FQ

There are 2.550 million people in the world

USSR. Stalin proclaimed an amnesty for the Germans still held in the gulags, who had proven themselves good workers. Others were reclassified as political prisoners and were only released by Khrushchev with another amnesty in 1957, a full 12 years after the end of the

North America. Chriphonectria parasitica, a fungus unintentionally imported from Japan to the United States in the 19th century, virtually wiped out all walnut trees on the continent. That’s 4 billion trees.

The United States has 369 nuclear weapons; the Soviet Union 5

China enters and emerges from the period of chaos that began a century earlier. Mao plunges China back into its previous isolationism, stability, and poverty. To do so, he seeks an uprising in the prosperous coastal cities. Failing this, he undertakes the Long March inland

An American B29 takes air samples over the Pacific Ocean with special filters and reveals the first Soviet nuclear explosion; Joe-1, as the test is named by the Americans, is an accurate copy of the American plutonium bomb, or Fat Man, dropped on Nagasaki.

Enrico Fermi returns to Europe for the first time, more than a decade after leaving before the war. He travels to Basel for a conference on high-energy particle physics. He meets Heisenberg, Pauli, and Lise Meitner, and swims a couple of kilometers in the Rhine

The character of Wile E. Coyote is born

Baron Marcel Bich invented the Bic pen. Its practical development dates back to the Hungarian Lazslo Biro. The first prototypes were used by the US Army during the Normandy landings.

Fred Hoyle, mocking Lemaître’s ideas in a BBC broadcast, invented the expression “Big Bang.”

Kurt Godel discovers a space-time, compatible with general relativity, filled with rotating matter with time loops at every point

Oldstone-On-The-Hudson, Peekskill, New York. Richard Feynman presents his computational methods and approach to QED.

Signal Intelligence. The USSR implements a massive change in its methods of encryption and encoding messages. It also favors land-based wired communications, which are more difficult to intercept than the Nazis’ radio communications.

Siege of West Berlin by the Red Army: the Allies (General Lucius Clay) respond with a gigantic airlift: 1 plane every 90 seconds for 2 years, day and night (cargo capacity was limited)

Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). The Bank Deutscher Länder was founded in March 1948 as the predecessor of the Deutsche Bundesbank (Buchheim 1998). New Deutsche Mark (DM) banknotes were printed in the United States. On June 20, 1948, the population received 40 DM per

Indonesia. Communist uprising bloodily suppressed by Sukarno (about 8,000 dead).

President Truman launches the Marshall Plan. US President Harry S. Truman signs the Foreign Assistance Act, the program better known as the Marshall Plan, named after US Secretary of State George C. Marshall, which channeled more than $13 billion in economic aid to Europe between

Brothers Maurice and Dick McDonald open their first restaurant in San Bernardino, California.

The CBS record company introduces the 33 rpm Long Playing (LP) to the market, replacing the old 78 rpm records.

Kurt Godel discovers an explicit model of the universe that allows time travel using Einstein’s theory of general relativity. It involves a rotating universe.

McDonald Observatory, Texas. Gerard Kuiper discovers Miranda, Uranus’s fifth satellite, which will also prove to be the most spectacular, with its young and tormented icy crust and its towering vertical cliffs: Verona Rupes, with a 20-kilometer-high wall!

Orville Wright, the most business-minded of the Wright brothers, dies. His brother Wilbur, the more inventive, had died of typhus in 1912.

A fanatic kills Gandhi, architect of Indian independence

month after discovering the transistor effect, Shockley woke up one night with an idea: a simpler junction, made like a sandwich, with the top and bottom layers of germanium doped with impurities with excess electrons (n), and a thin middle layer of germanium with excess

Bell Labs, NY: Miracle Month of the Transistor. John Bardeen develops the theory of the photovoltaic effect, Walter H. Brattain finds ingenious ways to test it, and through various experiments they arrive at the conception of the first transistor. They used Brattain’s lab to do

Facility 905 was built in Kazakhstan, near Semipalatinsk: there were 4 areas where, between 1949 and 1991, 456 atmospheric nuclear detonations and 318 underground ones were conducted.

First Soviet ballistic missile

Spaghetti alla Carbonara was invented in Rome as a local variation of the American Eggs & Bacon, to make them feel at home, using bacon from Marshall Plan cans.

The total number of Jews fleeing to the West in the two years after the end of the war was 300,000 people, of whom 200,000 from Poland, 18,000 from Hungary, 19,000 from Romania, 18,000 from Czechoslovakia.

U.S. Secretary of State George Catlett Marshall proposes a gigantic aid plan for Western Europe. It involves approximately $100 billion in current currency for Western Europe. This lays the foundation for democratic Europe, the defeat of real socialism, and the American century.

Romania. 260 people who opposed the Communist Party are arrested.

Glasgow, Scotland. The united British team took on the “rest of the world” and easily won 6-1. England manager Walter Winterbottom selected the British team, which included five English players, three from Scotland, two from Wales, and one from Northern Ireland. The European team, chosen

Romania. 600 members of opposition parties are arrested on trumped-up charges. Another 315 had been arrested a few days earlier.

MacArthur imposes the new Japanese constitution, approved by the Emperor

The assembly of the Mark-3 plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki was considered dangerous, and orders were given to never assemble a Mark-3 on American soil. In the event of conflict, they would be assembled at intermediate support bases such as Thule, in northwest Greenland. The

The number of America’s atomic weapons is considered such classified information that very few people know about it, and the number cannot be written down in any document. David Lilienthal, recently appointed head of the Atomic Energy Commission, returns from his first visit to Los

Poland. Polish Deputy Minister of Defense, General Karol Świerczewski, is assassinated by far-right Ukrainian partisans. The crime will be used as a pretext for a harsh crackdown on the Ukrainian minority in Poland, called Akcja Wisla (Operation Vistula) and nicknamed the Final Solution to the

Romania. 315 members of opposition parties are arrested on trumped-up charges. On May 4th, another 600 will be arrested. On June 2nd, another 260 people who opposed the Communist Party are arrested. All are deported to the Soviet Union.

Truman requests and obtains from Congress an extraordinary allocation of 400 million dollars in military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey, the initial act of the Doctrine of Containment of the Soviet Union launched by the American president

The Dead Sea Scrolls are found

Washington, D.C. The U.S. State Department receives an urgent phone call from the First Secretary of the British Embassy, and just half an hour later, two documents of historic significance are delivered: the formal notification that the British government would terminate its commitment in the

The United States launches a V-2 rocket from New Mexico to an altitude of 110 km, carrying a swarm of fruit flies. After three minutes in space (suborbital flight), the Blossom capsule returns and the flies are recovered safe and sound. The first living beings

Around 10,000 people were killed by Tito’s communist partisans, thrown into the Foibe, the karst-formed sinkholes typical of the Trieste and Istria area.

After the Paris Peace Treaty with the minor Axis powers (Italy, Finland, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria), the issue of Germany and Japan remained unresolved. US Treasury Secretary Henri Morgenthau Jr. called for the “pastoralization” of Germany with the complete dismantling of its industrial and military

The Allies sign a formal peace treaty with Romania.

Founding of the CIA.

Ho Chi Minh attacks the French. Thirty thousand Viet Minh soldiers under the command of Ho Chi Minh attack French positions in Hanoi, Vietnam, marking the beginning of thirty years of war in Indochina. Ho Chi Minh had first traveled to France at the end

Shortly after noon on July 22, 1946, Zionist terrorists, led by Menachem Begin, set off bombs planted in the basement of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. At 12:37, a massive explosion ripped through the building, killing 91 people. Among the dead were 25 Britons,

A fruit fly (better known as a “fly”) is intentionally loaded onto an American V-2 and launched into space to test the effect of space radiation on living beings.

Enrico De Nicola President of the Italian Republic

Juan Domingo Perón in power in Argentina

Vittorio Valletta at FIAT, will remain at the helm of the family company for more than 20 years.

Iran-Soviet Treaty for the complete withdrawal of the Red Army from Iranian soil. On August 25, 1943, a bilateral invasion had begun by British forces in the southwest and Soviet forces in the north. There were only isolated pockets of resistance. On August 29 and

Romania. Former Prime Minister Radescu is savagely beaten by a group of men armed with clubs. He realizes it’s best to leave his country.

Fulton, Missouri. Winston Churchill, in a famous speech, declared: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lies all the capitals of ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe (…) in what

Eckert and Mauchly, rivals and computer pioneers, jointly founded the Eckert Mauchly Computer Corporation, which would soon become Remington Rand, then Sperry Rand, and finally UNISYS. Among other things, they would also build the UNIVAC, which would predict with 100:1 certainty the election of Eisenhower

Alan Turing designs his computer with a program stored on board (and therefore modifiable by the computer itself as if it were data). It’s called ACE. Turing also publishes an article on the subject: “Proposed Electronic Calculator.”

The series production of the fearsome Grumman F6F HellCat ends; in the short three years of its production, 12,272 units were produced; providing a fundamental contribution to the conflict: out of 6,477 Japanese aircraft shot down in flight in dogfights, more than 5,000 were shot

The British test one of their captured V-2s at Cuxhaven. Witnessing the test, from afar and disguised as a British captain, is Soviet designer Sergei Korolyov.

51 nations sign treaty of accession to the United Nations (UNO United Nations Organization)

Edward Mills Purcell conceived the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging (NMR) instrument for medical purposes; the instrument would later be called Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).

Nobel Prize in Physics to Wolfgang Pauli

As part of the US Congressional inquiry into the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, much classified and secret military material was made public, including the interceptions and decryption of Japanese messages encrypted with JN-25. The British side of the story, namely the work done at

From the distance of the 21st century, we tend to see the end of the war as a time of celebration and rejoicing. Europe and parts of the world are, in reality, places of mourning, destruction, and vengeance, and it will take months, in some

Indonesia. Despite the country’s declaration of independence two weeks earlier, Australian, British, and then Dutch troops arrive to take control of the country from the Japanese.

In Nonantola, in the province of Modena, engineer Antonio Rizzi and his son Ettore, a partisan of the Italian Brigade and later a representative of the DC, were assassinated by partisans.

Los Alamos scientist Klaus Fuchs, by his own admission in 1950, spontaneously passed on to the Soviets the details of the American plutonium bomb technology.

Landing at Okinawa: 13,000 American deaths, 130,000 Japanese. Truman is persuaded to use the atomic bomb.

Prague. The Prague Local National Committee headquarters posts posters around the city with several directives: 1) the term “German” will henceforth be written in lowercase letters, in a derogatory sense. 2) (…) Germans will be given swastikas on their arms (…) they will not be

Despite Churchill’s recommendations to Truman, the Anglo-American troops withdraw from the occupied areas of East Germany and abandon the banks of the Elbe; the withdrawal reaches, in some places, 250 km along a 650 km front and allows the Soviets to establish themselves in the

After the Liberation of Milan, thousands of fascists or suspected fascists were killed. Palmiro Togliatti suggested 5,000 to the Soviet ambassador. Carlo Simiani claims 3,400 from April 25 to May 31. Research by Livio Valentini documents 1,856 fascist casualties throughout the civil war, of which

Germany. The US 3rd Division, stationed in Nordhausen, moves 14 tons of V-2 documents, right under the noses of the British, who are arriving to take over their sector.

As per the Yalta Agreement, Britain handed over to the Soviets the 45,000-man Cossack corps that had arrived from Yugoslavia. These soldiers and officers were disarmed and then deceived into handing them over to the Soviets, where they were subsequently sent to the Gulags.

Heinrich Himmler’s body is buried by some English soldiers somewhere in a forest near Lüneburg

Manchuria. Japanese Unit 731 conducted thousands of experiments on prisoners and experimented with biological (anthrax, plague, and cholera) and chemical weapons. Estimates of Chinese casualties range between 380,000 and 560,000. In May 1945, eight American airmen were also vivisected, without anesthesia. After the end of

Nearly 7 million Germans were expelled from western Poland, partly as a result of the country’s eastward shift in recompense to the USSR, as agreed at Yalta. Another 3 million were expelled from Czechoslovakia and more than 1.8 million from other countries, for a total

Yugoslavia. In an interview with a British magazine published in 1979, Tito’s right-hand man, Milovan Gilas, outlined the methods used to resolve the problem of collaborationism in the immediate post-war period. Tito essentially recognized the limitations of his country, particularly its judicial system, and decided

Winston Churchill, speaking of the countries of Eastern Europe, declared that “an iron curtain is drawn down upon their front.” The Cold War had begun.

Half a kilo of radioactive material (radium) was the subject of a dispute between partisans and the German army in the final months of the war in Italy: it was transported on a bicycle and buried for many months under the floor of a cellar.

Manhattan Project: A commission was established to consider the possible use of the bomb. The commission included four physicists: Compton, Lawrence, Fermi, and Oppenheimer (in favor).