years seems far from adequate--seems, indeed, almost to have failed." The Brooklyn-born Kazin became an editor at the New Republic the same week that On Native Grounds was published.

Nonfiction

• Herbert Agar: A Time for Greatness. The historian, critic, and editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal assesses U.S. responsibility for the war and its outcome.
• Sherwood Anderson: Memoirs. One of the author's most impressive achievements is this blend of fact and fiction that traces the stages of his artistic development.
• Esther Forbes: Paul Revere and the World He Lived In. Historical novelist Forbes publishes a best-selling biography of the Boston silversmith and Revolutionary War hero that features a remarkable reconstruction of the period. It is still regarded as one of the classic popular accounts of the Revolutionary War and its era.
• Douglas Southall Freeman: Lee's Lieutenants: A Study in Command. The first of three volumes (concluded in 1944) of biographical portraits of those who served under Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia. It is one of the seminal works of Civil War scholarship.
• Marion Hargrove (b. 1919): See Here, Private Hargrove. Hargrove, a former newspaperman, captures the lighter side of military life in this comic account of the author's military experiences at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. One reviewer recommends it as "an antidote for those who worry about their boys in our army camps."
• John Hersey (1914-1993): Men on Bataan. Although the fate of U.S. soldiers is still not fully known, Hersey reconstructs the story of the fall of the Philippines from available news dispatches and interviews with friends of General Douglas MacArthur and soldiers' families. Hersey was born in China, served as a secretary to Sinclair Lewis, and worked as a magazine writer and war correspondent.
• Zora Neale Hurston: Dust Tracks on a Road. This autobiography of the writer, folklorist, and anthropologist traces her career from childhood in an all-black Florida community through her schooling and literary success. The book's factual reliability has been questioned by subsequent biographers.
• Margaret Leech (1893-1974): Reveille in Washington. One of the year's standout historical works is this lively account of life in the capital during the Civil War. Critic Clifton Fadiman praises the work as evidence that the author is "among the foremost contemporary historians of America." Leech was a novelist, biographer, and historian whose other books include The Back of the Book (1924), Tin Wedding (1926), and Roundsman of the Lord (1927).
• Carey McWilliams: Ill Fares the Land: Migrants and Migratory Labor in the United States. McWilliams documents the shift to large-scale industrialized farming in the United States and the subsequent dislocation of agricultural workers.
• Samuel Eliot Morison: Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus. To research his massive two-volume Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Morison made voyages to the West Indies and across the Atlantic in the same types of vessels used by Columbus. Such firsthand experience sets Morison's biography apart from the many others that have tried to capture the explorer and his times.
• Elliot Paul: The Last Time I Saw Paris. Wartime nostalgia for pre-occupation Paris no doubt is responsible for the popularity of this whimsical and wistful evocation of the city and its residents, based on the author's eighteen-year residence there (1923-1940). It spawns a popular song and movie.
• Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Cross Creek. In an autobiographical memoir by the author of The Yearling, Kinnan details her thirteen years in a remote rural Florida community in what is regarded by many as a classic of regional portraiture.
• J. Saunders Redding: No Day of Triumph. Commissioned by the University of North Carolina and the Rockefeller Foundation to report on black life in the South, the literary critic combines autobiographical reflections with a detailed portrait that writer Wallace Stegner commends as "perhaps the sanest and most eloquent study of the Negro American that has appeared."
• Louise Dickinson Rich (1903-1991): We Took to the Woods. Rich's account of her six years living in the Maine wilderness becomes a bestseller. My Neck of the Woods would follow in 1950. The Massachusetts-born writer's other books include Happy the Land (1946), The Start of the Trail (1949), and Travel to the North (1952).
• E. B. White: One Man's Meat. An essay collection that contrasts the complexity of modern urban life with the more essential lessons learned on the author's Maine farm, further justification of one reviewer's claim that White is "among the best writers of the familiar essay in English."
• William L. White: They Were Expendable. The disastrous defeat of U.S. forces in the Philippines is chronicled from the perspective of a patrol torpedo boat squadron responsible for transporting General Douglas MacArthur safely to Australia. White takes a convincing documentary approach, based on interviews with four young naval officers.
• Philip Wylie (1902-1971): Generation of Vipers. Evidence that not all that is published in 1942 is staunchly patriotic, Wylie provocatively castigates American values, beliefs, and policies that he asserts have led the country into war and, unless corrected, threaten defeat. His chapter "Common Women" added the term Momism to the lexicon. The book becomes a sensation and compulsory reading on many campuses. Wylie was a prolific writer of short stories, articles, radio programs, and syndicated newspaper columns.

Poetry

• Conrad Aiken: Brownstone Eclogues, and Other Poems. Aiken's poetic sequence deals with city life.
• John Berryman (1914-1972): Poems. Selections from work done in 1939 and 1940 establishes Berryman's reputation as one of the leading young poets of his generation. Berryman's first publication in book form was in the anthology Five Young American Poets (1940).
• R. P. Blackmur: Second World. The literary critic's second volume of poetry is a carefully wrought, highly allusive, somber, and at times declamatory meditation on the human condition.
• J. V. Cunningham (1911-1985): The Helmsman. This is the poet's first collection of spare, satirical verse in traditional forms. Cunningham was raised in Montana and taught at Brandeis University. His Collected Poems and Epigrams of J. V. Cunningham would appear in 1971.
• Robert Frost: A Witness Tree. This Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Frost's seventh, includes important works such as "Come In," "The Gift Outright," and "The Subverted Flower."
• Langston Hughes: Shakespeare in Harlem and Other Poems. The poet describes this volume as "a book of light verse. Afro-Americana in the blues mood."
• Randall Jarrell (1914-1965): Blood for a Stranger. Jarrell's first published volume is an impressive debut of witty, sardonic, and technically accomplished verse, establishing him as a significant new poetic voice. Born in Nashville, Jarrell was influenced by John Crowe Ransom while a student at Vanderbilt. He served in the Air Force during the war.
• Edna St. Vincent Millay: The Murder of Lidice. Written at the request of the Writers' War Board for radio broadcast, Millay's contribution to the war effort is a trite ballad indicting Nazi atrocities committed against a village in Czechoslovakia.
• Kenneth Patchen: The Dark Kingdom and The Teeth of the Lion. Patchen's two volumes are filled with private symbols, mixing eroticism, spirituality, and social criticism. They cause New York Times reviewer P. M. Jack to declare Patchen "one of the poets whom historians will turn to for intelligence about the year 1942."
• Karl Shapiro (1913-2000): Person, Place, and Thing. Preceded by two privately printed collections--Poems (1935) and The Place of Love (1942)--this is the first major collection by the winner of the Levinson Prize for poetry. Shapiro's intensity and highly polished style mark him as a poet to watch.
• Wallace Stevens: Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. Stevens's philosophical poetic sequence is a meditation on the nature of reality, the imagination, and poetry. Stevens also publishes a new collection, Parts of the World, which includes "The Poems of Our Climate," "The Well Dressed Man with a Beard," "Examination of the Hero in a Time of War," and others exploring Stevens's conception of poetry.
• José Garcia Villa (1904-1997): Have Come, Am Here. Villa's first collection and the first volume of Filipino poetry published in the United States is highly praised and technically innovative. It introduces a new method of rhyming that the author terms "reversed consonance."
• Margaret Walker (1915-1998): For My People. The first African American to be included in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Walker's debut volume portrays the African American experience in dialect-rich free-verse ballads drawing on black folk tradition as well as conventional sonnets.
• Robert Penn Warren: Eleven Poems on the Same Theme. The collection traces a progress toward self-knowledge and contains one of Warren's finest poems, "End of Season."
• Edmund Wilson: Note-Books of Night. A miscellany of verses, satires, travel writings, and reminiscences. As poet Louise Bogan observes, the collection demonstrates that "America's most capable critic is not, at his creative lightest, a buffoon, or, at his most serious, a pendant."

Publications and Events

• Edmund WilsonLangston Hughes's "Here to Yonder" column debuts. Published in the Chicago Defender, Hughes's column will continue for twenty years. In it he introduced his most beloved creation, the common man from Harlem, Jesse B. Semple, later called Jesse B. Simple, whose comments on life and race would be collected in five volumes and form the basis for Hughes's musical play Simply Heavenly (1959).
• Edmund WilsonSeventeen. The first style and fashion magazine for teenage girls begins publication, signaling the emergent youth culture.
• Edmund WilsonStars and Stripes. The newspaper of the U.S. armed forces, created during World War I, is revived to distribute war news to American troops and to the occupation forces after the war.
• Edmund WilsonYank. This weekly magazine, written by and published for army soldiers, debuts and becomes the most widely circulated service periodical during World War II. It featured cartoons such as George Baker's popular "Sad Sack," pinups of girls, letters from soldiers, and stories, poems, and editorials by contributors such as Marion Hargrove, William Saroyan, and Irwin Shaw.

This article is about the year 1942. For other uses, see 1942 (disambiguation).

Millennium:	2nd millennium
Centuries:	19th century – 20th century – 21st century
Decades:	1910s  1920s  1930s  – 1940s –  1950s  1960s  1970s
Years:	1939 1940 1941 – 1942 – 1943 1944 1945

1942 by topic:

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v d e

1942 in other calendars

Gregorian calendar	1942 MCMXLII
Ab urbe condita	2695
Armenian calendar	1391 ԹՎ ՌՅՂԱ
Assyrian calendar	6692
Bahá'í calendar	98–99
Bengali calendar	1349
Berber calendar	2892
British Regnal year	6 Geo. 6 – 7 Geo. 6
Buddhist calendar	2486
Burmese calendar	1304
Byzantine calendar	7450–7451
Chinese calendar	辛巳年十一月十五日 (4578/4638-11-15) — to — 壬午年十一月廿四日 (4579/4639-11-24)
Coptic calendar	1658–1659
Ethiopian calendar	1934–1935
Hebrew calendar	5702–5703
Hindu calendars
- Vikram Samvat	1998–1999
- Shaka Samvat	1864–1865
- Kali Yuga	5043–5044
Holocene calendar	11942
Iranian calendar	1320–1321
Islamic calendar	1360–1361
Japanese calendar	Shōwa 17 (昭和17年)
Korean calendar	4275
Minguo calendar	ROC 31 民國31年
Thai solar calendar	2485
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Year 1942 (MCMXLII) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar.

Events

Below, events of World War II have the "WWII" prefix.

January

• January 1 – WWII: The United States and Philippines troops fight the Battle of Bataan.
• January 2 – WWII: Manila is captured by Japanese forces. All Manila Soldiers are killed and there are no survivors.
• January 7 – WWII: The siege of the Bataan Peninsula begins.
• January 10 – WWII: The last German air-raid on Liverpool destroys the home of William Patrick Hitler, Adolf Hitler's nephew. After his house is destroyed, William Hitler goes to the USA and joins the navy to fight against his uncle.
• January 11 – WWII:
  • Japan declares war on the Netherlands and invades the Netherlands East Indies.
  • The Japanese capture Kuala Lumpur.
• January 13
  • Sikorsky R-4 first flies, in the USA; it will become the first mass-produced helicopter.
  • Heinkel test pilot Helmut Schenk becomes the first person to escape from a stricken aircraft with an ejection seat.
• January 16 – Actress Carole Lombard and her mother are among those killed in a plane crash near Las Vegas, Nevada, while returning from a tour to promote the sale of war bonds.
• January 19 – WWII: Japanese forces invade Burma. Establishment of United States VIII Bomber Command, later to become the Eighth Air Force in Savannah, Georgia.
• January 20 – WWII: Nazis at the Wannsee conference in Berlin decide that the "final solution to the Jewish problem" is relocation, and later extermination.
• January 21 – WWII: Erwin Rommel launches his new offensive in Cyrenaica.
• January 23 – WWII: The Battle of Rabaul begins.
• January 25 – WWII: Thailand declares war on the United States and United Kingdom.
• January 26 – WWII: The first American forces arrive in Europe, landing in Northern Ireland.
• January 31 – WWII: The last organized Allied forces leave Malaya, ending the 54-day campaign.

February

• February 1 – WWII: The Command staff of the Eighth Air Force reaches England
• February 2 – WWII: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signs an executive order directing the internment of Japanese Americans and the seizure of their property.
• February 3 – WWII: Rommel suspends his offensive in Cyrenaica.
• February 7 – Maritime Commission fleet operations transferred to War Shipping Administration (lasting until September 1, 1946).
• February 8
  • António Óscar Carmona is elected president of Portugal.
  • WWII: Top United States military leaders hold their first formal meeting to discuss American military strategy in the war.
  • Daylight saving time goes into effect in the United States.
• February 9
  • Post of Chief of the Air Force Staff created.
  • The SS Normandie Ocean Liner catches fire while being converted into the troopship USS Lafayette for WWII.
• February 10 – In the early hours of the morning the SS Normandie capsizes at pier 88 in New York City.
• February 11 – Operation Cerberus A flotilla of Kriegsmarine ships dash from Brest through the English Channel to northern ports; the British fail to sink any one of them.
• February 15 – WWII: Singapore surrenders to Japanese forces.
• February 19 – WWII:
  • Japanese warplanes attack Darwin, Australia.
  • President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs executive order 9066 allowing the United States military to define areas as exclusionary zones. These zones affect the Japanese on the West Coast, and Germans and Italians primarily on the East Coast.
• February 20 – Lieutenant Edward O'Hare becomes America's first U.S. Navy WWII flying ace.
• February 22 – WWII: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt orders General Douglas MacArthur out of the Philippines as American defense of the nation collapses.
• February 23 – The Japanese submarine I-17 fires 17 high-explosive shells toward an oil refinery near Santa Barbara, California, causing little damage.
• February 24 – The SS Struma, carrying Jewish refugees from Axis-allied Romania to British-controlled Palestine, is torpedoed and sunk by the Soviet submarine Shch 213, killing 768 men, women and children, with only one survivor, a 19 year old man, making it the largest exclusively civilian naval disaster of the war.^[1]
• February 24 – Propaganda: The Voice of America begins broadcasting.
• February 25 – The Princess Elizabeth registers for war service.
• February 25 – Battle of Los Angeles: Over 1,400 AA shells are fired at an unidentified, slow-moving object in the skies over Los Angeles. The appearance of the object triggers an immediate wartime blackout over most of Southern California, with thousands of air raid wardens being deployed throughout the city. In total there are 6 deaths. Despite the several hour barrage no planes are downed.
• February 26
  • The worst coal dust explosion to date, in Honkeiko, China, claims 1,549 lives.
  • The 14th Academy Awards ceremony is held in Los Angeles; How Green Was My Valley wins Best Picture.
• February 27 – WWII – Battle of the Java Sea: An allied (ABDA) task force under Dutch command, trying to stem a Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies, is defeated by a Japanese task force in the Java Sea.

March

• March – Construction begins on the Badger Army Ammunition Plant (the largest in the United States during WWII).
• March 9 – WWII: Executive order 9082 (February 28, 1942) reorganizes the United States Army into three major commands: Army Ground Forces, Army Air Forces, and Services of Supply, later redesignated Army Service Forces.
• March 17 – Holocaust: the Nazi German extermination camp Bełżec opens in occupied Poland about 1 km south of the local railroad station of Bełżec in the Lublin district of the General Government. Between March and December 1942, at least 434,508 people are killed there.
• March 16 – WWII: New Zealand and Australia declared war on Thailand.
• March 18 – War Relocation Authority (WRA)
• March 28 – WWII: Operation Chariot - British Commandos raid St. Nazaire on the coast of Western France.

April

Spring 1942: the Nazi German extermination camp Treblinka II opens in occupied Poland near the village of Treblinka

• April – Holocaust: the Nazi German extermination camp Sobibor opens in occupied Poland on the outskirts of the town of Sobibór. Between April 1942 and October 1943, at least 160,000 people are killed in the camp.
• Spring – Holocaust: the Nazi German extermination camp Treblinka II opens in occupied Poland near the village of Treblinka. Between July 1942 and October 1943, around 850,000 people were killed there,^[2] more than 800,000 of whom were Jews.^[3]
• April 3 – WWII: Japanese forces begin an all-out assault on the United States and Filipino troops on the Bataan Peninsula.
• April 5 – WWII: the Japanese Navy attacks Colombo in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Royal Navy Cruisers HMS Cornwall and HMS Dorsetshire are sunk southwest of the island.
• April 9
  • The Bataan Peninsula falls and the Bataan Death March began.
  • WWII: The Japanese Navy launches an air raid on Trincomalee in Ceylon (Sri Lanka); the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Hermes and Royal Australian Navy destroyer HMAS Vampire are sunk off the country's East Coast.
• April 13 – The FCC's minimum programming time required of TV stations is cut from 15 hours to 4 hours a week during the war.
• April 15 – WWII: King George VI awards the George Cross to Malta, saying, "To honour her brave people I award the George Cross to the Island Fortress of Malta, to bear witness to a heroism and a devotion that will long be famous in history (from January 1 to July 24, there is only one 24-hour period during which no bombs fall on this tiny island)."
• April 18 – Tokyo, Japan is attacked by the Doolittle Raid, a small force of B-25 Mitchells commanded by then-Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle.
• April 23 – William Temple (archbishop) enthroned Archbishop of Canterbury.
• April 27 – WWII: A national plebiscite is held in Canada on the issue of conscription.
• April 27 – The Jewish Star of David is required wearing for all Jews in the Netherlands and Belgium. Other Jews in Nazi countries had been wearing it for longer.
• April 29 – WWII: An explosion at a chemical factory in Tessenderlo, Belgium leaves 200 dead and 1,000 injured.

May

• May – The is tested in Operation Pluto.
• May 5 – WWII – Operation Ironclad: United Kingdom forces invade the French colony of Madagascar.
• May 6 – WWII: On Corregidor, the last American and Filipino forces in the Philippines surrender to the Japanese.
• May 8 – WWII: The Battle of the Coral Sea (first battle in naval history where 2 enemy fleets fight without seeing each other's fleets) ends in an Allied victory.
• May 8/May 9 – WWII: At night, gunners of the Ceylon Garrison Artillery on Horsburgh Island in the Cocos Islands rebel. Their mutiny is crushed and 3 of them executed (the only British Commonwealth soldiers to be executed for mutiny during the Second World War).
• May 12 – WWII – Second Battle of Kharkov: In the eastern Ukraine, the Soviet Army initiates a major offensive. During the battle the Soviets capture the city of Kharkov from the German Army, only to be encircled and destroyed.
• May 14 – Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait is performed for the first time by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.
• May 15 – WWII: In the United States, a bill creating the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC) is signed into law.
• May 20 – The first African-American seamen are taken into the United States Navy.
• May 21 – WWII: Mexico declares war against Nazi Germany after the sinking of the Mexican tanker Faja de Oro by the German U-boat, U-160, off Key West.
• May 26 – WWII – Battle of Bir Hakeim: The Free French and British troops slow the German advance in North Africa.
• May 27 – WWII – Operation Anthropoid: Czech paratroopers attempt to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich in Prague.
• May 31 – June 1 – WWII – Attack on Sydney Harbour: Japanese submarines infiltrate Sydney Harbour in an attempt to attack Allied warships.

June

June 4: The Japanese aircraft carrier, Hiryū under attack by US aircraft at the Battle of Midway.

• June 1 – WWII: Mexico declares war on Germany, Italy and Japan.
• June 4 – WWII: Reinhard Heydrich succumbs to wounds sustained on May 27 from Czechoslovakian paratroopers acting in Operation Anthropoid.
• June 4–June 7 – WWII – The Battle of Midway: The Japanese naval advance in the Pacific is halted.
• June 7 – WWII: Japanese forces invade the Aleutian Islands (the first invasion of American soil in 128 years).
• June 8 – WWII: Attack on Sydney Harbour: The Australian cities of Sydney and Newcastle are shelled by Japanese submarines. The eastern suburbs of both cities are damaged and the east coast is blacked out.
• June 9 – WWII: Nazis burn the Czech village of Lidice in reprisal for the killing of Reinhard Heydrich.
• June 9 Flying Fortress Air Crash Near Auckland 12:30 a.m.
• June 10 – WWII: The Gestapo massacres 173 male residents of Lidice, Czechoslovakia in retaliation for the killing of a Heydrich.
• June 12 – Holocaust: On her 13th birthday, Anne Frank makes the first entry in her new diary.
• June 13 – The United States opens its Office of War Information, a propaganda center.
• June 29 – The German Eleventh Army under Erich von Manstein takes Sevastopol, although fighting rages until July 9.

July

• July 1–July 27 – WWII: the First Battle of El Alamein.
• July 3 – Guadalcanal, occupied only by aborigines falls to the Japanese Naval construction force deployed to construct an air field on the island.
• July 4 – WWII in the European Theater of Operations:
  • Twenty-four ships are sunk by German bombers and submarines after Convoy PQ 17 to the Soviet Union is scattered in the Arctic Ocean to evade the German battleship Tirpitz.
  • US Eighth Air Force inauspiciously flies its first mission in Europe using borrowed British planes and bombds targets in the Netherlands, such as De Kooy airfield attached to Den Helder naval base. Three of six aircraft return^[4]; captain Charles C. Kegelman is first member of 8th Airforce to be awarded DFC for this mission ^[5].
• July 6 – Holocaust: Anne Frank's family goes into hiding in an attic above her father's office in an Amsterdam warehouse.
• July 8 – Turkish prime minister Refik Saydam died while working in office. For one day he is succeeded by Ahmet Fikri Tüzer
• July 9 – Şükrü Saracoğlu forms the new government in Turkey. (13 th government)
• July 13 – WWII: German U-Boats sink 3 more merchant ships in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
• July 14 – WWII: Germany introduces the Ostvolk Medal for Soviet personnel in Wehrmacht
• July 16
  • Holocaust: By order of the Vichy France government headed by Pierre Laval, French police officers round-up 13,000–20,000 Jews and imprison them in the Winter Velodrome.
  • Georges Bégué and others escape from the Mauzac prison camp.
• July 18 – WWII: The Germans test fly the Messerschmitt Me 262 (using only its jets) for the first time.
• July 19 – WWII – Battle of the Atlantic: German Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz orders the last U-boats to withdraw from their United States Atlantic coast positions, in response to an effective American convoy system.
• July 21 – The Japanese establish a beachhead on the north coast of New Guinea in the Buna-Gona area; a small Australian force begins a rearguard action on the Kokoda Track Campaign.
• July 22 – Holocaust: The systematic deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto begins.
• July 29 – The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR institutes the Order of Suvorov, the Order of Kutuzov, and reinstates the Order of Alexander Nevsky.
• July 30 – Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES).
• July 31 – The Oxford Committee of Famine Relief (OXFAM) is founded.

August

• August 7 – WWII: Battle of Guadalcanal begins – The U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps begin the first American offensive of the war with an amphibious landing on the island of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.
• August 8 – Walt Disney's animated film, Bambi premieres in United Kingdom.
• August 9
  • Indian leader, Mohandas Gandhi is arrested in Bombay by British forces.
  • Start, led by the goalkeeper Nikolai Trusevich, play football against the German Luftwaffe team Flakelf in Nazi-occupied Kiev. Against all odds, they win 5–3. Eight of them are later arrested and tortured, and at least four are killed.
• August 13
  • WWII: In Washington, DC, six Germans would-be saboteurs are executed (Two others were cooperative and received sentences of life imprisonment instead. One was spared because of his quite young age: execution was considered to be too harsh for such a young man. The imprisoned ones were freed a few years after the end of the war.)
  • Quit India resolution is passed by the Bombay session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC), which led to the start of a historical civil disobedience movement across India.
• Walt Disney's fifth animated film, Bambi is released in the US.
• August 14 night – In London, instruments detect a massive burst of cosmic rays.
• August 15 – WWII: The American tanker SS Ohio reaches Malta as part of the convoy of Operation Pedestal.
• August 16
  • Polish-Jewish teacher Janusz Korczak follows a group of Jewish children into the Treblinka death camp.
  • The U.S. Navy blimp L-8 (Flight 101) comes ashore near San Francisco, eventually coming down in Daly City (the crew is missing).
• August 17 – WWII: First raid by heavy bombers of U.S. Eighth Air Force against occupied France.
• August 19 – WWII – Dieppe Raid: Allied forces raid Dieppe, France.
• August 22 – WWII: Brazil declares war on Germany and Italy.
• August 23 – WWII: German troops reach the suburbs of Stalingrad.
• August 25
  • WWII: Japanese marines land at Milne Bay.
  • Prince George, Duke of Kent, brother to King George VI and King Edward VIII, dies in a flying accident over Morven in Scotland at the age of 39.
• August 30 – Luxembourg is formally annexed to the German Reich.
• August 31 – A general strike is launched in Luxembourg to protest against forced conscription.
• August 31–September 5 – WWII: Battle of Alam Halfa

September

• September 3 – WWII: A German attempt to liquidate the Jewish ghetto in Lakhva leads to an uprising.
• September 5 – WWII: Battle of Milne Bay: Japanese forces suffer their first defeat on land.
• September 9 – WWII: A Japanese floatplane drops incendiary devices at Mount Emily, near Brookings, Oregon, in the first of two "Lookout Air Raids", the first bombing of the continental United States.
• September 10 – Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) begins operation.
• September 12 – The RMS Laconia, carrying civilians, Allied soldiers and Italian POWs, is torpedoed off the coast of West Africa and sinks.
• September 15 – Women's Flying Training Detachment (WFTD).
• September 24 – Andrée Borrel and Lise de Baissac become the first female SOE agents to be parachuted into occupied France.
• September 27 – WWII: Both commerce raiding hilfskreuzer Stier and Liberty ship Stephen Hopkins sink following a gun battle in the South Atlantic. Stier is the only commerce raider to be sunk by Defensively Equipped Merchant Ships.^[6]

October

• October 2 – The British cruiser Curaçao collides with the liner Queen Mary off the coast of Donegal and sinks; 338 drown.
• October 3 – The first A-4 rocket is successfully launched from Test Stand VII at Peenemünde, Germany. The rocket flies 147 kilometres wide and reaches a height of 84.5 kilometres, becoming the first man-made object to reach space.
• October 9 – The Statute of Westminster Adoption Act formalizes Australian autonomy.
• October 11 – WWII – Battle of Cape Esperance: On the northwest coast of Guadalcanal, United States Navy ships intercept and defeat a Japanese fleet on their way to reinforce troops on the island.
• October 14 – A German U-boat sinks the ferry SS Caribou, killing 137.
• October 16 – A hurricane and flood in Bombay kill 40,000.
• October 23 – Award-winning composer and Hollywood songwriter Ralph Rainger ("Thanks for the Memory") is among 12 people killed in the mid-air collision between an American Airlines DC-3 airliner and a U.S. Army bomber near Palm Springs, California.
• October 23 – November 4 – WWII – Second Battle of El Alamein: British troops go on the offensive against the Axis forces.
• October 26 – WWII – Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands: two Japanese aircraft carriers are heavily damaged and one U.S.N. carrier is sunk.
• October 28 – The Alaska Highway is completed.
• October 29 – Holocaust: In the United Kingdom, leading clergymen and political figures hold a public meeting to register outrage over Nazi Germany's persecution of Jews.

November

• November 2 – A USAF squadron, including B-24 Liberators, intercepts many Luftwaffe patrols off the coast of Oran, Algeria.
• November 3 – WWII – Second Battle of El Alamein: German forces under Erwin Rommel are forced to retreat during the night.
• November 8 – WWII
  • Operation Torch – United States and United Kingdom forces land in French North Africa.
  • French Resistance Coup in Algiers: 400 French civil resistants neutralize the Vichyist XIXth Army Corps and the Vichyist generals (Juin, Darlan, etc.), so allowing the immediate success of Operation Torch in Algiers, and ultimately the whole of French North Africa.
• November 9 – WWII: U.S serviceman Edward Leonski is hanged at Melbourne's Pentridge Prison for the "Brown-Out" murders of 3 women in May.
• November 10 – WWII: In violation of a 1940 armistice, Germany invades Vichy France, following French Admiral François Darlan's agreement to an armistice with the Allies in North Africa.
• November 12 – WWII – Battle of Guadalcanal: A naval battle near Guadalcanal starts between Japanese and American forces.
• November 13 – WWII:
  • Battle of Guadalcanal: Aviators from the USS Enterprise sink the Japanese battleship Hiei.
  • British forces capture Tobruk.
• November 15 – WWII:
  • The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal ends: Although the United States Navy suffers heavy losses, it retains control of Guadalcanal.
  • A BOAC scheduled passenger flight, a DC-3 with registration G-AGBB, (formerly KLM PH-ALI, Ibis), enroute between Lisbon and Bristol, is attacked over the Bay of Biscay by German fighters. Although damaged, it escapes and lands in England. Other attacks follow on the same aircraft and scheduled route: April 19 and June 1, 1943 (fatal).
  • British forces capture Derna.
• November 19 – WWII – Battle of Stalingrad: Soviet Union forces under General Georgy Zhukov launch the Operation Uranus counter-attacks at Stalingrad, turning the tide of the battle in the USSR's favor.
• November 20 – WWII –British forces capture Benghazi.
• November 21 – The completion of the Alaska Highway (also known as the Alcan Highway) is celebrated (however, the "highway" is not usable by general vehicles until 1943).
• November 22 – WWII – Battle of Stalingrad: The situation for the German attackers of Stalingrad seems desperate during the Soviet counter-attack Operation Uranus, and General Friedrich Paulus sends Adolf Hitler a telegram saying that the German Sixth Army is surrounded.
• November 23 – A German U-boat sinks the S.S. Ben Lomond off the coast of Brazil. One crewman, Chinese second steward Poon Lim, is separated from the others and spends 130 days adrift until he is rescued on April 3, 1943.
• November 25–November 26 – Operation Harling: A British SOE team, together with Greek Resistance fighters, blows up the Gorgopotamos viaduct in the first major sabotage act in occupied continental Europe.
• November 26 – The movie Casablanca premières at the Hollywood Theater in New York City.
• November 27 – WWII: At Toulon, the French navy scuttles its ships and submarines to keep them out of Nazi hands.
• November 28
  • In Boston, Massachusetts, a fire in the Cocoanut Grove night club kills 491 people.
  • The large-scale German "pacification" of the Zamojszczyzna region of Poland begins.
• November 29 – The Blue Star Line cargo liner MV Dunedin Star runs aground on the Skeleton Coast of Namibia. Crew and passengers survive following a 26-day overland trek to Windhoek.^[7]

December

• December 1 – Gasoline rationing begins in the United States.
• December 2 – Manhattan Project: Below the bleachers of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, a team led by Enrico Fermi initiates the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction (a coded message, "The Italian navigator has landed in the new world" is then sent to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt).
• December 4
  • Holocaust: In Warsaw, 2 women, Zofia Kossak and Wanda Filipowicz, risk their lives by setting up the Council for the Assistance of the Jews.
  • WWII: USAAF bombers make their first raid on Italy.
• December 7 – WWII: British commandos conduct Operation Frankton, a raid on shipping in Bordeaux harbour.
• December 17
  • The Allies issue the Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations, the first time they publicly acknowledge the Holocaust.
• December 22
  • An avalanche in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania kills 26, including Vulcan Crucible Steel Co heir-apparent Samuel A. Stafford Sr., when two 100 ton boulders fall on a bus filled with wartime steel workers on their way home.
  • An airplane carrying prominent Ustashe general Jure Francetić crashes. Francetić dies as result of the injuries on December 27.
• December 24 – French Admiral Darlan, the former Vichy leader who had switched over to the Allies following the Torch landings, is assassinated in Algiers.
• December 27 – The Union of Pioneers of Yugoslavia is founded.

Date unknown

• The Grand Coulee Dam is finished in the Columbia River.
• DDT is first used as a pesticide.
• C. S. Lewis publishes The Screwtape Letters.
• Lions become extinct in Iran.

Births

January

• January 1
  • Martin Frost, American politician
  • Gennadi Sarafanov, Russian cosmonaut (d. 2005)
  • Country Joe McDonald, American musician
• January 2
  • Dennis Hastert, American politician and former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives
  • Hugh Shelton, American Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
• January 3
  • John Thaw, English actor (d. 2002)
  • Laszlo Solyom, President of Hungary
• January 4 – Dame Marcela Contreras, Chilean-British immunologist and educator
• January 5
  • Maurizio Pollini, Italian pianist
  • Charlie Rose, American talk show host
  • Jan Leeming, former BBC newsreader
• January 7 – Vasiliy Alekseyev, Soviet weightlifter
• January 8
  • Stephen Hawking, British physicist
  • Junichiro Koizumi, former Prime Minister of Japan
  • Yvette Mimieux, American actress
• January 8 – George Passmore, English performance artist (Gilbert and George)
• January 11
  • Clarence Clemons, American musician (d. 2011)
  • Leo Cullum, American "New Yorker" cartoonist (d. 2010)
• January 14 – Yogesh Kumar Sabharwal, Chief Justice of India
• January 17
  • Muhammad Ali, American boxer
  • Ulf Hoelscher, German violinist
  • Nancy Parsons, American actress (d. 2001)
• January 19 – Michael Crawford, English singer and actor
• January 20 – Linda Moulton Howe, American investigative journalist and documentary producer-writer-director-editor
• January 25
  • Carl Eller, American football player
  • Eusébio, Portuguese footballer
• January 26 – Souad Hosni, Egyptian actress (d. 2001)
• January 31
  • Derek Jarman, English director and writer (d. 1994)
  • Daniela Bianchi, Italian actress

February

• February 1 – Terry Jones, Welsh actor and writer
• February 2
  • Graham Nash, American (English-born) rock musician (The Hollies)
  • Bo Hopkins, American actor
• February 5 – Roger Staubach, American football player
• February 9 – Carole King, American singer and composer
• February 12 – Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel
• February 13 – Peter Tork, American musician and actor (The Monkees)
• February 14
  • Michael Bloomberg, American businessman, philanthropist, and the founder of Bloomberg L.P., Mayor of New York City
  • Andrew Robinson, American actor
• February 15 – Sherry Jackson, American actress
• February 19 – Paul Krause, American football player
• February 20
  • Phil Esposito, Canadian hockey player
  • Mitch McConnell, American politician
• February 21 – Margarethe von Trotta, German actress, film director, and writer
• February 24 – Joseph Lieberman, American politician
• February 25
  • Sally Jessy Raphaël, American talk show host
  • Karen Grassle, American actress (Little House on the Prairie)
• February 27
  • Robert H. Grubbs, American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
  • Michel Forget, Canadian actor
• February 28 – Brian Jones, English musician (The Rolling Stones) (d. 1969)

March

• March 2
  • John Irving,American author
  • Lou Reed, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
• March 4
  • Charles C. Krulak, U.S. Marine Corps commander
  • Gloria Gaither, American gospel songwriter
• March 5 – Felipe González Márquez, Spanish politician
• March 7
  • Tammy Faye Bakker, American evangelist, singer and television personality (d. 2007)
  • Michael Eisner, American film studio executive
• March 9
  • John Cale, Welsh composer and musician (Velvet Underground)
  • Mark Lindsay, singer/songwriter of the group Paul Revere & The Raiders
• March 12 – Jimmy Wynn, American baseball player
• March 13
  • Dave Cutler, American software engineer
  • Scatman John, American musician (d. 1999)
  • George Negus, Australian author, journalist, and television presenter
• March 16 – James Soong, Taiwan politician
• March 17 – John Wayne Gacy, American serial killer (d. 1994)
• March 20 – Earl Bramblett, American murderer (d. 2003)
• March 23 – Walter Rodney, Guyanese historian and political figure
• March 25
  • Aretha Franklin, American singer
  • Richard O'Brien, English-born actor and writer
• March 26 – Erica Jong, American author
• March 27
  • John E. Sulston, British chemist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
  • Michael York, English actor
  • Michael Jackson, English writer (d. 2007)
• March 28
  • Neil Kinnock, British statesman
  • Mike Newell, British film director
  • Conrad Schumann, East German border guard (d. 1998)
  • Jerry Sloan, American basketball coach
• March 29 – Scott Wilson, American actor
• March 30 – Ruben Kun, Nauruan politician and former President of Nauru

April

• April 1 – Annie Nightingale, British DJ
• April 2
  • Hiroyuki Sakai, Japanese chef
  • Leon Russell, American singer, songwriter, pianist, and guitarist
  • Yury Yarov, Russian politician and a former deputy prime minister
• April 3
  • Marsha Mason, American actress
  • Wayne Newton, American singer
• April 5
  • Peter Greenaway, Welsh filmmaker
  • Pascal Couchepin, Swiss Federal Councilor
• April 6 – Barry Levinson, American film producer and director
• April 8 – Roger Chapman, British rock singer (Family)
• April 9 – James Cowan, Australian novelist
• April 10
  • Nick Auf der Maur, Canadian journalist and politician (d. 1998)
  • Hayedeh, Iranian singer (d. 1990)
• April 12 – Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa
• April 14
  • Valeriy Brumel, Russian athlete (d. 2003)
  • Valentin Lebedev, Russian cosmonaut
• April 15
  • Kenneth Lay, American businessman (d. 2006)
  • Julie Sommars, American actress
• April 17
  • Kenas Aroi, Nauruan politician
  • Buster Williams, American jazz bassist
• April 20 – Arto Paasilinna, Finnish author
• April 23 – Sandra Dee, American actress (d. 2005)
• April 24 – Barbra Streisand, American singer, theatre and film actress, composer
• April 25
  • Jon Kyl, American politician
  • Katsuji Adachi, Japanese professional wrestler
• April 26
  • Bobby Rydell, American singer
  • Michael Kergin, Canadian diplomat
  • Claudine Auger, French actress
• April 27
  • Jim Keltner, American drummer
  • Ruth Glick, American writer

May

• May 2 – Jacques Rogge, Belgian International Olympic Committee president
• May 3 – Věra Čáslavská, Czech gymnast
• May 5 – Tammy Wynette, American country singer (d. 1998)
• May 8 – Terry Neill, Northern Irish footballer and football manager
• May 9 – John Ashcroft, United States Attorney General
• May 10 – Youssouf Sambo Bâ, Burkinabé politician
• May 12 – Ian Dury, British musician (d. 2000)
• May 17 – Taj Mahal, American singer and guitarist
• May 18
  • Albert Hammond, English-born American musician and composer
  • Nobby Stiles, English footballer
• May 19
  • Gary Kildall, American computer scientist (d. 1994)
  • Robert Kilroy-Silk, British politician and television presenter
• May 20 – David Proval, American actor
• May 22
  • Theodore Kaczynski (aka "The Unabomber"), American criminal
  • Calvin Simon, American musician (P Funk)
  • Rich Garcia, American Major League Baseball Umpire
• May 23 – Gabriel Liiceanu, Romanian philosopher
• May 24 – Ichirō Ozawa, Japanese politician
• May 26 – Levon Helm, American musician (The Band)
• May 28 – Stanley B. Prusiner, American scientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

June

• June 2 – Eduard Malofeyev, Russian football coach and former international player
• June 3
  • Curtis Mayfield, American musician (d. 1999)
  • Frank McRae, American actor
• June 5 – Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, President of Equatorial Guinea and Chairperson of the African Union
• June 7 - Muammar Gaddafi, former dictator of Libya (d. 2011)
• June 8 – James Tien, Hong Kong-Taiwanese actor
• June 10
  • Gordon Burns, British journalist and TV presenter
  • Preston Manning, Canadian politician
• June 12 – Bert Sakmann, German physiologist, Nobel Prize laureate
• June 16 – John Rostill, English bassist, musician and composer (The Shadows) (d. 1973)
• June 17
  • Mohamed ElBaradei, Egyptian International Atomic Energy Agency director, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize
  • Roger Steffens, Reggae archivist, actor, author, Bob Marley biographer
• June 18
  • Roger Ebert, American film critic and television personality
  • Paul McCartney, British musician and composer (The Beatles) (Wings)
  • Hans Vonk, Dutch conductor
  • Thabo Mbeki, South African politician
  • Nick Tate, Australian actor
• June 19 – Ralna English, American singer
• June 20 – Brian Wilson, American singer, composer/producer, musical innovator (The Beach Boys)
• June 24
  • Mick Fleetwood, English drummer (Fleetwood Mac)
  • Michele Lee, American actress, singer and dancer (Knots Landing)
• June 26
  • Gilberto Gil, Brazilian singer and Minister of Culture
  • James J. Dillon, American professional wrestling manager
• June 27 – Bruce Johnston, American musician (The Beach Boys)
• June 28 – David Miner, American rock musician and record producer

July

• July 1
  • Geneviève Bujold, French-Canadian actress
  • Andrae Crouch, American gospel singer
• July 2 – Vicente Fox, President of Mexico
• July 4
  • Floyd Little, American football player
  • Prince Michael of Kent
• July 7 – Carmen Duncan, Australian actress
• July 8 – Janice Pennington, American model
• July 9 – Richard Roundtree, American actor
• July 10
  • Pyotr Klimuk, Russian cosmonaut
  • Ronnie James Dio, American singer (d. 2010)
• July 13
  • Harrison Ford, American actor
  • Roger McGuinn, American musician (The Byrds)
• July 15 – Mil Máscaras, Mexican professional wrestler
• July 16 – Margaret Court, Australian tennis player
• July 18 – Adolf Ogi, member of the Swiss Federal Council
• July 23 – Myra Hindley, English multiple murderer (d. 2002)
• July 24 – Chris Sarandon, American actor
• July 27 – Dennis Ralston, American tennis player
• July 28 – Kaari Utrio, Finnish writer
• July 29 – Tony Sirico, American actor

August

• August 1 – Jerry Garcia, American musician (Grateful Dead) (d. 1995)
• August 2 – Isabel Allende, Chilean writer
• August 4 – David Lange, Prime Minister of New Zealand (d. 2005)
• August 7
  • Garrison Keillor, American writer and radio host
  • Tobin Bell, American film and television actor
• August 16 – John Challis, English actor
• August 17 – Roshan Seth, British Indian actor
• August 18
  • Wu Ma, Chinese film actor, director, producer and writer
  • Judith Keppel, first person to win £1,000,000 on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
• August 19 – Fred Dalton Thompson, American politician and actor
• August 20 – Isaac Hayes, American singer and actor (d. 2008)
• August 27 – "Captain" Daryl Dragon, American musician (The Captain and Tennille)
• August 28
  • Sterling Morrison, American musician (d. 1995)
  • Jose Eduardo dos Santos, President of Angola
• August 31 – Isao Aoki, Japanese golfer

September

• September 3
  • Al Jardine, American Musician (The Beach Boys)
  • Michael Hui, Hong Kong film comedian
• September 5
  • Werner Herzog, German filmmaker
  • Björn Haugan, Norwegian operatic lyric tenor (d. 2009)
• September 7 – Alan Haskvitz, American educator
• September 14 – Bernard MacLaverty, Irish writer
• September 15 – Wen Jiabao, Premier of the People's Republic of China
• September 16 – Tadamasa Goto, Japanese yakuza boss
• September 17 – Desmond Lynam, British TV presenter
• September 18 – Gabriella Ferri, Italian singer
• September 19 – Freda Payne, American singer and actress
• September 22
  • Marlena Shaw, American jazz singer
  • David Stern, American commissioner of the National Basketball Association
• September 24 – Ilkka "Danny" Lipsanen, Finnish singer
• September 28 – Marshall Bell, American actor
• September 29
  • Madeline Kahn, American actress (d. 1999)
  • Ian McShane, English actor
  • Jean-Luc Ponty, French jazz violinist
• September 30 – Frankie Lymon, American singer (d. 1968)

October

• October 1 – Gunther Wallraff, German investigative journalist
• October 4 – Christopher Stone, American actor (d. 1995)
• October 6
  • Britt Ekland, Swedish actress
  • Fred Travalena, American comedian and impressionist (d. 2009)
• October 7
  • Ronald Baecker, American computer scientist
  • Joy Behar, American comedienne and television personality
• October 11 – Amitabh Bachchan, Indian actor
• October 12
  • Daliah Lavi, Israelian actress and singer
  • Melvin Franklin, American musician (The Temptations) (d. 1995)
• October 13
  • Rutanya Alda, Latvian-American actress
  • Jerry Jones, American football team owner
• October 14 – Evelio Javier, Filipino politician, lawyer, and civil servant (d. 1986)
• October 15 – Penny Marshall, American actress and director
• October 19 – Andrew Vachss, American author and attorney
• October 20
  • Earl Hindman, American actor (d. 2003)
  • Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, German biologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
• October 21 –
  • Elvin Bishop, American musician
  • Judith Sheindlin, American lawyer, judge, television personality
• October 22 – Annette Funicello, American actress
• October 23 – Michael Crichton, American author (d. 2008)
• October 24 – Ruthann Aron, Brooklyn, New York
• October 26 – Bob Hoskins, British actor
• October 29 – Bob Ross, American painter and television presenter (d. 1995)
• October 31 – David Ogden Stiers, American actor and voice-over artist

November

• November 1
  • Larry Flynt, American publisher (Hustler)
  • Ralph Klein, Canadian politician
  • Marcia Wallace, American actress and comedienne
• November 2
  • Shere Hite, American-German sexologist
  • Stefanie Powers, American actress
• November 5
  • Pierangelo Bertoli, Italian singer-songwriter (d. 2002)
  • Margaret Teele, American actress
• November 8
  • Angel Cordero Jr., Puerto Rican jockey
  • Fernando Sorrentino, Argentine writer
• November 10
  • Robert F. Engle, American economist, Nobel Prize laureate
  • Hans-Rudolf Merz, Swiss Federal Councilor
• November 13 – Roger Lee Hall, American composer and music preservationist
• November 15 – Daniel Barenboim, Argentine-born pianist and conductor
• November 17
  • Derek Clayton, Australian long-distance runner
  • Kang Kek Iew, Cambodian politician and criminal
  • Martin Scorsese, American film director
  • István Rosztóczy, Hungarian microbiologist
• November 18
  • Linda Evans, American actress
  • Susan Sullivan, American actress
• November 20 – Joe Biden, 47th Vice President of the United States
• November 22 – Francis K. Butagira, Ugandan ambassador
• November 24 – Billy Connolly, Scottish comedian
• November 26 – Khalil Kalfat, Egyptian intellectual and writer
• November 27
  • Henry Carr, American athlete
  • Jimi Hendrix, American musician (d. 1970)
  • Manolo Blahnik, Spanish shoe designer
• November 28 – Paul Warfield, American football player
• November 29 – Philippe Huttenlocher, Swiss baritone

December

• December 4 – Gemma Jones, British actress
• December 6 – Peter Handke, Austrian novelist
• December 7 – Peter Tomarken, American game-show host (Press Your Luck) (d. 2006)
• December 9 – Dick Butkus, American football player
• December 12 – Peter Sarstedt, British musician
• December 17 – Paul Butterfield, American musician (d. 1987)
• December 20 – Bob Hayes, American athlete
• December 21
  • Carla Thomas, American singer
  • Hu Jintao, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, President of the People's Republic of China
• December 27 – Charmian Carr, American actress
• December 29
  • Rajesh Khanna, Indian actor
  • Dinah Christie, British actress
• December 30
  • Michael Nesmith, American songwriter, singer and actor (The Monkees)
  • Betty Aberlin, American actress
  • Allan Gotthelf, American philosopher
  • Janko Prunk, Slovenian historian
• December 31 – Andy Summers, English guitarist

Date unknown

• Dick Stockton, American sports announcer
• Hissene Habre, President of Chad
• probable – Muammar al-Gaddafi, leader of Libya

Deaths

January–June

• January 4
  • Mel Sheppard, American athlete (b. 1883)
  • Otis Skinner, stage & film actor (b. 1858)
• January 6 – Henri de Baillet-Latour, Belgian International Olympic Committee president (b. 1876)
• January 14 – Porfirio Barba-Jacob, Colombian poet and writer (b. 1883)
• January 16
  • Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, second youngest son of Queen Victoria (b. 1850)
  • Carole Lombard, American actress (air crash) (b. 1908)
• January 22 – Walter Sickert, English Impressionist painter (b. 1860)
• January 26 – Felix Hausdorff, German mathematician (suicide) (b. 1868)
• February 8 – Fritz Todt, Nazi German engineer (b. 1891)
• February 12 – Grant Wood, American painter (b. 1891)
• February 14 – Mirosław Ferić, Polish pilot of the No. 303 Squadron in Northolt (b. 1915)
• February 19 – Frank Abbandando, American gangster (executed) (b. 1910)
• February 22 – Stefan Zweig, Austrian writer (suicide with wife) (b. 1881)
• February 28 – Karel Doorman, Dutch admiral (sinking ship) (b. 1889)
• March 1
  • Cornelius Vanderbilt III, American military officer, inventor, and engineer (b. 1873)
  • George S. Rentz, United States Navy Chaplain and Navy Cross winner (b. 1882)
• March 8 – José Raúl Capablanca, Cuban chess player (b. 1888)
• March 10 – William Henry Bragg, English physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1862)
• March 21 – J.S Woodsworth, Canadian politician (b. 1874)
• April 15 – Robert Musil, Austrian-born novelist (b. 1880)
• April 16 – Princess Alexandra of Edinburgh and Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, granddaughter of Queen Victoria
• April 17 – Jean Baptiste Perrin, French physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1870)
• April 18 – Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, American sculptor and socialite (b. 1875)
• April 24
  • Deenanath Mangeshkar, Indian singer and composer (b. 1900)
  • Lucy Maud Montgomery, Canadian writer (b. 1874)
• May 2 – Jose Abad Santos, Filipino chief justice of the Supreme Court (b. 1886)
• May 3 – Thorvald Stauning, Prime Minister of Denmark (b. 1873)
• May 7 – Felix Weingartner, Yugoslavian conductor (b. 1863)
• May 10 – Joe Weber, American vaudevillian (b. 1867)
• May 14 – Frank Churchill, American composer (b. 1901)
• May 16 – Bronisław Malinowski, Polish anthropologist (b. 1884)
• May 27 – Chen Duxiu, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (b. 1879)
• May 29
  • John Barrymore, American actor (b. 1882)
  • Akiko Yosano, Japanese author, poet (b. 1878)
• June 4
  • Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Nazi Reich Main Security Office and Reich governor of Bohemia and Moravia (assassinated) (b. 1904)
  • John C. Waldron, United States Naval aviator and commander of Torpedo Squadron 8, killed at the Battle of Midway (b. 1900)
  • Lofton R. Henderson, United States Naval aviator and commanding officer of VMSB-241, died at the Battle of Midway (b. 1903)
• June 5 – Virginia Lee Corbin, American actress (b. 1910)
• June 7 – Alan Blumlein, English electronics engineer (b. 1903)
• June 26 – Gene Stack, first American major league baseball player to be drafted during WWII and also the first to die in service (b. 1920)
• June 30 – William Henry Jackson, American photographer (b. 1843)

July–December

• July 1 – Peadar Mac Fhionnlaoich, Irish language writer (b. 1857)
• July 8 – Refik Saydam, prime minister of Turkey in his office (b.1881)
• July 15 – Wenceslao Vinzons, Filipino politician and resistance leader (bayoneted to death) (b. 1910)
• July 23 – Adam Czerniakow, Polish engineer and senator (suicide) (b. 1880)
• July 26 – Roberto Arlt, Argentine writer (b. 1900)
• July 28 – William Matthew Flinders Petrie, English Egyptologist (b. 1853)
• July 30 – Jimmy Blanton, American bassist (b. 1918)
• August 3
  • James Cruze, American actor (b. 1884)
  • Richard Willstätter, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1872)
• August 12 – Phillips Holmes, American actor (b. 1907)
• August 22 – Michel Fokine, Russian choreographer and dancer (b. 1880)
• August 25 – Prince George, Duke of Kent, fourth eldest son of King George V (b. 1902)
• September 14 – Ezra Seymour Gosney, American philanthropist and eugenicist (b. 1855)
• October 1 – Ants Piip, Estonian lawyer, diplomat and politician (b. 1884)
• October 15 – Marie Tempest, English stage & film actress (b. 1864)
• October 20 – May Robson, Australian actress (b. 1858)
• October 23 – Ralph Rainger, American composer and Hollywood songwriter (b. 1901)
• October 24 – James C. Morton, American character actor (b. 1884)
• November 1 – Hugo Distler, German composer (b. 1908)
• November 5 – George M. Cohan, American songwriter and entertainer (Yankee Doodle Dandy) (b. 1878)
• November 9 – Edna May Oliver, stage & film character actress (b. 1883)
• November 12 – Laura Hope Crews, American stage & film actress (Aunt PittyPat) (b. 1879)
• November 13 – Daniel J. Callaghan, United States Navy officer (b. 1890)
• November 16 – Josef Schmidt, Polish tenor (b. 1904)
• November 19 – Bruno Schulz, Polish writer and painter (shot) (b. 1892)
• November 21 – Leopold Graf Berchtold, Austro-Hungarian foreign minister (b. 1863)
• November 30 – Buck Jones, American actor (b. 1891)
• December 3 – Henner Henkel, German tennis champion (b. 1915)
• December 7 – Orland Steen Loomis, Governor-elect of Wisconsin (b. 1893)
• December 12 – Helen Westley, stage and film character actress (b. 1875)
• December 22 – Franz Boas, German anthropologist (b. 1858)
• December 24 – Francois Darlan, French Naval officer (b. 1881)

Nobel Prizes

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

References

1. ^ The actual number of victims, including the ten person crew, is uncertain, although a recent study concludes it may have been as high as 791, of which 785 were Jewish.[1] Franz & Collins' book Death on the Black Sea: The Untold Story of the Struma and WWII's Holocaust at Sea, calls it simply the "largest naval civilian disaster of the war." (page 255)
2. ^ Treblinka - ein Todeslager der "Aktion Reinhard", in: "Aktion Reinhard" - Die Vernichtung der Juden im Generalgouvernement, Bogdan Musial (ed.), Osnabrück 2004, pp. 257–281.
3. ^ Donald L. Niewyk, Francis R. Nicosia, The Columbia guide to the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-231-11200-9. Page 210
4. ^ Taphilo.com
5. ^ http://fpmedia.club.officelive.com/EersteaanvalVIIIBomberCommand.aspx Nieuws-wo2.tk
6. ^ Muggenthaler, August Karl (1977). German Raiders of WWII. Prentice-Hall. pp. 241–242. ISBN 0-13-354027-8. 
7. ^ Dawson, Jeff (2005). Dead Reckoning: The Dunedin Star Disaster. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0753820447. http://books.google.com/books?id=naMFHgAACAAJ. Retrieved 2008-03-31. 

• 1942 coin pictures

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