1942
1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950
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.
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.
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.
Explorer-mystic Sir Francis E. Younghusband dies at Lychett Minster, Dorset, July 31 at age 79.
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.
Filene's executive and Boston civic leader Louis E. Kirstein dies of pneumonia at Boston December 10 at age 75.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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: 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