1944: Information and Much More from Answers.com
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1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950
An Italian court finds former minister of state Emilio De Bono, 77, guilty of treason and a firing squad executes him at Verona January 11 (see 1943). Benito Mussolini has his 40-year-old son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano executed the same day, but Il Duce remains at large as Allied troops storm ashore from Higgins-built assault vessels on Anzio beach January 22, putting them within 25 miles of Rome after the start of a new assault on the Gustav Line to the south. The Germans have just withdrawn their patrols in the Anzio area to reinforce the Gustav Line, but Gen. J. P. Lucas misses his chance to advance on Rome. He has the men of his VI Corps dig foxholes for 2 days to consolidate their beachhead, the Tuskegee airmen of the 99th Army Air Corps squadron shoot down 12 German fighter planes in two successive days over Anzio, but the Germans rush in reinforcements, firing from the Alban Hills to pin down Allied troops.
The RAF bombs Berlin January 20, dropping 2,300 tons of bombs in an action that provokes protests February 9 in the House of Lords.
Soviet troops recapture Novgorod January 20, relieve Leningrad completely a week later after the city's 872-day siege, reach the border of prewar Poland in February, and take Krivoi Rog in the Ukraine February 22 after trapping 10 German divisions near Cherkassy.
The 96th Bomb Squadron of the U.S. Fifth Army under the command of Air Corps major Bradford A. Evans destroys the historic Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino February 15, having dropped leaflets the day before addressed to "Italian Friends" and saying, "We have been especially careful to avoid shelling the Monte Cassino monastery. The Germans have known how to benefit from this. But now the fighting has swept closer to its sacred precincts . . . We give you warning so that you may save yourselves. We warn you urgently: Leave the monastery. Leave it at once." Gen. Frido von Senger und Etterlin has not used the abbey as an observation post, but he has employed its ruins as a fortress located 1,702 feet above the main road from Naples to Rome, and he has been evacuating the monks and civilians since January as Allied forces approached. Allied troops have been sitting ducks for German artillery and have taken heavy casualties: British-born Lt. Gen. Bernard C. (Cyril) Freyburg, 54, is commander in chief of New Zealand forces, Major Gen. Sir Francis (Ivan Simms) Tucker commands the 4th Indian division, and they have demanded that the abbey be destroyed despite its cultural importance.
Allied aircraft begin Big Week February 20 with more than 1,700 bombers taking off from English airfields to attack Germany's aircraft industry, including a Messerschmidt assembly plant at Leipzig and other such targets. U.S. high-level bombers begin daylight attacks March 6 under the direction of Gen. Carl Truesdell Jr., using the Norden bombsight first developed in 1927 and still a U.S. secret. Truesdell also drops supplies to Polish patriots in the streets of Warsaw.
German troops invade Hungary March 19, even though it is clear that Hitler is playing a losing hand (see 1943). The Germans oust Premier Miklós Kállay, whose policy has been to fight the Russians while making peaceful overtures to the Western powers; he goes into hiding, will later be taken prisoner, and will be held at Dachau and, after that, Mauthausen until the end of the war (see 1946).
Soviet troops cross the Dniester March 19, Gen. Ivan Stepanovich Konev's First Ukrainian Army traps 100,000 Germans in the Korsun salient and Konev is made a marshal of the Soviet Union in March. Adolf Hitler dismisses Gen. Erich von Manstein March 30 after he questions der Führer's decisions with regard to the Eastern Front. The Russians retake Odessa April 10, and they retake Sevastopol May 9, trapping from 60,000 to 100,000 Germans. The Germans surrender, but the Russians take no prisoners; they round up 300,000 to 500,000 Crimean Tatars who welcomed the Germans and send them into exile in Central Asia as they clear the Ukraine of German invaders; thousands of Chechens are forcibly moved farther east to prevent their collaborating with the enemy.
Allied airmen escape the night of March 24 from the German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III 60 miles west of Frankfurt; most are British and Commonwealth fliers, 73 of the 76 who make their way out of the tunnel they have dug are eventually captured, and 50 are shot to death by the Gestapo on orders from der Führer.
Polish forces in Italy finally take what remains of Monte Cassino May 18 after nearly 6 months of Allied efforts to capture the abbey and break through the German lines. The battle for Monte Cassino has taken more than 60,000 Allied and German lives, more thousands have been wounded; about 1,000 men have died in the final assault, and most of the survivors are too exhausted to climb the final 200 yards.
Allied troops liberate Rome June 4 as German forces withdraw to the "Gothic Line" after dogged resistance and U.S. Fifth Army units under the command of Gen. Mark Clark enter the city to jubilant acclaim. Gen. Sir Harold Alexander has had overall command in Italy and receives credit for having used methods that compelled the enemy to evacuate the eternal city without subjecting it to destructive fighting.
June 6 (D-Day) sees Allied troops storm ashore on Normandy beaches under the supreme command of Gen. Eisenhower, whose forces take Cherbourg June 6. Bad weather has delayed Operation Overlord, which involves the largest naval force ever assembled, but Eisenhower seizes upon a temporary clearing to launch the assault. It begins with a drop of paratroopers under the command of Gen. James M. Gavin, 37, and British airborne forces landed from wooden gliders towed by 833 C-47s; they manage to capture the town of Ste. Mère Eglise, although most of them are killed, and of the U.S. troops who land on Omaha Beach after a rough Channel crossing some 2,500 are killed by day's end and about 12,000 wounded (the men storm ashore from Higgins-built assault vessels). The U.S. troops landed at Utah Beach encounter far less resistance, as do the British and Canadian troops landed on Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches; they move more than a mile inland by nightfall, while those landed on Omaha Beach have only a fragile foothold on the shore. An intrepid German spy at Istanbul has stolen allied plans for the invasion, and they are in Nazi hands, but a double agent has led the German high command to believe that the Normandy landings are a diversion to draw Hitler's panzer divisions south to Normandy while 30 divisions under the command of Gen. George S. Patton strike at Calais. The Allies have made no contingency plans, betting everything on success. Gen. Rommel is in Germany, celebrating his wife's 50th birthday; he rushes to the French coast and tries to persuade Gen. von Runstedt and derFührer that the Normandy landing is the real thing, Allied intelligence uses its knowledge of the secret German code to keep abreast of the split in German thinking, the flow of false information is redoubled, and the inability of commanders on the ground to make decisions delays efforts that would have driven the invaders back into the sea. Allied aircraft outnumber the Lüftwaffe 30 to one, and the Germans have failed to train enough pilots for a two-front war. Royal Air Force Marshal Arthur William Tedder, 53, plays a key role in the landing, as he did in Sicily last year and in North Africa before that; Admiral Bertram H. Ramsey, Royal Navy, commands Allied naval forces. The Germans do not concentrate their defense efforts until late afternoon, and some 176,000 Allied troops are ashore by day's end. French women who have consorted with enemy occupiers are shorn of their hair as the Germans fall back. The Normandy beachhead is secured by June 12.
Remote-controlled German V-1 (Vengeance) rockets hit London beginning June 13, each carries a ton of explosive, and they cause so much damage that more than 1.5 million Londoners are evacuated (see von Braun, 1942).
League of Nations promoter David Davies, 1st Baron Davies (of Llandinam), dies at his native Llandinam, Wales, June 16 at age 64.
Minsk falls to Soviet forces July 3; 100,000 Germans are captured.
A Vichy French firing squad executes former cabinet minister Georges Mandel, 59, at Fontainebleau July 7 for opposing pro-German policies.
Iceland attains the status of an independent republic July 17. A sovereign state since 1918 but a dependency of Denmark, the country discovered by the Vikings in 874 has been occupied since May 1940 by British and then by U.S. forces to prevent seizure by Germany, but withdrawal of U.S. troops will not begin until the end of 1959.
Adolf Hitler survives an assassination attempt July 20 at Rastenburg in East Prussia and continues to direct the Wehrmacht as it falls back before the advancing Allied armies. Count Claus Schek von Stauffenberg, 37, has lost an eye, his right hand, and two fingers of his left while fighting with the Afrika Corps; he and some of Hitler's other generals have plotted against Hitler, a bomb explodes, but although der Führer is knocked unconscious he suffers no more than a punctured eardrum (several of his aides are killed by the blast along with a Lüftwaffe general). Military intelligence chief Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, now 57, is arrested and sent to the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Bavaria, where he will be executed next year, and an estimated 4,500 others will be executed as well, including Admiral Canaris's chief of staff Gen. Hans Oster, Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, and Gen. Erich Hoepner. Former minister of war Otto Gessler, now 69, is arrested and will spend 7 months in a concentration camp. The Gestapo sends Karl Haushofer to Dachau and imprisons his son Albrecht, a University of Berlin professor of geopolitics, in Berlin's Moabit Prison (see 1945).
Adolf Hitler appoints his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels "General Plenipotentiary for Total War Measures" in July as he becomes increasingly reclusive. Goebbels gives false reassurances that Germany is winning her war for world domination and hints at a "secret cache" of miracle weapons. A Messerschmidt Me 262 attacks a British photo-reconnaissance Mosquito over Munich July 25, becoming the first jet aircraft to be used in combat (see 1943). British Gloster Meteor jets go into action against Me 262s, and most of the German jets remain on the ground for lack of fuel, spare parts, or trained pilots. Ernst Heinkel has unveiled his own jet aircraft design, but although the He-178 has performed well against Willy Messerschmidt's Me-109 the Lüftwaffe high command has refused to fund it. Frank Whittle's design will evolve into engines with 50,000 to 60,000 pounds, enabling jet aircraft to fly at much higher altitudes and higher speeds, but by the 1950s most jets will employ Hans von Ohain's axial-flow engine rather than Whittle's centrifugal-flow engine.
Soviet troops cross the Curzon line in Poland July 23, the Kremlin recognizes the Lublin Committee of Polish Liberation in Moscow July 26 as the governing authority of a liberated Poland, Warsaw rises against the Germans August 1 on orders from Gen. Bor-Komorowski (Tadeusz Komorowski), 49, of the Polish underground, who responds to an appeal by Moscow Radio, but Soviet troops are unable to come to the support of Bor-Komorowski. The Germans crush the uprising, inflict heavy losses, and force Bor-Komorowski to surrender along with a few survivors after 2 months of ferocious fighting.
Allied forces break out of the Normandy beachhead at Avranches August 1, Gen. Omar Bradley takes command of the 1.2 million-man U.S. 12th Army Group a few days later.
German industrialists who include members of the Krupp and Messerschmidt families meet in secret August 10 at the Paris hotel Maison Rouge under the chairmanship of financier Hjalmar Schacht, now 67, and plan ways to help Nazi leaders get out of the country to escape Allied retribution after the war and get hundreds of millions of dollars in assets into foreign banks where they cannot be touched.
Marshal Konev's army crosses the Vistula in August, sweeps across Poland, and becomes the first Soviet force to enter German territory.
Allied forces cross the Loire August 11, the Canadian 1st Army reaches Potigny August 15, and as many as 300,000 Germans find themselves trapped in what is soon called the "Falaise Pocket," an area 30 miles long and 15 wide with the U.S. 1st Army at its rear, Gen. Patton's U.S. 3rd Army on its southern flank, Field Marshal Montgomery's British 2nd Army on its northern flank. The U.S. 7th Army lands in southern France August 15 and begins moving up the Rhine Valley. French forces invade southern France August 16 under the command of Gen. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, now 55, and begin a drive that will take them into southern Germany and Austria. Adolf Hitler relieves Gen. Günther von Kluge of his command in the Falaise Pocket, replacing him with Field Marshal Walter Model, 53; von Kluge is recalled to Germany, and swallows a cyanide tablet August 17 at age 61 rather than face execution (so do some others suspected of having participated in the July 20 assassination plot). Allied paratroopers land behind German lines in the Netherlands August 17 as Field Marshal Montgomery launches Operation Market Basket to secure control of bridges across the Rhine, Gen. Patton's 3rd Army reaches the Seine August 19, and Polish forces play a key role in cutting down or capturing the Germans as they retreat through the Falaise Gap between August 13 and 21, losing half their men and much of their equipment (which is more complex and sometimes less reliable than Allied equipment). Some 10,000 Germans are killed in the slaughter of men and horses, 50,000 are captured, but 200,000 escape.
French troops retake Marseilles August 23 and liberate Paris after more than 4 years of German occupation. Gen. de Gaulle enters Paris August 25, followed by the U.S. 1st Army under the command of Georgia-born Gen. Courtney (Hicks) Hodges, 57; the French provisional government moves there from Algiers August 30.
Romania surrenders to Soviet forces August 24; the Red Army enters Bucharest August 30, and Romanian troops redirect their efforts to fight the Germans.
Delegates to two international conferences at Washington, D.C., discuss the formation of a United Nations organization that will succeed in doing what the League of Nations failed to do (see 1943). Both meetings are held at Dumbarton Oaks, the 16-acre Georgetown estate of career diplomat Robert Bliss and his wife, Mildred, whose house has stood since 1801.
Finland names 77-year-old field marshal Carl G. von Mannerheim president in hopes that he can negotiate a separate peace with the Soviet Union, and an armistice negotiated in September by Mannerheim with Soviet diplomat Aleksandra Kollontai, now 72, ends hostilities between Moscow and Helsinki (see 1940). Finland has ceded 41,540 square kilometers (16,000 square miles) of territory to the USSR and in 1941 joined with Germany (under pressure from Berlin) against the Russians. Former prime minister Pehr Evind Svinhufvud has died at Luumäki February 29 at age 82. Cabinet minister Väinö Tanner, now 63, is imprisoned at Moscow's insistence and will not be released until 1949. A coalition government is formed under the leadership of diplomat Juho Kusti Paasikivi, now 73, with Mannerheim continuing as president (see 1946).
British anti-aircraft and RAF fighter planes destroy 80 percent of incoming German rockets by August (De Havilland Mosquito planes are credited with downing more than 600 of the missiles), and the rocket attacks stop in early September, but they are succeeded September 8 by faster and deadlier V-2 rockets (buzz bombs with warheads of nearly one ton each); they also hit Antwerp, killing hundreds. These V-2 rockets take an increasing toll in Britain despite efforts by Allied bombers to destroy launching sites at Peenemünde and knock out the German factories producing the bombs. Designed, as were the V-1 rockets, by Wernher von Braun, the liquid-fueled missiles are called V-2 (Vergeltungswaffe Zwei, revenge weapon two) bombs and travel at more than three times the speed of sound, but they cannot pinpoint prime targets and will have little strategic effect. French scientist Henri Moureu, 45, has kept his country's stocks of heavy water (deuterium oxide) out of German hands and gives the Allies the location of the German's V-2 bases; U.S. bombers will destroy the bases over the next 6 months, but V-2 rockets will continue to fall until late March of next year, by which time some 12,000 will have landed in southern England, killing about 2,700, maiming and injuring another 6,500, and causing enormous property damage.
Hawker Aircraft ceases production of its Hurricane fighter plane, having produced more than 14,000 Hurricanes in some 20 variations (see 1940). The plane has been modified to carry bomb and rocket racks and heavier guns, including 40-millimeter cannon.
Idaho-born Marine aviator Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, 31, shoots down three Japanese planes January 3 but is himself shot down in Rabaul harbor, picked up by a Japanese submarine, and taken to a prison camp. A veteran of Gen. Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers who saw service in China, Boyington rejoined the Marines in 1942, organized the 212 (Black Sheep) Squadron, has shot down 28 enemy planes, and is awarded the Medal of Honor (it is not known whether or not he is alive, but he will be released next year).
Allied forces in the Pacific take Kwajalein Island February 6 and attack the main Japanese Central Pacific base at Truk February 16. Known as the Gibraltar of the Pacific, it has provided shelter for ships of the Imperial Navy since the start of the war, but carrier-based planes sink dozens of ships and ground forces land on Eniwetok in the Marshalls February 17.
Japanese forces in Burma launch a major offensive March 7 with the intent of invading India (see 1942). Gen. Orde C. Wingate dies in a crash of his B-25 Mitchell bomber March 24 at age 41; his specially trained jungle fighters—the Chindits, or Wingate's Raiders—have harried Japanese forces in northern Burma since 1942, thrusting far behind enemy lines with supplies dropped by air. The Japanese launch an attack March 29 in the Imphal Plain and April 5 on Kohima. Lieut. Gen. Sir William J. Slim, 52, directs the British 14th Army in a stout defense, Chindit forces harry the attackers, the Japanese withdraw from Kohima May 30, and by June 22 the Japanese have begun a retreat to the Chindwin River, having lost 53,000 men; the British and their Indian regiments have lost 4,000 (13,000 wounded have been evacuated by air). Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army has grown to number some 50,000 and fights the British not only in Burma but also within India's borders at Imphal (see 1943); keeping his forces free from Japanese involvement, Bose occupies Coxtown on the Indian border, and his men shout, "Delhi Chalo!" ("Let's march to Delhi!"). Gen. Slim repels a Japanese invasion of India, Gen. Stilwell continues work on the Lido-Burma Road, the Japanese communications line is broken by the end of August with help from 3,000 U.S. elite volunteer jungle fighters of the 5307th Composite division (led by Gen. Frank D. Merrill, 41, and known as Merrill's Marauders), but the Chindits are too exhausted to continue (see 1945).
Allied forces land at Hollandia in New Guinea April 22 and capture Salamaua as Gen. MacArthur advances toward the Philippines. The troops come ashore on assault craft built by Higgins Industries, whose boss Andrew Jackson Higgins has designed 12,964 (92 percent) of the U.S. Navy's 14,072 vessels and built 8,865 of them—high-speed PT boats, antisubmarine boats, dispatch boats, 170-foot freight supply ships, and specialized patrol craft as well as landing craft—at his own New Orleans plants, which are fully integrated and pay blacks and women the same wages as white males.
A U.S. Navy task force commanded by Chicago-born Rear Admiral Daniel V. Gallery, 43, of the carrier U.S.S. Guadalcanal seizes the German submarine U-505 June 4 off French West Africa in the first capture at sea of any foreign warship since 1815. The Americans obtain valuable military secrets that include a German radio code and a new type of torpedo, but the coup is kept secret so that the Germans will believe the submarine has sunk.
A B-29 Superfortress attacks Japanese railyards at Bangkok June 5 in the first combat mission by the strategic bomber first tested in September 1942. More than a third of the 26,000 workers who have been working around the clock to assemble the huge planes are women, employed in factories at Wichita, Omaha, and Marietta, Ga., with parts built by General Motors and Chrysler from parts made by nearly 4,000 sub-assemblers all over the United States. B-29s attack the Yawata steelworks on Japan's home island of Kyushu June 15. The Battle of the Philippine Sea June 19 ends with a loss of 402 Japanese planes, while only 27 U.S. planes are downed. Admiral Soemu Toyoda has won appointment as commander in chief of Japan's combined fleet May 3 following the death March 31 of Admiral Mineichi Koga in a plane crash in the Philippines, but Toyoda has never commanded forces at sea, his subordinates have little confidence in him, and he has been unable to prevent the defeat of Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, 58, who has been a leading advocate of aviation in the Imperial Navy.
The U.S. Army Air Corps has nearly 80,000 aircraft by July and employs more than 2.4 million men.
Saipan in the Marianas falls to U.S. troops July 9 after Lieut. Gen. Yoshitsugo Saito and 31,000 troops have fought to the death in a 23-day battle that has cost 3,500 U.S. lives. Navajo code talkers play a crucial role in the U.S. victory as they did earlier on Guadalcanal (see 1942; Iwo Jima, 1945). More than 2,000 Japanese civilians throw themselves and their children off cliffs at the island's northern tip; to be captured would be a disgrace, they have been told, and only 1,000 surrender July 9. Japan's 473 carrier-based planes are outmatched by 956 U.S. planes, and three of Japan's nine carriers are sunk. Losing more than 400 planes and nearly that many flyers effectively ends Japan's viability as an air power. New B-29 superfortresses—25 percent faster than B-17s or B-24s—can reach Tokyo from Saipan with 20,000-ton bombloads, and the island's conquest marks a turning point in the war. Former prime minister Fumimaro Konoye argues that the government should begin negotiations to end the war and leads a peace delegation to Moscow; Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov refuses to see him. The Tokyo government falls July 18, but a new government takes office and continues hostilities.
Thailand's dictator Luang Phibunsongkhram resigns under pressure in July, having gained some minor territorial concessions in Burma, Cambodia, Laos, and Malaya through its alliance with Japan (see 1942). Free Thai overseas resistance groups have helped their counterparts to conduct raids on Japanese facilities and infiltrate the government; a new civilian government takes power, controlled from behind the scenes by Phibunsongkhram's former colleague Pridi Phanomyong (see 1946).
Former Iranian leader Reza Shah Pahlevi dies at Johannesburg July 26 at age 66; former Egyptian khedive Abbas II at Geneva December 20 at age 70.
Antwerp falls to the Allies September 4, and Brussels is liberated September 5. President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill meet at Quebec from September 11 to 16 (the Octagon Conference) and decide to advance against Germany on two western fronts rather than making a concerted drive on Berlin. The decision will later be criticized as having permitted Soviet troops to take the German capital (see 1945). British airborne troops landed September 17 at Eindhoven and Arnhem are unable to outflank the German Westwall defenses and sustain heavy losses before the survivors are withdrawn; by September, the U.S. 1st Army under Gen. Bradley has breached the Siegfried Line and is fighting on German soil—the first invasion of Germany from the west since Napoleon's time; the Allies retake Aachen in the Rhineland October 21.
Moscow declares war on Bulgaria September 5, Soviet columns enter Sofia September 16, and Belgrade falls to Soviet and Yugoslav partisan forces October 20.
British and Greek Partisan forces retake Athens October 13, other troops liberate Albania and establish communist leader Enver Hoxha, now 35, as prime minister. The Communist-controlled EAM-ELAS (Ethnikón Apeleftherotikón Métopon-Ethnikós Laikós Apeleftherotikós Strátos, or National Liberation Front-National Popular Liberation Army) has cooperated at times with the EDES (Ellinoos Dimokratikos Ethnikós Strátos, or Greek Democratic National Army) in actions against German occupation troops, but the EAM-ELAS has set up a provisional government in the mountains, and although the British bring the two groups together in an uneasy coalition, it breaks apart within a few weeks when the EAM-ELAS refuses to disband its guerrilla army, whose men overrun all of Greece except Athens and Salonika. Civil war breaks out at Athens December 3, and the British military is able to suppress it only with great difficulty (see 1945).
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel commits suicide October 14 at age 52. Adolf Hitler has suspected him of disloyalty and ordered SS troops to surround his house; they provide him with the cyanide pill that he swallows.
Hungary's Admiral Horthy announces October 14 that he will seek an armistice with the Allies; the Germans that day send 40 Tiger tanks into Budapest with orders to overthrow Horthy, who capitulates October 16. Fascist Arrow Cross Party leader Ferenc Szálasi, 47, takes over as nominal head of the country and uses his thugs to root out Jews, leftists, and deserters.
RAF pilot G. (Geoffrey) Leonard Cheshire, 27, is awarded the Victoria Cross; he commanded the 617 Squadron that has destroyed key German dams on the Möhne and Eder dams, producing heavy floods in the Ruhr area and thereby slowing industrial production. The rotating, bouncing bombs dropped by the RAF have been invented by aeronautical designer and military engineer Barnes (Neville) Wallis, 56.
U.S. Army and Marine forces take the airstrip at Munda Point on New Georgia in the Solomon Islands August 5 after more than a month of combat in which 9,000 Japanese defenders in camouflaged pillboxes have held off 45,000 Americans. More than 1,100 U.S. lives have been lost and several thousand wounded have been evacuated in the fight to establish a base for Marine fighter planes.
Guam in the Pacific falls to U.S. Marine and Army forces August 10 after a 21-day battle; the U.S. forces take Pelelieu in the Palaus in October and begin carrier-based raids on Formosa (Taiwan), where 300 Japanese planes are destroyed October 12.
Philippines president-in-exile Manuel Quezon dies of tuberculosis at Saranac Lake, N.Y., August 1 at age 65 and is succeeded by Vice President Sergio Osmeña, 65, who founded the Nacionalista Party in 1907 and has remained in the Philippines during the Japanese occupation. He will serve until the elections in 1946.
U.S. forces launch an amphibious invasion of the Philippines October 20, landing four divisions. President Roosevelt has given approval in late July to Gen. MacArthur's plan to make the Philippine Archipelago America's next objective in the Pacific, Lieut. Col. Henry A. Mucci, a Pearl Harbor survivor from Bridgeport, Conn., has led a small, preliminary Ranger assault force ashore on the central Philippine island of Leyte October 18 to clear the way, and Gen. MacArthur walks down the ramp of a landing craft October 20, wading ashore in an event carefully staged for photographers and newsreel cameramen. "People of the Philippines, I have returned," says MacArthur into a microphone. "The hour of your redemption is here . . . Rally to me." But the Japanese are intent on holding the Philippines lest their troops be cut off from oil supplies in the East Indies.
The Battle of Leyte Gulf from October 23 to 26 is the largest engagement in naval history and leaves the Imperial Navy crippled. A Japanese flotilla commanded by Vice-Admiral Shoji Nishimura has steamed north from Brunei to block the landing of U.S. troops. Another flotilla has steamed south from the Ryukus under the command of Vice-Admiral Kiyohide Shima. Their plan is to rendezvous in the Mindinao Sea and proceed through Surigao Strait into Leyte Gulf, where they are to join their forces with those of Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, 55, who is coming across the Palawan Passage and Sibuyan Sea from Lingga Roads, near Singapore. Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa has headed southward from Japan with his remaining aircraft carriers, but the high command has intended his 35-year-old converted battleships mainly as decoys, they carried only about 100 planes, and Ozawa has lost most of them in combat. Nishimura arrives in the Mindanao Sea October 24 with two battleships, a cruiser, and four destroyers, but California-born Rear Admiral Robert B. (Bostwick) Carney, 49, has devised a plan to stop the Imperial Navy. Torpedoes from five U.S. destroyers knock out one of Nishimura's battleships and all but one of his destroyers; when his surviving vessels reach the neck of Surigao Strait they are met by New Hampshire-born Admiral Thomas C. (Cassin) Kinkaid, 56, whose 7th Fleet has six battleships, five of them survivors of Pearl Harbor, plus four heavy cruisers, six light cruisers, and 18 escort carriers. Firing by radar direction from a distance of 12 miles, the six-, eight-, 14-, and 16-inch guns of Kinkaid's fleet sink Nishimura's other battleshi p, cripple his cruiser, and force his sole remaining destroyer to reverse course. Vice-Admiral Shima arrives, collides with Nishimura's foundering cruiser, and withdraws, but U.S. ships and planes sink three of his ships, including Nishimura's flagship. U.S. submarines have intercepted Kurita's 24-ship fleet in the Palawan Passage October 23, sinking two of his cruisers, including his flagship, and damaging a third; rescued from the sea, Kurita has transferred his flag to the Yamato which, like her sister ship the Musashi, has 18-inch guns that fire 3,000-pound projectiles (they are the world's largest battleships). Kurita's carrier planes lure Admiral Nimitz and his entire 3rd Fleet out of Pearl Harbor while Kurita steams unopposed through San Bernardino Strait and bears down on Kinkaid's escort carriers, taking them by surprise off Samar and inflicting heavy damage. Kinkaid and Nimitz signal Admiral Halsey for help, and he heads for Samar with his battleship group while part of Nimitz's 3rd Fleet sinks Kurita's carriers off Cape Engaño to the north. Kurita believes himself to be outnumbered and breaks off the engagement, retreating toward Lingga Roads while kamikaze suicide pilots flying converted Zero fighter planes make last-ditch efforts to inflict as much damage as possible on the Americans after a 3-day battle that has involved 282 ships and 200,000 seamen and aviators over an expanse of some 100,000 square miles of sea. The U.S. Navy loses only one light cruiser, two escort carriers, and three destroyers, the Imperial Navy three battleships, one large carrier, three light carriers, six heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, and 11 destroyers, but Vice Admiral Ozawa acquits himself with honor and the Japanese succeed in landing reinforcements on the west coast of Leyte.
Gen. Eisenhower delivers a Thanksgiving Day address to the nation, saying, "Let us thank God for Higgins Industries, management, and labor which has given us the landing boats with which to conduct our campaign." (Adolf Hitler has called boat builder Andrew Jackson Higgins the "new Noah.")
Superfortress raids on Tokyo from Saipan begin November 24.
The "unsinkable" new Japanese aircraft carrier Shinano steams out of Tokyo Bay on her maiden voyage November 28 with an escort of three destroyers en route to Kure for final construction, radar aboard the U.S. submarine Archerfish under the command of Capt. Joseph F. Enright, 34, picks up what looks at first like an oil tanker 12 miles away, the Shinano's lookout spots the submarine, Capt. Toshio Abe tries to escape, but four of the six torpedoes fired by the Archerfish at 3:17 the next morning find their target, the 59,000-ton carrier goes down, the Archerfish dives to 400 feet to escape depth charges, none of her 81 crewmen are hurt, but the Japanese destroyers are able to pick up only about 1,000 of the 2,514 sailors and civilian workers who were aboard the Shinano.
U.S. forces on Leyte take Ormoc December 10, U.S. forces invade Mindoro Island December 15, but the Battle of Leyte rages until December 25, with U.S. generals Walter Krueger, Franklin Sibert, and John Hodge commanding about 150,000 men against Lieut. Gen. Sosaku Suzuki, who is heavily reinforced by Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita but has only 212 planes and cannot hold the island. Japanese ground forces sustain at least 74,000 casualties, most of them killed but many taken prisoner; the Americans lose 15,584 killed, wounded, and missing in action.
Former U.S. senator (R. Neb.) George W. Norris dies at McCook, Neb., September 2 at age 74; former New York governor and 1928 presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith (the "Happy Warrior" in President Roosevelt's phrase) dies at his native New York October 4 at age 70; Wendell L. Willkie has suffered a heart attack in August and dies at New York October 8 at age 52.
President Roosevelt wins reelection to a fourth term with 53 percent of the popular vote and 432 electoral votes. His Republican opponent is New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, now 42, who receives 46 percent of the popular vote but fails to carry his home state and winds up with only 99 electoral votes. Washington wit Alice Roosevelt Longworth has said of Gov. Dewey, a diminutive man with black hair, black moustache, and a faint smile, "How do you expect people to vote for a man who looks like a bridegroom on a wedding cake?" Party leaders have dumped Vice President Henry A. Wallace because he is considered too liberal for southern voters, they have rejected Sen. James F. Byrnes (S.C.) because his segregationist views are unacceptable to northern voters, so the vice president-elect is Sen. Harry S. Truman, 60 (Mo.), who has gained national recognition by chairing a special Senate "watchdog" committee to investigate possible profiteering on national defense projects.
Helen Gahagan Douglas wins election to Congress from Los Angeles's 14th Congressional District and is appointed to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. She will be reelected in 1946 and 1948, both times by wide margins (see 1939; 1950).
The U.S. Senate rises to its feet December 19 to pay tribute to Sen. Hattie Caraway (R. Ark.), who has been defeated by Congressman William Fulbright, 39, for the seat she has held since 1932.
RAF planes using bombs designed by Barnes Wallis attack the German battleship Tirpitz November 12 at her repair dock on the Norwegian coast (see 1942). Seriously damaged by previous air attacks, she is capsized and permanently disabled, ending her threat to Soviet-bound Allied convoys.
Former French prime minister Joseph Caillaux dies at Mamers November 22 at age 81.
Strasbourg falls to the Allies November 24, but the Battle of the Bulge that begins December 16 takes a heavy toll of U.S. troops as the German 5th Panzer Army commanded by Gen. von Runstedt launches an offensive along an 80-mile front in Belgium's Ardennes Forest that will continue through January of next year. German war production has reached new highs despite U.S. bombings, von Runstedt has massed 250,000 troops on the Belgian border beginning in October, and Hitler has ordered a cessation of all radio signals to keep the Allies unaware of his intentions to sweep through the Ardennes, recapture Antwerp, and so embarrass the Americans that they will sue for peace. The surprise attack catches the Americans unprepared and begins the largest, costliest battle in U.S. history. Temperatures drop below zero in the worst winter that anyone in the area can remember, the frozen ground makes it hard to dig foxholes, snow begins falling December 21, and many soldiers on both sides freeze to death or lose frost-bitten extremities, although most of the casualties are caused by artillery shells as heavy clouds help the Germans by denying air cover to the Americans.
The Manhattan Project proceeds apace on developing a nuclear weapon at Los Alamos (see 1942). Ted Hall and his former Harvard College roommate Saville Sax approach a Soviet trading company at New York late in the year and begin supplying critical information about the project (see 1945). German-born British physicist Klaus (Emil Julius) Fuchs, 33, is a member of the British mission working at Alamogordo, N.M., and also passes along knowledge to Soviet agents of the "implosion principle" for producing the pressure needed to set off a nuclear chain reaction using plutonium, knowledge that will prove essential to Soviet bomb-making efforts (see 1949; Fuchs, 1946). Captured papers found at Strasbourg in December by Dutch-born U.S. physicist Samuel A. Goudsmit and E. I. du Pont executive Frederic A. C. Wardenburg, 3rd, 39, show that German scientists under the direction of Nobel physicist Werner Heisenberg have been trying to develop a nuclear weapon but gone off in a wrong direction. Some European scientists leave the Manhattan Project when it becomes clear that a nuclear bomb will not be needed to defeat Hitler, some oppose any deployment of such a bomb, others worry that the bomb will not be powerful enough to make it clear that world powers must find peaceful ways to settle their differences or face global obliteration.
"Nuts," says Gen. Anthony C. (Clement) McAuliffe, 46, December 22 to German demands that he surrender his 101st Airborne Division at Bastogne, which he has held against overwhelming odds; the weather clears December 23, and McAuliffe is relieved December 26 by units of Gen. Patton's 3rd Army headed by Col. Wendell Blanchard, 41, whose tanks, led by Col. Creighton (Williams) Abrams, 30, have come 150 miles in 19 hours, but the fighting continues with heavy losses on both sides (see 1945).
German occupation forces in Hungary capture patriot Hannah Senesh, 23, who has volunteered with five young men to parachute behind enemy lines on a suicidal rescue mission. A native Hungarian who emigrated to Palestine in 1939 to fulfill her Zionist dreams, she has kept a diary since age 13. She is executed along with her comrades. Soviet forces surround Budapest December 27.
Liberian Supreme Court Justice William V. S. (Vanarat Shadrach) Tubman, 48, is inaugurated as president January 3 and promptly declares war on Germany and Japan. He will hold office until his death in 1971, encouraging foreign capital investment, expanding revenues, encouraging tribal peoples to participate in the government, encouraging immigration from the United States, the West Indies, and Britain's West African colonies, and granting the franchise to women (see 1955).
Cuban president Fulgencio Batista steps down after 11 years in which he has built a strong, efficient government (see 1933; 1952).
El Salvador's fascist-style government survives a coup attempt in April, but university students foment a general strike in May, bringing the nation to a standstill and forcing the resignation of Maximiliano Hernández Martinez, who has ruled since December 1931 (see human rights, 1932). Another military dictator succeeds him and continues his repressive regime (see 1948).
Guatemalan dictator Gen. Jorge Ubico suspends freedom of speech June 22 and shuts down the nation's press, a general strike June 23 cripples the country, and Ubico, now 65, resigns July 1 after 13 years in power; he flees to New Orleans and a coup d'état October 20 ends the nation's military dictatorship. Former minister of education Juan José Arévalo (Bermejo), 40, wins 85 percent of the popular vote in the ensuing presidential election, with organized labor playing a major role for the first time. Arévalo will take office next year and rule until 1951.
The Nazis convert the Stutthof forced labor camp outside Danzig into an extermination camp early in the year. Intended mostly for Jewish women from the Baltic countries and Poland, it will soon be used also for Hungarian Poles, and some 50,000 people will die there and in satellite camps in the next 16 months from hunger, disease, or in the gas chambers.
Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. and his aides meet with President Roosevelt in the White House Oval Office January 16 to discuss the plight of Europe's Jews (see 1942). The State Department finally agrees to show some compassion, and the president signs Executive Order 9417 January 22 establishing a War Refugee Board that is to take all necessary means to rescue people in danger of being annihilated in what will come to be called the Holocaust. The president has mostly turned a deaf ear to earlier pleas for such action and he has signed the order chiefly to shut off discussion in Congress that might embarrass the administration. Treasury Department official John Paley is appointed acting director of the board, the first 982 refugees arrive in August at a hastily-constructed camp set up at Oswego, N.Y., and the board will eventually help about 200,000 Jews to escape, a small fraction of the number that might have been saved had the United States acted sooner.
Nazi troops gun down 335 Italian men and boys in the Ardeatine Caves beside the Appian Way outside Rome March 24 in reprisal for the killing of 33 German soldiers by partisans. Of the dead, 255 are civilians, 68 soldiers; the status of 12 will remain a mystery, but all are victims of Herbert Kappler, 37, the SS colonel who has ordered the massacre and has actually fired the first shot when the soldier assigned to do so became physically ill. Kappler will be convicted of war crimes in 1948 and be sentenced to life in prison but will be smuggled out of a hospital in 1977 and die 6 months later in Germany; SS captain Erich Priebke, 30, will escape from a British prisoner-of-war camp, flee to Argentina, and not be extradited for trial until 1995.
Nazi SS troops lock women and children inside a church at the French town of Oradour-sur-Glane in Normandy June 10 while they cut down their men with machine-gun fire in retaliation for the capture of an SS officer by the Résistance. The SS start fires on the church altar, and when the women try to escape they are shot by the Germans, who poke their guns through the windows to fire on those inside. Only six of the town's 648 people survive the massacre, and 14 Alsatian Frenchmen will be convicted of having participated in the killings, although the Germans forced 13 of them to join the SS.
German forces in Hungary threaten the safety of that country's 700,000 Jews. Nazi authorities jail bishop Jozsef Mindszenty, 52, for prohibiting Roman Catholics to say a Mass and sing a government-ordered Te Deum "in thanksgiving for the successful liberation of the town [Budapest] from the Jews" (see 1948). The newly-established American War Refugee Board and the Swedish government send diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, 32, to Budapest with orders to initiate a rescue plan. Wallenberg's financier uncle Marcus died last year; he designs a Swedish protection passport (Schutz-pass), arranges "Swedish houses" that offer refuge, and will be credited with saving up to 100,000 Jews from annihilation, but the Germans ship nearly 500,000 Jews off to the death camps in just 12 weeks (see 1945).
Soviet forces liberate the Maidanek death camp outside Lublin July 29 but find only a few hundred prisoners still alive; anywhere from 200,000 to 1.5 million people have died at the camp, either from privation or by execution.
Amsterdam Jew Otto Frank and his family are betrayed to the Gestapo August 4 after more than 2 years in hiding and deported with eight others in the last convoy of cattle trucks to the extermination camp at Auschwitz. Local housewife Miep Gies and her husband, Jan, have kept the Frank family in a camouflaged annex above Frank's small pectin trading company offices, where Mrs. Gies has been employed. Frank's daughter Anne, 15, has her head shaved at Auschwitz (the Reich uses women's hair for packing round U-boat pipe joints and for other purposes), but is not gassed. She will be shipped to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and die there in March of next year, probably of typhus, but three notebooks left behind at 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam will be found by her father, the only survivor, to contain her diary, chronicling the period in which she and her family hid from the Gestapo (see Theater, 1955). Dutch sympathizers have risked their lives to help 20,000 of the nation's 120,000 Jews survive.
Gen. de Gaulle issues a decree August 25 giving French women the right to vote on the same basis as men (see 1945).
The Union of Italian Women (Unione delle Donne Italiane, or UDI), founded late in the year, attracts anti-Fascists of all political stripes to continue the spirit of the Resistance (see 1943).
An American cannot be denied the right to vote because of color, the U.S. Supreme Court rules April 3. The case of Smith v. Allwright involves a Texas primary election, but voting districts throughout the South will continue to make it difficult, if not impossible, for blacks to vote (see Voting Rights Act, 1964).
Baltimore housewife Irene Morgan, 27, suffers a miscarriage in July, travels by bus to leave her son and daughter with her mother at Gloucester, Va., and boards a Greyhound bus July 17 for the return trip to have a medical checkup. She has paid $5 for her ticket from the window marked "Colored" at Haye's grocery store, she walks to the fourth row from the rear and takes an aisle seat in the "colored" section, but 30 minutes later she is told by the driver that she and another black woman must give up their seats for a white couple. When Morgan refuses, the driver takes his bus to the town of Saluda, where a sheriff's deputy boards the vehicle with an arrest warrant. Morgan rips it up and throws it out the window, the deputy grabs her arm, she knees him the groin, he staggers off, and another deputy drags her out, arrests her, and has her jailed. She shouts from the jail to a black youth and asks her to have a local clergyman call her mother at Gloucester, her mother arrives within an hour and posts $600 bail, Morgan pleads guilty to resisting arrest at her trial in the Middlesex Circuit Court (black and white spectators sit side by side but the courthouse door bears the charter of the Ku Klux Klan), Morgan is fined $100, but she refuses to accept guilt for violating the state's Jim Crow law, and she loses on appeal (see 1946).
Australia's parliament enacts legislation empowering Aborigines to apply for citizenship, but the terms are so restrictive that few will benefit.
South African lawyer Nelson R. (Rolihlahla) Mandela, 26, law student Oliver (Reginald) Tambo, 26, political activist Anton Lembede, 31, and others organize a militant African National Congress (ANC) Youth League movement, will work to remove the 32-year-old ANC's conservative leadership, help elect the 46-year-old Rhodesian-born Zulu chief Albert J. (John) Luthuli president, and begin militant but non-violent campaigns of work stoppages to protest systematic oppression by whites of the country's black majority (see 1924). Transkei-born Johannesburg real-estate operator Walter (Max Ulyate) Sisulu, 32, has helped his fellow Xhosa tribesman Mandela get through law school, and Mandela will head the Youth League beginning in 1950 (see apartheid, 1948).
The "Baruch-Hancock Report on War and Postwar Adjustment Policies" issued February 18 favors job creation and disposal of surplus property through private enterprise. Office of War Mobilization head James M. Byrnes has asked presidential adviser Bernard M. Baruch and Lehman Brothers official John M. Hancock to prepare the report, which opposes using public works and government planning to achieve its ends.
Britain institutes a Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE) income tax program beginning April 6 (see Ruml plan, 1943).
The G.I. Bill of Rights (Serviceman's Readjustment Act) signed into law by President Roosevelt June 22 guarantees veterans $300 in mustering out pay, preferential job placement, and weekly allowances of $20 for 52 weeks (a substantial sum given the fact that rents and clothing prices are low, gasoline sells for 12¢/gallon, bus fares, phone calls, and soft drinks cost 5¢, beer 10¢/glass, cigarettes two packs for 25¢), federally guaranteed loans of up to $2,000, and financial help for education and housing. Drafted by Harry Colmery of the American Legion, who called it a "Bill of Rights for G.I. Joe and G.I. Jane," the legislation was introduced by Sen. Joel Bennett Clark (D. Mo.). Some southern legislators initially opposed the measure because it would benefit black veterans as well as white, and some Republicans opposed it out of fear that its weekly allowances would lead to indolence, but supporters recall the social unrest in Germany and Italy after World War I, when unemployed soldiers helped bring totalitarian leaders to power; they also want to avoid any repetition of the "bonus army" that disrupted Washington, D.C., in 1932. Jobs will be plentiful in the United States after the war, only one-fifth of the $3.5 billion set aside for weekly G.I. benefit payments will be used, and although the total cost of the program will be $14.5 billion it will turn out to be a fruitful investment.
A United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods, N.H., in July establishes the International Bank for Reconstruction (World Bank) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) as the Western powers look to postwar economic problems. Some 730 delegates from 44 nations have assembled July 1 at the Mount Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods, a 2-hour drive north of Manchester. Among the delegates are Cambridge University economist John Maynard Keynes; U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr.; and Morgenthau's assistant for international affairs Harry Dexter White, 51. The monetary system formulated at Bretton Woods pledges every participating country to keep its currency within a percentage point or two of an agreed dollar value, and the IMF is designed to provide moral suasion and credit to keep the system alive. The system will remain in effect until March 1973, when stability rules will be generally disregarded following a 1971 U.S. move unlinking the dollar from any gold value.
The Road to Serfdom by Vienna-born economist Friedrich (August) von Hayek, 45, attacks Keynesian economic theories, pointing out that state planning is both dangerous and inefficient, and that internal contradictions in all collectivist societies not only doom them to failure but also lead logically and inexorably to tyranny (see Keynes, 1936). Marxists have called Fascism (and Nazism) "the last dying gasp of capitalism," but Hayek, writing in Britain, creates a sensation by asserting that Hitler is actually the direct and inevitable consequence of socialism: "The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualistic ethics regarded as the denial of all that is moral," he says; "In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule," and he insists that even modest economic planning requires a coercive machinery to force people to cooperate with the plan. Collectivism leads inevitably to corruption, bureaucratic tyranny, and even greater inequality than capitalism and the market economy, Hayek says, and his book is read by millions of people within months of it publication. But while hard-money enthusiasts will oppose Keynes and his supporters for generations, supporters of Keynesian economics will argue that such economic views do not necessarily entail collectivism and that lassez-faire economic policies can lead to tyranny by big business. Sir William H. Beveridge has been profoundly influenced by the views of Lord Keynes and defends them in his book Full Employment in a Free Society.
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by mathematician John von Neumann and his German-born Princeton University economist colleague Oskar Morgenstern, 42, applies Neumann's theory of games strategy to competitive business.
The $70 billion budget submitted to Congress January 10 is sharply reduced from last year's budget, but President Roosevelt observes in November that the war is costing the United States $250 million per day, and he opens a sixth War Loan Drive to raise $14 billion.
The Girls' Volunteer Corps of high-school girls relieves Japanese men for active military service. Organized in January to create a new pool of factory workers, it is changed in March to recruit unmarried girls and women aged 12 to 40; any who refuse to work in industry are subject to 1 year's imprisonment and a fine of ¥1,000. Some 472,000 girls are employed 15 hours per day in the Volunteer Corps, many of them on night shifts, and women in the workforce total 2,256,000, a figure that will grow by next year to 3,130,000.
Carbon monoxide fumes kill more than 100 Italians and possibly twice that many March 2 in a railway tunnel two miles from Balvano. Most of the victims are black-market operators, who have been obtaining chocolate, cigarettes, and other scarcities (often from Allied troops) and trading them for eggs, meat, and olive oil from country people for sale in Naples.
Labor organizer Harry Bridges begins a 2-year effort to bring Hawaiian sugar and pineapple workers into his 7-year-old International Longshoremen and Warehousemen's Union (see 1937). He has been using vigorous tactics since 1939 and will continue to do so until 1953, despite efforts to have him deported for his alleged Communist Party connections.
Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average closes December 30 at 152.32, up from 135.89 at the end of 1943.
Montgomery Ward CEO Sewell Avery defies the National War Labor Board, which has ruled that distributing companies like Ward's are subject to last year's Smith-Connally Act empowering the president to take over manufacturing plants useful to the war effort if they have labor disturbances. Attorney General Francis Biddle flies to Chicago in April, hoping to effect a peaceful seizure of Montgomery Ward, but Avery tells Biddle, "To hell with the government. I want none of your damned advice." Now 69, Avery has resisted orders to pay his unionized workers higher wages and enforce a closed shop, Biddle orders him ejected bodily from his office, and pictures of him being removed by soldiers appear in papers worldwide. A Gallup Poll shows that 61 percent of respondents support his position, but Gallup's resident interviewers tend to have a right-wing bias; the army takes over and operates seven key Wards stores soon after Christmas on orders from President Roosevelt.
Shasta Dam on the Sacramento River in California's Central Valley is completed for the Bureau of Reclamation after 6 years of construction, superintended by Frank T. Crowe. Second in size only to the Hoover Dam completed in 1936, the concrete structure is 602 feet (183 meters) high and 3,460 feet (1,055 meters) long. Its turbines initially generate 379,000 kilowatts of electricity.
Kentucky Dam is completed on the Tennessee River August 30 after 6 years' work by the Army Corps of Engineers for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Built at a cost of $118.5 million 22 miles before the Tennessee empties into the Ohio at Paducah, Ky., it is 206 feet high, stretches 8,422 feet across, and can generate 175,000 kilowatts of electricity.
Liquid natural gas (LNG) bursts out of two East Ohio Gas Co. storage tanks at Cleveland October 20, creating a firestorm that kills 131 people; 2 million gallons of LNG flow down the streets and into the sewers, exploding at the slightest spark, gutting 29 acres of houses and stores, and creating anxiety about the safety of LNG.
Tetraethyl lead pioneer Thomas Midgley Jr. dies at Worthington, Ohio, November 2 at age 55 after 4 years of paralysis. Holder of 117 patents, including some on Freon refrigerant and other chlorofluorocarbons, he has suffered from lead poisoning since the 1920s as a result of his work but has kept it hidden, pretending that he had polio. The New York Times reports that he succumbed to accidental strangulation "by a self-devised harness for getting in and out of bed."
A Lockheed Constellation flown by Howard Hughes sets a new speed record April 17 (see 1943). Hughes will develop TWA into Trans World Airways and control it until 1966, by which time he will have expanded his patrimony into a fortune of $1.5 billion and made TWA a transatlantic competitor of Pan American (see 1947).
Automaker Louis Renault dies at his native Paris October 24 at age 67 while awaiting trial on charges of having collaborated with the Germans.
A Federal Highway Act passed by Congress November 29 establishes a new U.S. National System of Interstate Highways. The arterial network of 40,000 miles is planned to reach 42 state capitals and to serve 182 of the 199 U.S. cities with populations above 50,000 (see 1955; 1956).
Bakelite inventor Leo H. Baekeland dies on his estate at Beacon, N.Y., February 23 at age 80.
The first automatic, general-purpose digital computer is formally dedicated August 7 at Harvard University, where it has been built under the aegis of the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project and Engineering School mathematics professor Howard (Hathaway) Aiken, 44, with a $5 million grant from IBM, whose chairman Thomas Watson said last year, "I think there is a world market for about five computers" (see Watson, 1924; Bush, 1930; science [Turing], 1936; Shannon, 1940). IBM engineers James Bryce, Benjamin Durfee, Francis Hamilton, and Clair Lake have translated Aiken's specifications (actually an abstract statement of computations) into a workable machine, Aiken's graduate student Robert Campbell has written the initial programs for it, and the Harvard-IBM Mark I Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator has been calculating tedious Navy problems that would take weeks or months to work out absent such a device. It has 760,000 parts and 500 miles of wire, requires 4 seconds to perform a simple multiplication, 11 seconds for a simple division, and is subject to frequent breakdown, but the navy assigns New York-born WAVES lieutenant Grace M. Hopper (née Grace Brewster Murray), 37, to develop operating programs for the massive contraption. A Vassar graduate with a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale, Hopper is the third person to program the computer (when a moth gets into Mark I's circuits she coins the term bug to connote unexplained computer failures; see 1952; ENIAC, 1946).
A paper published February 1 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine helps lay the foundation for molecular biology by revealing the hidden hereditary nature of the threadlike DNA fibers present in all cells (see Levene, 1929). Halifax, N.S.-born Rockefeller Institute bacteriologist Oswald (Theodore) Avery, 66, his Nova Scotia-born colleague Colin M. (Munro) MacLeod, 35, and his South Bend, Ind.-born colleague Maclyn McCarty, 32, prove that DNA rather than a protein or any other substance is what carries hereditary information. Having investigated the phenomenon of transformation, they report that what causes bacteria lacking in capsules to form such capsules is not protein but the genetic material deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), and that the change is inherited by succeeding generations of the transformed cells (see Watson and Crick, 1953).
British biochemists A. J. P. (Archer John Porter) Martin, 34, and R. L. M. (Richard Laurence Millington) Synge, 29, invent paper partition chromatography, a quick and economical analytical technique that simplifies the separation of closely related chemicals (such as amino acids) for identification and will permit extensive advances in chemical, biological, and medical research.
Biologist Albert Claude publishes the first detailed picture of cell anatomy, having used an electron microscope for his studies (see medicine [cancer virus], 1933).
Soviet nuclear physicist V. I. (Vladmir Iosifovich) Veksler, 37, shows how subatomic particles can be treated in "bunches" and accelerated in orbits that remain stable even during relativistic mass increases (see Lawrence's cyclotron, 1932). Edwin M. McMillan at the University of California, Berkeley, develops an almost identical proposal independently soon afterward, and the new phase stability principle is quickly incorporated into a new generation of particle accelerators—synchrocyclotrons in the United States, synchrophasotrons in the Soviet Union.
New York-born Manhattan Project theoretical physicist Richard P. (Phillips) Feynman, 26, and Hans Bethe at Los Alamos, N.M., devise a formula for predicting the energy yield of a nuclear explosive. The youngest group leader of the project's theoretical division, Feynman proposed an original approach to calculating molecular forces in his MIT undergraduate thesis 5 years ago and in 1942 received his Ph.D. from Princeton, where he developed a "least-action" approach to quantum mechanics, replacing the wave-oriented electromagnetic theory of the late James Clerk Maxwell (see 1873) with one based on calculating all the possible paths that a particle could take from one point to another and mapping the interactions of particles in space and time (see Feynman, Schwinger, 1948).
Dutch astronomy student Hendrik (Christoffel) van de Hulst, 25, makes theoretical studies of hydrogen atoms in space, finds that the magnetic fields of the proton and electron in the hydrogen atom can align in either the same direction or in opposite directions, and calculates that a hydrogen atom will realign itself every 10 million years or so, emitting a radio wave with a 21-centimeter wavelength. Hulst's calculations will prove valuable in mapping the Milky Way Galaxy and provide the basis for early developments in radio astronomy.
Dutch-born U.S. astronomer Gerard P. (Peter) Kuiper, 38, at the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory confirms the presence of a methane atmosphere around Saturn's moon Titan. He will predict correctly 4 years hence that carbon dioxide is a major component of the Martian atmosphere (see 1956).
Dutch chemist Ernst J. Cohen dies at Auschwitz March 5 (approximate) at age 75, having done extensive research in piezochemistry, electrochemical thermodynamics, and the allotropy of metals, notably tin; physicist Charles Glover Barkla dies at Edinburgh October 23 at age 67 (his youngest son was killed in an airplane crash last year while serving as a surgeon for the RAF in North Africa); mathematician George D. Birkhoff dies at Cambridge, Mass., November 12 at age 60; astronomer Sir Arthur S. Eddington at Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, November 22 at age 71.
Rutgers biochemist Selman A. Waksman introduces the antibiotic streptomycin (see 1943). Discovered by Waksman in collaboration with Albert Schatz and E. Bugie of Merck & Co., the drug is a much broader spectrum antibiotic than penicillin, meaning that it can be used to kill many gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria that penicillin cannot stop (although penicillin is used to treat thousands of wounded Allied troops on D-Day). Pencillin has not been able to kill tubercle bacilli, but Mayo Clinic researchers at Rochester, Minn., use streptomycin November 20 to treat a 21-year-old woman dying of advanced pulmonary TB and find it highly effective. Waksman persuades George W. Merck, now 50, of Merck & Co. to waive the company's contractual provision for "sole right" to develop streptomycin commercially, but Merck will be the leading producer of the antibiotic.
Quinine is synthesized by Harvard chemist Robert B. (Burns) Woodward and Columbia chemist William (von Eggers) Doering, both 26 (see 1820).
Dutch physician Willem J. Kolff, 33, devises the first kidney machine to filter noxious wastes out of the blood of patients with kidney disease. He uses the clinical apparatus in secret to save the lives of Dutch partisans in German-occupied Holland. A surgical operation is required to insert the machine's large tubes into an artery and vein, and the machine is used only for brief emergency treatment of waste-product buildup (see Scribner, 1960).
Halifax, N.S.-born University of Chicago surgeon Charles B. (Brenton) Huggins, 42, performs the first complete removal of the adrenal glands to save a cancer patient. His research has shown him that the growth of prostate cancer can be arrested by removing the testes or administering female sex hormones, real or synthetic, to lower the levels of androgens (male sex hormones), but he has recognized that in some cases the cancer has recurred because the adrenal glands were compensating for the loss of androgens in patients who had been treated.
A typhus epidemic threatens Naples, but widespread spraying of DDT kills the lice responsible (see Müller, 1939).
Swiss-born pharmacologist Daniel Bovet, 37, of the Pasteur Institut at Paris develops an improved antihistamine (see Halpern, 1942). By countering the action of a histamine, pyrilamine (mepyramine) proves effective against allergic reactions, but it has side effects that researchers will work for more than 50 years to combat as they develop newer generation antihistamines.
The National Institutes of Health at Washington, D.C., hears in June of a mysterious disease that has killed an 11-year-old boy in the Kew Gardens section of Queens, N.Y. Victims suffer violent, body-racking fevers and skin lesions. The only Public Health Service officer on duty is Ohio-born physician Robert J. (Joseph) Huebner, 30, who served until last year as a medical officer on a Coast Guard vessel in Alaska. He rushes to New York, a local exterminator shows him an apartment whose walls are crawling with mites, Huebner finds that Russian immigrants have unwittingly brought the mites into the country with their luggage, and he identifies the disease as rickettsialpox, one of many diseases caused by the microscopic rickettsia pathogens carried by mites (see Ricketts, 1906). The Public Health Service sends Huebner to California to investigate an outbreak of Q-fever, which was first discovered in 1930 and has spread from cows to humans; he finds other members of the rickettsia family in vats of unpasteurized milk, but dairy farmers take offense and put pressure on state health authorities to send Huebner back to Washington (see adenovirus, 1953).
Nobel surgeon Alexis Carrel dies of heart failure in occupied Paris November 5 at age 71. Having developed a technique for blood transfusion (but with no knowledge of blood types), he has done research on the prolongation of life and helped English chemist Henry Dakin, now 64, to develop Dakin's Solution (a 0.5 percent solution of sodium hypochlorite) that found wide use for sterilizing deep wounds in World War I. U.S. military personnel wounded in battle have an estimated 85 percent chance of recovery if reached by medics within 90 minutes of being hit—a rate roughly three times better than that in World War I.
The first operation to save a "blue baby" is performed November 9 at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Children's Hospital by Georgia-born surgeon Alfred Blalock, 45, who proceeds on the premise advanced by his Cambridge, Mass.-born colleague Helen Taussig, 46, that bypassing the pulmonary artery can cure anoxemia. Prevented by a congenital pulmonary artery defect from getting enough blood into their lungs, many infants have been born blue, grown progressively weaker, and either died or been doomed to chronic invalidism. The surgical technique developed by Blalock and Taussig will permit blue babies to live normal lives (and have normal color).
Massachusetts-born NBC radio executive Milton E. Krents, 33, launches a weekly religious drama and discussion series entitled The Eternal Light. Produced for the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, it will have 4 million listeners by 1963 as 100 stations carry it nationwide, and it will continue for decades on television.
Arabs riot at Damascus May 26 as Syrian authorities permit women to remove their veils in public.
Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson dies of a sleeping-powder overdose at Oakland September 27 at age 54 (see 1926). Despite accusations of adultery, alcoholism, fraud, hypocrisy, perjury, grand theft, and physical assault, she has never been convicted, and an estimated 45,000 weeping mourners file past her coffin between October 6 and 8. She is buried with great ceremony October 9.
The G.I. Bill of Rights (Servicemen's Readjustment Act) signed into law June 22 will finance college educations for millions of U.S. war veterans. Some leading educators, including Harvard president James Bryant Conant, now 51, and University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins, now 45, have opposed the measure on grounds that it would ruin higher education in America, but they will be proved wrong. The law guarantees government payment for up to 365 days of education or vocational training, and many trade schools will spring up to take advantage of the law.
Parliament adopts an Education Act creating two basic classes of school, grammar and secondary modern, based on the ideas of University College, London, psychologist Cyril Burt, now 61, who has determined that some pupils have high levels of academic intelligence while others can benefit more from practically-based education (see 1923; 1966).
CBS radio announcer Robert Trout covers the D-Day landings in Normandy. Now 34, he makes 35 broadcasts in 24 hours, remaining on the air for 7 hours and 18 minutes in one stretch to give American listeners an eye-witness account. Battle sounds recorded by Chicago-born sound engineer Marvin Camras, 28, and amplified at sites far removed from the D-Day landing sites mislead the Wehrmacht. Camras has developed wire recorders that the U.S. Army has used to train pilots (see 1950; music [Mullin], 1945).
Journalist William Allen White dies at his native Emporia, Kansas, January 29 at age 75; cartoonist George Herriman at Hollywood, Calif., April 25 at age 65; Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler of a coronary thrombosis at Los Angeles September 23 at age 80, having turned over the presidency of the paper in 1941 to his son Norman, now 45, who will serve as publisher until 1960.
Al-Akhbar begins publication at Cairo. Twin publishers Aly and Mustapha Amin, 30, begin the weekly Akhbar el Yom in addition to their daily newspaper.
Agence France Presse is founded as an outgrowth of the Havas organization established in 1835. It will grow by the end of the century to have more than 2,500 customers worldwide, providing news sent by bureaus in 165 countries (in Arabic, English, German, Portuguese, and Spanish as well as French).
Le Figaro resumes publication at Paris August 23 after a 20-month suspension.
Parisien Liberé begins publication at Paris under the direction of advertising man Emilien Amauray, 33, who has started clandestine Résistance papers while serving as Vichy government director of propaganda favoring large families. The de Gaulle government has expropriated the daily Le Petit Parisien on charges of collaborating with the enemy and placed Amauray in charge of the 81-year-old paper; he has renamed it and will make it a commercial success with 22 regional editions and a daily circulation of more than 800,000.
Le Monde begins publication at Paris December 19 to succeed the prewar paper Le Temps, which had become a mouthpiece for the French steel trust, big private banks, and the foreign office. The new paper's directeur is Résistance veteran Hubert Beuve-Méry, 42, who has Gen. de Gaulle's blessings to make Le Monde an independent paper.
Seventeen magazine begins publication at New York in September. Publishing heir Walter H. Annenberg, now 36, has started the periodical for young girls (see 1939; TV Guide, 1953).
Nonfiction: An American Dilemma by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, 44, explores the history of U.S. black-white relationships and examines the moral and psychological dilemmas posed by years of professing equality while practicing inequality; Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 by Buffalo-born historian Richard Hofstadter, 28, who wrote it as his Columbia University Ph.D. thesis 2 years ago; How New Will the Better World Be? by Carl L. Becker; Lee's Lieutenants (third of three volumes) by Douglas Southall Freeman; Lost in the Horse Latitudes by H. Allen Smith.
Author Ida M. Tarbell dies at Bethel, Conn., January 6 at age 86; sociologist Robert E. Park at Nashville, Tenn., February 7 at age 79; economist and humorist Stephen Leacock of throat cancer at Toronto March 28 at age 74; Fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile is killed by communists at Florence April 15 at age 68; medieval historian and French Résistance leader Marc Bloch is killed by a German firing squad outside Lyons June 16 at age 57, having been captured in March by Vichy police and tortured by Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie; Antoine de Saint-Exupery is shot down while on a reconnaisance mission over the Mediterranean and dies July 31 at age 44.
Fiction: Dangling Man by Canadian-born U.S. novelist Saul Bellow, 29; A Bell for Adano by Time magazine journalist-novelist John (Richard) Hersey, 30; A Walk in the Sun by Portland, Me.-born war novelist Harry (McNab Peter) Brown, 27; Strange Fruit by Florida-born novelist Lillian (Eugenia) Smith, 46, is about a lynching in a racially-segregated Georgia town in the years following World War I (its realistic language and ironic treatment of miscegenation, sexuality, and abortion cause an uproar, and the book is banned by Boston's Watch and Ward Society); The Lost Weekend by Summit, N.J.-born novelist Charles (Reginald) Jackson, 41, is about alcoholism; The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham; Winter Tales by Isak Dinesen; The Ballad and the Source by Rosamond Lehmann; The Golden Fleece (in the United States, Hercules, My Shipmate) by Robert Graves; The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary; There Were No Windows by Norah Hoult; Forest of Anger (L'Education européene) by Lithuanian-born French novelist Romain Gary (originally Romain Kacew), 30, who has joined Gen. Charles de Gaulle at London after serving with the Free French forces in Europe and North Africa. His depiction of the horrors of war will be republished under the title Nothing Important Ever Dies after being revised; The Dwarf (Dvargen) by Swedish novelist Par Lagerkvist, 53; The Green Years by A. J. Cronin; Love on the Supertax by English novelist-critic Marghanita Laski, 29; The Leaning Tower, and Other Stories by Katherine Ann Porter; Boston Adventure by Covina, Calif.-born novelist-short story writer Jean Stafford, 29; The Feather Merchants by Max Shulman; Green Dolphin Street by English novelist Elizabeth Goudge, 44; Dragonwyck by New York-born novelist Anya Seton, 28, daughter of nature writer Ernest Thompson Seton; Alina by journalist-novelist Martha Gellhorn, whose bumpy 4-year-old marriage to Ernest Hemingway will end next year; While We Still Love (in England, The Unconquerable) by Helen MacInnes; Jassy by Norah Lofts.
Pulp fiction writer Max Brand (Frederick Shiller Faust) is killed May 14 at age 51 while observing an Allied assault in Italy as war correspondent for Harper's magazine. He has written an estimated 30 million words in his career; humorist-playwright George Ade dies at his estate near Brook, Ind., May 16 at age 78; Nobel novelist-playwright Romain Rolland December 30 at age 78 in the house he bought 7 years ago at Vézelay, Switzerland (he married a young Russian widow 10 years ago).
Poetry: To the German Rendezvous (Au rendez-vous allemand) and Worthy of Living (Dignes de verre) by Paul Eluard, whose works are circulated in secret among members of the Résistance; Flight into Darkness by Ralph B. Gustafson; Beast in View by Muriel Rukeyser; The Soldier by Conrad Aiken; V-Letter and Other Poems by Karl Shapiro, whose "Elegy for a Dead Soldier" is widely acclaimed; The Enchanted Echo by Ontario-born Royal Canadian Air Force enlistee Alfred Wellington "Al" Purdy, 26, who dropped out of school at age 17, rode the rails west to Vancouver, and worked in a mattress factory before joining the air force; The Walls Do Not Fall by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle); The Phoenix and the Tortoise by Kenneth Rexroth; Rendezvous with America by Missouri-born poet Melvin (Beaunorus) Tolson, 46, contains the six-part poem "Dark Symphony," contrasting European-American history with black American history.
French authorities arrest poet-political theorist Charles Maurras in September for having given strong support to the Pétain government; now 76, he will be sentenced in January to life imprisonment and excluded from the Académie Française, into which he was received in 1938.
Poet John Peale Bishop dies of coronary disease at Hyannis, Mass., April 4 at age 51; Futurist poet-novelist-playwright Filippo Marinetti at Bellagio December 2 at age 67.
Juvenile: The Park Book by Norfolk, Va.-born author Charlotte Zolotow (née Shapiro), 29, with illustrations by H. A. Rey; The Cat Club by Bridgeport, Conn.-born New York author Esther (Holden) Averill, 42, introduces the shy black cat Jenny Linsky and her bright red scarf.
Kewpie doll author-illustrator-designer Rose Cecil O'Neill dies at Springfield, Mo., April 6 at age 69; author Margery Bianco at New York September 4 at age 63.
Painting: Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifix by English painter Francis Bacon, 34, whose asthma has kept him out of military service; Death's Head by Pablo Picasso; View of Paris with furtive pedestrians by French artist Jean Dubuffet, 43; How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life and The Liver Is the Cock's Comb by Arshile Gorky; The Survivor by George Grosz, who emigrated to America in 1932 and became a U.S. citizen in 1938; Pelvis III by Georgia O'Keeffe; That Red One by Arthur Dove; Factory Workers by Harlem painter Romare Bearden, 31; The Young Mother by Canadian-born U.S. painter Philip Guston, 31; Tattoo Artist by Norman Rockwell; Mother and Child by Milton Avery; Green Pom-Pom by Walt Kuhn; The Broken Column by Frida Kahlo; The King Playing with the Queen by Max Ernst. Edvard Munch dies at his estate outside Oslo January 23 at age 80; Piet Mondrian at New York February 1 at age 71; Florine Stettheimer at New York May 11 at age 72; Wassily Kandinsky at Paris December 17 at age 78; artist-illustrator Charles Dana Gibson at his New York townhouse December 23 at age 74 (President Roosevelt sent an amphibious plane to pick him up at his 700-acre island home off Isleboro, Me., when he became seriously ill in September).
Sculpture: Landscape Sculpture (wood) by Barbara Hepworth. Sculptor Aristide Maillol dies in an automobile accident near Banyuls-sur-Mer October 5 at age 82.
Kodacolor is introduced by Eastman Kodak, whose color negative film makes it possible to take color snapshots with low-priced cameras (see Kodachrome, 1936; Ektachrome, 1946).
Photojournalism pioneer Erich Solomon dies at Auschwitz July 7 at age 58.
Theater: Ramshackle Inn by George Batson 1/5 at New York's Royale Theater, with ZaZu Pitts, Joseph Downing, Cora Witherspoon, 216 perfs.; Wallflower by Mary Orr and Reginald Denham 1/26 at New York's Cort Theater, with Sunnie O'Dea, Mary Rolfe, 192 perfs.; Decision by New York-born playwright Edward Chodorov, 39, 2/2 at New York's Belasco Theater, with Georgia Burke is a melodrama about fascism in America and U.S. race relations, 160 perfs.; Antigone by Jean Anouilh 2/4 at the Théâtre de l'Atelier in occupied Paris; Jacobowsky and the Colonel by S. N. Behrman (who has adapted a play by Franz Werfel) 3/14 at New York's Martin Beck Theater, with Louis Calhern, J. Edward Bromberg, French actress Annabella (originally Suzanne Charpentier), now 39, 417 perfs.; Only the Heart by Texas-born playwright Horton Foote, 28, 4/4 at New York's Bijou Theater, with Mildred Dunnock, June Walker, 47 perfs.; The Searching Wind by Lillian Hellman 4/12 at New York's Fulton Theater, with Cornelia Otis Skinner, now 42, Dudley Digges, Montgomery Clift, Dennis King, 318 perfs.; No Exit (Huis Clos) by Jean-Paul Sartre 5/27 at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in occupied Paris; Anna Lucasta by Chicago-born playwright Philip Yordan, 30, 8/30 at New York's Mansfield Theater, with Hilda Simons, Canada Lee, John Tate (Ruby Dee, now 16, will join the cast in 1946), 957 perfs.; Soldier's Wife by Rose Franken 10/4 at New York's John Golden Theater, with Budapest-born actress Lili Darvas, 38, Martha Scott, Glenn Anders, Myron McCormick, 253 perfs.; I Remember Mama by John Van Druten (who has adapted Kathryn Forbes's book Mama's Bank Account) 10/19 at New York's Music Box Theater, with Mady Christians, Frances Heflin, Joan Tetzel, Marlon Brando, Oscar Homolka, 714 perfs.; Snafu by Louis Solomon and Harold Buchman 10/25 at New York's Hudson Theater (to Biltmore 1/1/1945), with Enid Markey, 158 perfs.; Harvey by former Denver newspaperwoman Mary Coyle Chase, 37, 11/1 at New York's 48th Street Theater, with Frank Fay, 1,775 perfs.; The Late George Apley by John P. Marquand and George S. Kaufman 11/21 at New York's Lyceum Theater, with Leo G. Carroll, Janet Beecher, 384 perfs.; Dear Ruth by Norman Krasna 12/13 at New York's Henry Miller Theater, with El Monte, Calif.-born actress Virginia Gilmore, 25, Lenore Lonergan, 683 perfs.; Love in Idleness by Terence Rattigan 12/20 at London's Lyric Theatre, with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, 213 perfs. (it will move to Broadway in January under the title O Mistress Mine and run for 451 perfs., giving the Lunts their biggest success).
Playwright Walter Hackett dies at his native New York January 20 at age 67; Jean Giraudoux in occupied Paris January 31 at age 61 (he has served as minister of information for the Vichy government); actor Richard Bennett dies at Los Angeles October 22 at age 72.
Fire engulfs the big tent of the Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey Circus circus at Hartford, Conn., July 6. Reputed to be the largest tent in the world, it has been treated to make it fire-resistant but not fireproof. No circus animal is hurt, but about 140 people are burned to death, many of them charred beyond recognition, 193 are hospitalized, and the death toll soon reaches 159. Clown Emmett Kelly ("Wearie Willie"), now 45, helps carry water to douse the flame, and the "Greatest Show on Earth" does not reopen until August 2, at Akron, Ohio.
Radio: Columbia Presents Corwin 3/7 on CBS with Boston-born writer-announcer Norman Corwin, 33; Rosemary 10/2 on NBC is another soap opera created by Elaine Carrington (to 1955, mostly on CBS).
Foreign journalists confer the first Golden Globe Awards early in the year at Hollywood's 20th Century Fox studios, honoring what they consider the best films and performances of 1943 to begin a yearly event that they will continue next year with a dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel, giving away pedestal-mounted golden images of a globe encircled with a strip of motion-picture film to directors as well as actors.
Films: Marcel Carné's Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis) with Jean-Louis Barrault, Arletty (Léonie Barhiat), 46; Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity with Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray; Preston Sturges's Hail the Conquering Hero with New York-born actor Eddie Bracken, 24, Snoquaimie, Mass.-born actress Ella Raines (originally Ella Wallace Raubes), 23, William Demarest; Otto Preminger's Laura with Clifton Webb, Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews; Preston Sturges's The Miracle of Morgan's Creek with Eddie Bracken, Betty Hutton, William Demarest; Clarence Brown's National Velvet with Mickey Rooney, Elizabeth Taylor. Also: Frank Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace with Cary Grant, Iowa-born actress Priscilla Lane (originally Mullican), 27, Josephine Hull, Jean Adair, Jack Carson, Raymond Massey, Peter Lorre; Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat with Tallulah Bankhead, William Bendix, Walter Slezak, Pittsburgh-born actor John Hodiak, 30; John Cromwell's Since You Went Away with Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten; Robert Siodmak's The Suspect with Charles Laughton, Ella Raines; David Lean's This Happy Breed with Robert Newton, Celia Johnson, John Mills; Leslie Fenton's Tomorrow the World with Fredric March, Betty Field, Skippy Homeier, Agnes Moorehead; Alf Sjoberg's Torment with Swedish actress Mai Zetterling, 19, Stig Jarrel; Carol Reed's The Way Ahead with David Niven, Stanley Holloway, 52, Peter Ustinov, Trevor Howard, 27, script by Eric Ambler and Ustinov; Henry King's Wilson with Ontario-born actor Alexander Knox, 37, Savannah-born actor Charles Coburn, 66, Geraldine Fitzgerald; Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window with Joan Bennett, Edward G. Robinson.
Actor William Collier dies of pneumonia at Beverly Hills January 13 at age 79; producer Myron Selznick of portal thrombosis at Santa Monica March 23 at age 45; cameraman Billy Bitzer at Hollywood April 29 at age 70; comedian Harry Langdon of a heart attack at Hollywood December 22 at age 60.
Hollywood musicals: Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis with Judy Garland, songs by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane that include "The Trolley Song," "The Boy Next Door," the title song, and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"; Leo McCarey's Going My Way with Bing Crosby, Barry Fitzgerald, songs that include "Would You Like to Swing on a Star?" and "Too-ra-Loo-ra-Loo-ra"; Mark Sandrich's Here Come the Waves with Bing Crosby, music and lyrics by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, songs that include "Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive"; Charles Vidor's Cover Girl with Rita Hayworth, Gene Kelly, music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, songs that include "Long Ago (and Far Away)"; Robert Siodmak's Christmas Holiday with Gene Kelly, Deanna Durbin, songs by Frank Loesser that include "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year." Also: Delmer Daves's Hollywood Canteen with Bette Davis, John Garfield, Cincinnati-born singing cowboy Roy Rogers (originally Leonard Franklin Slye), 32, singing "Don't Fence Me In" by Cole Porter. Texas-born Dale Evans (originally Frances Octavia Smith), 32, teams up with Roy Rogers in the film The Cowboy and the Senorita. She will marry him in 1948 and become known as the queen of the westerns.
Stage musicals: Mexican Hayride 1/28 at New York's Winter Garden Theater, with Bobby Clark, June Havoc, book by Herbert and Dorothy Fields, music and lyrics by Cole Porter, songs that include "Count Your Blessings," 481 perfs.; Sweeter and Lower (revue) 2/17 at London's Ambassador's Theatre, with Hermione Gingold, Henry Kendall, 870 perfs.; Follow the Girls 4/8 at New York's New Century Theatre (to the 44th Street Theater 6/14, to the Broadhurst 6/5/1945), with comedian Jackie Gleason, Gertrude Niesen, Chicago-born baritone Bill Tabbert, 22, music and lyrics by Dan Shapiro, Milton Pascal, and Phil Chang, book by Guy Bolton, Eddie Davis, and Fred Thompson, 882 perfs.; Hats Off to Ice 6/22 at the Center Theater, with ice skaters performing to music and lyrics by John Fortis and James Littlefield, 889 perfs.; The Song of Norway 8/21 at the Imperial Theater, with music based on works by Edvard Grieg, book and lyrics by Robert Wright and George Forrest, songs that include "Strange Music," 860 perfs.; Bloomer Girl 10/5 at the Shubert Theater, with Celeste Holm as Evalina, Mabel Taliaferro, now 57, music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by E. Y. Harburg, songs that include "Evalina," "It Was Good Enough for Grandma," 653 perfs.; On the Town 12/28 at New York's Adelphi Theater, with Sono Osato, Betty Comden, 25, Adolph Green, Nancy Walker, music by Lawrence, Mass.-born New York Philharmonic assistant conductor Leonard Bernstein, 25, arrangements by his Curtis Institute of Music classmate Hershy Kay, also 25, dances derived from the ballet Fancy Free, 563 perfs.
London musical composer Harold Fraser-Simson has an accident on the circular stone staircase at Dalcross Castle and dies at an Inverness nursing home January 19 at age 71; composer-performer Will Cook dies at New York July 19 at age 75.
Opera: Swedish soprano (Märta) Birgit Nilsson (Svensson), 26, makes her debut at Stockholm's Royal Opera, singing the role of Agathe in the 1821 von Weber opera Der Freischutz as did Jenny Lind in 1838; Pennsylvania-born mezzo-soprano Blanche Thebom, 26, makes her Metropolitan Opera debut 12/14 as Wotan's wife, Fricka, in the 1870 Wagner opera Die Walküre.
Soprano Lina Cavalieri dies during an air raid at Florence February 8 at age 69; composer Dame Ethel Smyth at Woking, England, May 8 at age 86, having written six operas.
Ballet: Fancy Free 4/18 at New York's Metropolitan Opera House with Jerome Robbins, John Kriza, and Hugh Laing as the Three Sailors, music by Leonard Bernstein, choreography by Robbins; Appalachian Spring 10/30 at the Library of Congress in Washington, with Martha Graham, music by Aaron Copland, who has received a $500 commission from Graham to write the work that he has scored for a 12-member orchestra, incorporating the folk song "It's a Gift to Be Simple"; Herodiade 10/30 at the Library of Congress, with Graham, music by Paul Hindemith, text from a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé.
First performances: Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber by Paul Hindemith 1/20 at New York's Carnegie Hall; Ode to Napoleon by Arnold Schoenberg 1/23 at Carnegie Hall (the ode is based on a poem by Lord Byron); Jeremiah by New York Philharmonic assistant conductor Leonard Bernstein 1/28 in a concert by the new Pittsburgh Symphony; Concerto for Piano and Orchestra by Schoenberg 2/6 in an NBC Symphony radio concert from New York; Symphony No. 2 (dedicated to the Army Air Forces) by Cpl. Samuel Barber 3/3 at Boston's Symphony Hall; Symphony No. 2 by Walter Piston 3/5 at Washington, D.C.; Theme with Variations According to the Four Temperaments by Hindemith 9/3 at Boston's New England Mutual Hall; Capricorn Concerto by Barber 10/8 at New York's Town Hall; Theme and Variations in G minor for Orchestra by Schoenberg 10/20 at Boston's Symphony Hall; Fugue for a Victory Tune by Piston 10/21 at New York's Carnegie Hall; Concerto for Orchestra by Béla Bartók 12/1 at Boston's Symphony Hall.
Indian singer Madurai Shanmukhavadivu Subbulakshmi, 27, gains international fame with her appearance at the All-India Music and Dance Conference at Bombay (Mumbai).
Popular songs: "Sentimental Journey" by Ben Homer and bandleader Les Brown, now 33, lyrics by Bud Green (Brown persuades Doris Day to record the vocal and makes it the theme song for his "Band of Renown"); "I'll Walk Alone" by Jule Styne, lyrics by Sammy Cahn (for the film Three Cheers for the Boys); "I'm Making Believe" by James V. Monaco, lyrics by Mack Gordon (for the film Sweet and Low Down); "Jealous Heart" by Decatur, Ill.-born Nashville country music singer-songwriter Jenny Lou Carson (originally Virginia Lucille Overstock), 29; "That's What I Like about the South" by Andy Razaf; "Moonlight in Vermont" by Karl Senssdorf, lyrics by John Blackburn (Detroit-born vocalist Margaret Whiting, 20, records the song; her late father was songwriter Richard Whiting, and when he died in February 1938 his last regular collaborator Johnny Mercer encouraged her to pursue her singing career); "Straighten Up and Fly Right" by Irving Mills, lyrics by Montgomery, Ala.-born singer Nat "King" Cole (originally Nathaniel Adams Coles), 25; "Linda" by Ann Ronell; "Candy" by Mack Davis, Joan Whitney, and Alex Kramer; "Twilight Time" by Buck Ram, Morty Nevins, and Artie Dunn; "It Could Happen to You" by James Van Heusen, lyrics by Johnny Mercer (for the film And the Angels Sing); "Holiday for Strings" by London-born Hollywood composer David Rose, 34, lyrics by Sammy Gallop; "Nancy (with the Laughing Face)" by James Van Heusen and comedian Phil Silvers; "Rum and Coca-Cola" by Jeri Sullivan and Paul Baron, who have adapted a 1906 Trinidadian calypso melody, lyrics by Chicago-born comedian Morey Amsterdam, 35 (the Andrews Sisters record the number); "You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You" by Russ Morgan, Larry Stock, and James Cavanaugh; "You Always Hurt the One You Love" by Allan Roberts and New York-born songwriter Doris Fisher, 29, a daughter of songwriter Fred Fisher; "I Should Care" by Springfield, Mass.-born songwriter Paul Weston (originally Wetstein), 37, Sammy Cahn, and Alex Stordahl (for the film Thrill of a Romance); "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Cocoanuts" by English songwriter Fred Heatherton; "Green Fig" by calypso king Aldwyn Roberts, now 20, who is renamed Lord Kitchener by the older calypsomanian known as Growling Tiger; "Put Your Dreams Away for Another Day" by Stephen Weiss and Paul Mann, lyrics by Ruth Lowe (Frank Sinatra records it and will use it as his closing theme).
Pittsburgh-born jazz singer William Clarence "Billy" Eckstine, 30, forms his own band and will soon be proselytizing the new, progressive "bebop" jazz pioneered by instrumentalist Benny Carter, now 36 (who excels on alto sax, trumpet, trombone, clarinet, and piano), North Carolina-born tenor saxophonist John (William) Coltrane, 18, Alton, Ill.-born trumpeter Miles (Dewey) Davis (III), 18, South Carolina-born trumpeter John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie, 26, St. Joseph, Mo.-born tenor saxophonist Coleman (Randolph) Hawkins, 39, and alto saxophonist Charles Christopher "Charlie" Parker (Jr)., 24, who moved to Harlem from his native Kansas City in 1939 and has become known as "Yardbird" or simply "Bird" (see Birdland, 1950).
Horace Heidt's pianist Frankie Carle quits with Heidt's blessing to form his own band. Heidt made him a partner last year when Carle rejected a chance to take over Eddie Duchin's orchestra, Duchin having joined the army and wired Carle an offer to fill in during his absence for 25 percent of the gross.
A new 30 percent federal excise tax on nightclubs that feature dancing puts a crimp on attendance at such places, whose patrons find the new "bebop" jazz almost impossible to dance to. Performers are happy to do without the dancers, and nightclub owners are quick to ban dancing in order to avoid the new tax.
Billie Holiday records "Lover Man"; Anita O'Day records "And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine" with the Stan Kenton band, has an immediate hit, briefly rejoins the Gene Krupa band, and then goes on her own; former Newark Baptist Church choir singer Sarah (Lois) Vaughan, 20, who won an amateur contest at Harlem's Apollo Theater 2 years ago, records "I'll Wait and Pray" 12/31 with Billy Eckstine's big band to begin a notable career.
A plane carrying bandleader-trombonist Glenn Miller disappears December 16 on a flight from England to Paris, where his orchestra has been scheduled to play a USO engagement. Dead at age 40, Miller broke up his band 2 years ago to join the military, his widow will ask his Fort Worth-born singer and saxophone player Gordon "Tex" Beneke, now 30, to take the Glenn Miller orchestra back on the road in 1946, it will flourish under Beneke's direction, but Beneke will break with the Miller estate in 1947 and perform under the name Tex Beneke and His Orchestra: Playing the Music Made Famous by Glenn Miller.
Mexican matador Carlos (Ruiz) Arruza, 24, goes to Spain and appears in the ring as "El Ciclón," competing with the great Manolete to see who will be awarded the most ears (cut from the bull after an outstanding performance by the torrero) (see 1945).
Polo player Tommy Hitchcock dies in a plane crash in England April 19 at age 44. Having dominated the game for 20 years, he obtained a commission as lieutenant colonel in the Army Air Corps (he was a member of the Lafayette Escadrille in World War I) and has secured appointment as commander of a P-51 fighter group despite his age.
Sgt. Frank Parker, 28, U.S. Army, wins in men's singles at Forest Hills, Pauline Betz in women's singles.
The St. Louis Cardinals win the World Series, defeating the St. Louis Braves 4 games to 2 (both teams are comprised mainly of over-aged athletes or those with physical defects; most ballplayers are in the armed forces).
Baseball commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis dies at Chicago November 25 at age 78.
The buildup of U.S. troops in Britain from January to early June produces some complaints that the Yanks are overfed, oversexed, and over here.
Fashion designer Paul Poiret dies in a charity hospital at his native Paris April 28 at age 65, having failed to find much work since filing for bankruptcy in 1929.
Coppertone Suntan Cream is introduced by Miami Beach pharmacy owner Benjamin Green, who has seen tourists rubbing homemade concoctions on their skins to prevent sunburn. Having used his wife's coffee pot to cook up a batch of cocoa butter, he has tried it on his bald head, found that it worked, and markets it with a picture of a Native American saying, "Don't be a paleface."
A gang of white youths at Abbeville, Ala., abducts and rapes Recy Taylor, 24, a black wife and mother. One member of the gang confesses and names his accomplices, but prosecutors cannot find a grand jury that will hand down an indictment. A National Committee for Equal Justice distributes pamphlets written by a reporter and a prominent black writer suggesting that the youths believed they would not be punished and that white women are only slightly safer than black women from such attacks.
The G.I. Bill of Rights signed into law June 22 will provide 4 percent home loans to veterans with no down payment required. Two-thirds of Americans have been rental tenants; the new law will subsidize a postwar building boom that will make two-thirds of Americans home owners, encouraging a mass exodus from U.S. cities that will deplete major metropolitan areas of middle-income taxpayers (see Levittown, 1947).
A large-scale migration of Americans from rural to urban areas begins. The shift will create major problems in cities.
An earthquake registering 7.8 on the Richter scale shatters San Juan, Argentina, January 15, killing at least 5,000 and possibly 8,000; a quake in Turkey February 1 registers 7.4 and kills between 2,800 and 5,000; a quake measuring 8.3 hits Tonankai, Japan, December 7, leaving about 1,000 dead.
Smokey Bear becomes a symbol for forest fire prevention. Created by the National Forest Service and the Advertising Council to enlist public support at a time when lumber is critical to the war effort, the bear appears in a poster by Saturday Evening Post illustrator Albert Staehle showing Smokey with the message, "Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires." National Forest Service illustrator James Hansen develops another likeness of the bear, Forest Service artist Rudolph Wendelin will soften Hansen's bear, and Forest Service illustrator Harry L. Rossoll, now 33, will turn it into a weekly newspaper "Smokey Says" cartoon character (see 1950).
The new Kentucky Dam on the Tennessee River creates the largest reservoir in the Tennessee Watershed—a 160,000-acre body of water with 2,380 miles of shoreline to provide a Land Between the Lakes recreation area for anglers, boaters, campers, hikers, riders, and swimmers. Even more than the other dams on the river, it provides effective flood control, protecting 6 million acres of land in the lower Ohio and Mississippi River valleys from inundation.
Congress establishes Big Bend National Park in a bend of the Rio Grande River of Texas. It occupies 708,221 acres of mountain-land and desert.
The new Shasta Dam in California will help control floods, provide irrigation, and provide recreation (the lake it creates is the state's largest, covering 46 square miles [119 square kilometers]).
A "Green Revolution" moves forward outside Mexico City as Iowa-born former E. I. du Pont plant pathologist (Ernest) Norman Borlaug, 30, joins the Rockefeller Foundation effort to improve Mexican agricultural production (see 1943; 1949; Salmon, 1945).
The average yield per acre in U.S. corn fields reaches 33.2 bushels, up from 22.8 in 1933 (see 1968).
U.S. soybean acreage reaches 12 million as new uses for the beans are found in livestock feed, sausage filler, breakfast foods, enamel, solvent, printing ink, plastics, insecticides, steel-hardening, and beer.
U.S. farm acreage will decline by 7.3 percent in the next 20 years, dropping by 1.3 million acres per year. Some 27 million acres of non-croplands will be converted to farm use (mostly in Florida, California, Washington, Montana, and Texas), but 53 million acres of croplands will go out of production and be used for home and factory sites, highways, and the like.
Britain cuts her food imports to half their prewar levels. Domestic wheat production has increased by 90 percent, potato by 87 percent, vegetable by 45, and sugar beet by 19 despite the manpower shortage. "Land Girls" and others have worked to achieve the agricultural production gains, and the Ministry of Food has economized on shipping space by importing dried eggs and milk, dehydrated vegetables, and boneless and compressed meat, recommending what foods may be produced at home and what deficiencies can best be met by imports. Far more cheese, dried milk, canned fish, and legumes such as peas, beans, and lentils are imported than before the war, while imports of nuts and fruits other than oranges have been sharply reduced.
Bengal's rice crop fails again as in 1942. Millions starve, some because they refuse to accept wheat flour (see Burma, 1943).
Bread, flour, oatmeal, potatoes, fish, fresh vegetables, and fruit other than oranges remain unrationed in Britain. Prices are controlled so that the average householder has about half the food budget available for unrationed foods after buying rationed foods plus foods whose distribution is controlled or allocated on a "points" basis.
U.S. meat rationing ends May 3. Meat consumption rises to 140 pounds per capita, up from 128.9 last year, as national income rises to $181 billion, up from $72.5 billion in 1939. A large proportion of the meat is sold through black-market channels organized by criminal elements.
Dutch civilians survive in many cases only by eating sugar beets and sometimes flower bulbs. A poster put up by the underground shows a prisoner in a German uniform with a ball and chain attached to one foot as he sits at a wooden table eating with a spoon from a bowl labeled "Pulp." The legend says, "Don't shoot a single Jerry. Let them eat pulp for 20 years."
Enrichment of all U.S. yeast-raised commercial bakery products begins January 16 by order of the War Food Administration: coffee cakes, sweet buns, plain rolls, doughnuts, and crullers are fortified with the same B vitamins and iron found in enriched white bread.
Kentucky and Mississippi enact bread enrichment laws. Enrichment of flour is not mandatory, but the American Institute of Baking says that at least 75 percent of the flour sold at retail is fortified. Enrichment has its detractors, many of whom criticize it on political grounds, but restoring most of the B vitamins and iron lost in milling refined white flour is having the desired effect of reducing U.S. incidence of diseases related to malnutrition.
University of Texas biochemist Esmond E. Snell, 30, and his colleague Herschel K. Mitchell isolate folic acid (folacin) from four tons of spinach, using a steam kettle and filter press. Researchers at Lederle Laboratories will soon synthesize the B vitamin, thought at first to be effective against pernicious anemia; while that claim will be disproven, the FDA will order enrichment of bread, pasta, and other cereal grain products with folic acid because it stimulates regeneration of both red blood cells and hemoglobin (see science [vitamin B12], 1948).
Britain requires bakers to make the "national loaf," comprised about 85 percent of whole wheat flour, partly to provide the nutrients found in enriched U.S. white bread; U.S. authorities find it more reasonable to restore certain food factors to the refined bread and cereal products that people want. Britain's rich do not eat as well as they did before the war, but the poorer third of the population enjoys better nutrition than it has in decades. British per-capita calorie consumption is actually slightly higher than it was in 1939, and intake of vitamins and minerals is substantially higher, thanks to higher wages and efforts by the Food Ministry to maintain stable prices.
Carnation evaporated milk creator Elbridge A. Stuart dies at Los Angeles January 14 at age 87.
Ohio State University tests prepackaged foods in cooperation with companies looking beyond the war to explore ways to reduce losses in food distribution. By 1961 88 percent of U.S. supermarkets will be prepackaging all or some of their produce, and 90 percent will be prepackaging all fish, smoked meats, and table-ready meats in transparent film (see polyethylene, 1935).
Only 10 U.S. grocers have completely self-service meat markets. The figure will increase to 5,600 by 1951, 11,500 by 1956, and 24,100 by 1960, when 35 percent of all meat sold at retail will be from self-service cases.
Chiquita Banana is introduced by the United Fruit Company in a move to make bananas a brand-name item rather than a generic commodity (see Sunkist, 1919). The bananas are advertised on radio with a tune composed by Len MacKenzie and performed by Ray Bloch's orchestra with vocalist Patti Clayton singing Garth Montgomery's lyrics: "I'm Chiquita Banana/ And I've come to say,/ Bananas have to ripen in a certain way:/ When they are fleck'd with brown and have a golden hue/ Bananas taste the best and are the best for you. / You can put them in a salad/ You can put them in a pie-aye/ Any way you want to eat them/ It's impossible to beat them/ But bananas love the climate of the very, very tropical equator/ So you should never put bananas in the refrigerator" (copyright 1945 Maxwell-Wirges Publications, Inc.) (The skins of refrigerated bananas do turn brown, and that disturbs consumers, but the fruit keeps longer if refrigerated.) (see 1974).
Hershey Chocolate increases the size of its nickel Hershey Bar from 1¼ oz. to 1 5/8 oz. G.I.s in Europe hand out Hershey Bars to children and use them as a medium of exchange.
Moscow publishes edicts in the summer aimed at replacing the millions of war dead suffered by the nation. The edicts reward mothers with cash payments that increase according to the number of their children, confer decorations on those with especially large families, and erect obstacles to divorce.
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