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Stalin orders the deportation of all Jews to the Gulags, particularly in the Birobidzan region on the border with China.

Swiss inventor Auguste Piccard and his son Jacques dive into the Mediterranean Sea in the bathyscaphe Trieste to a depth of 3 km. They are disappointed to see only dark, muddy, and barren depths.

First artificial diamonds.

The US federal budget reaches $85.5 billion, up from $4 billion in 1932. A full 57.2% is allocated to the Department of Defense. President Eisenhower tries to halt this upward trend, warning the American people that the cost of a modern American bomber is that

The B-52 enters service

United States. The Constitutional Court, regarding President Truman’s government order to nationalize American steel mills for reasons of national security related to the Korean War, rules the president’s actions unconstitutional by a vote of 6 to 3.

Moscow, Soviet Union. Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai (Александра Михайловна Коллонтай) dies. She was a Russian revolutionary of Marxist and feminist orientation, the first woman in history to hold the post of minister and to have featured, as a career official and ambassador, in the diplomacy of

Pat Haggerty, executive vice president of Texas Instruments, persuaded Bell to sell him a license to manufacture the transistor. He also hired Gordon Teal, a chemist who had worked at Bell on germanium, but who had recently focused on silicon. Within a few weeks, he

Eleuthera, Bahamas. The U.S. Navy tests a network of 40 hydrophones on the ocean floor to detect submarines. The experiment is successful, and in 1954, it is also installed off the coast of Hawaii and California. It will become the global SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System)

Bruno Pontecorvo, previously under investigation by a McCarthyist commission in the United States, accepted a transfer from Canada to a professorship at the University of Liverpool (made to him so as to keep him away from classified information and research); he never arrived in Liverpool,

John Wheeler realizes that at the Planck scale (10^-35m) the nature of spacetime is a bizarre, foamy fluctuation.

A second coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae, a crossopterygian fish thought to have become extinct 100 million years ago) is caught off the Comoros Islands. Hundreds more will be caught in the following decades.

Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson is put in charge of the Burbank Plant, which will later be nicknamed the Skunk Works.

At MIT, SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment) was developed: a computerized system of 23 coordination centers, each with 50 operators and two redundant computers, capable of tracking the trajectory of 400 aircraft simultaneously; the system was only decommissioned in 1984. IBM, the main supplier of

The Whirlwind computer becomes operational at MIT

Kaesong, now North Korea. Ceasefire negotiations begin, which will not end until July 27, 1953. Representatives of the UN, the United States, North Korea, and China sit at the table.

Seoul, South Korea. Fourth Battle of Seoul (in less than two years), or Operation Ripper. General Ridgway’s Eighth Army manages to retake the capital and push the Chinese and North Koreans out. The operation is a success; 566 American soldiers and thousands of Chinese soldiers

War of position in Korea around the 38th parallel, the nuclear option is considered

UN condemns China as an aggressor in Korea

UN soldiers begin counteroffensive in South Korea

Chinese and North Korean troops reoccupy Seoul

South Korean and UN troops are massed in the southeastern corner of the peninsula, around Pusan, and are in danger of being pushed back into the sea by the communists.

South Korea. Truman orders the Seventh Fleet to “neutralize” the Taiwan Strait, to avoid an extension of the conflict.

Lund, Sweden. Milton Humason receives an honorary doctorate in astronomy from Lund University. He is the first person to go directly from a fifth-grade degree to a PhD. Hired as a mule driver during the construction of the Mount Wilson Observatory in the United States,

The advent of solid state components allowed the creation of electronically commutated electric motors (brushless and steppers) which had been conceived with valves in the 1930s.

Hungary. In a flurry of rigged elections across Eastern Europe, the Hungarian Communists won an absurd 96% of the vote.

E.C. Bullard of Cambridge University hypothesizes that the differential rotation of the planet’s core and outer shell acts like a giant electric motor, forming Earth’s magnetic field.

After 4 years of war Indonesia gains independence from the Netherlands, Sukarno, a charismatic and bombastic figure, becomes the leader of the country

Civil war in Greece. After years of violence and counter-violence, the civil war ends with the complete defeat of the left.

The Federal Republic of Germany is founded. Chancellor Konrad Adenaur leads it.

Romania. The Communist Party has 4 million members. In 1944, when Soviet tanks were about to enter the country, there were 80 members.

Italy received 1578 million dollars from the USA (at the time) under the Marshall Plan

Luigi Einaudi President of the Italian Republic

London Olympics

N. Wiener, professor at MIT, publishes ‘Cybernetice’, a book that describes the concept of communication and control in electronic, mechanical and biological systems.

Alan Turing writes that we don’t need an infinite number of machines dedicated to solving infinite problems: just one will suffice. The engineering task of solving the infinite problems will be the programming of such a machine.

Richard Strauss, at the age of 84, composed Four Last Songs for Soprano and Orchestra

Polaroid patent, by Edwin Herbert Land

Bell Labs, NY: The demonstration for colleagues hosted by Shockley, Brattain, and Bardeen involves amplifying a voltage more than 300 times using two gold electrodes pressed against a specially prepared germanium surface. Some Bell executives then put on headphones so they can directly hear the

Bell Labs, NY: William Bradford Shockley, Walter H. Brattain, and John Bardeen make the first experimental observations of the transistor effect in a demonstration for colleagues at Bell Labs.

The new Italian Constitution is approved and will come into force on January 1, 1948.

When John Bardeen arrives home that evening, he does something unusual: he mentions his workday to his wife. As she peels carrots, he says to her as they pass, “We discovered something important today.” They had invented the transistor…

Tuesday. Murray Hill, New Jersey. Bell Labs in New York: William Bradford Shockley, Walter H. Brattain, and John Bardeen combine a small sheet of thin gold, a semiconductor chip, and a bent paper clip. As expected, the device can amplify electric current and function as

Partition of Palestine and the birth of the State of Israel.

A list from the Italian Ministry of the Interior puts 166 fascists summarily executed after liberation in the province of Brescia. Expanding the list to include other Brescians killed elsewhere in Italy, the figure rises to 241. In Novara, 160 fascists were executed; in Vercelli,

Berkeley’s 184-inch cyclotron goes online

Bulgaria. In a flurry of rigged elections across Eastern Europe, the Bulgarian Communists won 70% of the vote in the official count.

Umberto II King of Italy

The Vespa was invented in Italy

The Philippines gains independence from the United States

The war is over, and demobilization in the United States is proceeding at a staggering rate: the U.S. Army has already reduced its personnel from 8 million to less than 1 million, the U.S. Air Force’s aircraft have been reduced from over 80,000 to 25,000,

MacArthur, despite strong domestic and international pressure to include Emperor Hiroito in the register of war crimes suspects, asks the American government not to include him; his plan is to use the emperor as a bridge to the Japanese people; after speaking to him personally,

Warsaw, Poland. The young American photographer John Vacon has just arrived in the city on behalf of the UN. He writes to his wife, Penny: “It really is an incredible city (…) Now, 90% of it is destroyed… Everywhere you look, you find only large

Soviet Union. Anarchist trade unionist Otello Gaggi, who emigrated to Russia in 1923, dies in a Siberian concentration camp while serving his third sentence.

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek flies his troops into Manchuria where the Communists are establishing a stronghold

With the Japanese surrender, a nascent Indonesian nationalist movement proclaimed independence. The Dutch intervened militarily, and four years of conflict followed, ultimately resulting in the country’s independence being recognized, even under American pressure on the Netherlands (the Marshall Plan was threatened), as the Americans were

Hugh Trevor-Roper, an officer of the British secret service MI-5, presents the results of his investigation into Adolf Hitler’s death in the bunker to a skeptical audience of journalists at the Hotel am Zoo in Berlin. The story of Hitler’s death is told as it

General Eisenhower revokes the order not to fraternize with the local population in Europe. Previously, on June 8, the order had been revoked only for children, after which American soldiers addressed local girls and women with “Hi, baby!”

At the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, material from Germany for the V-2 rockets is being assembled; in total, the Americans have managed to recruit 457 German scientists and engineers; Von Braun and 120 of his colleagues work at Fort Bliss, near El

Operation Cherry Blossoms. In the final stages of the war, the Japanese had planned a biological weapons attack on San Diego for the night of September 22, 1945, to be carried out by releasing bubonic plague from a single plane carried there by a submarine

Wernher Von Braun arrives in Wilmington, Delaware aboard a C45 cargo ship

Robert Goddard dies, his patents will be the basis of the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo missions

A young rooster in Fruita, Colorado, is decapitated, but incredibly, the axe misses the jugular vein, leaving enough brain tissue attached to allow the bird to survive another two years. The rooster will become a tourist attraction: Mike the Headless Wonder Chicken. He is fed

Anglo-American investments in electromechanical and then electronic computers, primarily for the purpose of breaking Japanese, German, and Italian codes, likely shortened World War II by two years, saving millions of lives on both sides and perhaps even determining the outcome of the war. It is

The Soviet Union, in accordance with the Potsdam Agreement, declared war on Japan. According to several historians (e.g., Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Gar Alperowitz), it was this, and not the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that prompted Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Americans. In the eyes

Jornada del Muerto, New Mexico. Enrico Fermi, with dark humor, spreads the rumor that the Trinity Site explosion could obliterate New Mexico or even the entire world. In reality, Teller, Bethe, and others have already conducted the necessary theoretical verifications.

Italy declares war on Japan

Lugo di Romagna, Ravenna. The Manzoni counts, aristocrats and former collaborators of the fascist regime, are at their home when a group of former partisans burst in, shooting and killing their three brothers, their mother, their maid, and even their dog. Then the rural population

General Elections in Great Britain. Conservative Churchill (36%) loses to Labour’s Attlee (48%). Churchill was a foregone conclusion in the rest of the world, but the British didn’t see it that way and wanted to turn the page.

Dornberger, von Braun’s boss at Peenemunde, is handed over by the Americans to England where he will spend two years in prison before being released.

Operation PaperClip (named after the paper clips placed on the CVs of selected German scientists): 127 German scientists were selected to work in the United States on an American missile program (von Braun had requested 400 people!)

Medolla, province of Modena. A Christian Democrat representative is assassinated as part of post-war vendettas.

Lama Mocogno, province of Modena. A Christian Democrat representative is murdered as part of post-war vendettas.

Himmler presents himself to the new Reich President, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, to try to secure a seat in the new German government, but despite repeated meetings, nothing comes of it. Himmler then decides to go into hiding, trying to blend in with the disbanded

The testimony, brought to the general public by newsreels, of the first liberated Nazi concentration camps—Bergen-Belsen, Ohrdurf, Nordhausen, and Buchenwald—irrevocably changes the moral landscape. It seems to justify everything the Allies did during the war: the bombing of cities, the insistence on unconditional surrender, the

San Francisco. Conference of the newly formed United Nations (but for now only with the countries that were soon to win the war). In Yalta, Stalin had reassured Churchill and Roosevelt that free elections would be held in Poland. For this reason, 16 Polish resistance

Around 5pm: the Allies set up a gigantic prison camp in the Bosco Rainusso around Via Nonantolana at the height of the Torrazzi, Modena

Dr. Angelo Zarella, director of the Modena prisons, was captured by the mob and murdered by a woman in Piazza Grande, Modena.

American Colonel Boris Pash of Operation Alsos arrives in Hechingen, where he knows the Nazi atomic pile is located. He finds all the Nazi nuclear scientists except Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg. The pile is made up of 664 uranium cubes that multiply neutrons sevenfold.

8:30 PM: The first U.S. armored vehicle arrives in front of Molinari on Via Emilia Centro, Modena; by this time, almost all the Germans have surrendered or left the city.