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Prague. The first tests of “flying wings” were carried out, such as the Horten Ho-229 with jet engines, developed starting in 1944 but never entered service, or the Flugkreisel (flying top) developed at BMW in Prague and tested between late 1944 and early 1945.

The Volksjager He-162, designed by Heinrich Heinkel, flies for the first time, just three months after receiving the specifications directly from Hitler. The flight is a disaster, and the aircraft crashes to the ground in the presence of the Führer. The design is modified and

Greece. Ministers of the communist-inspired National Liberation Front (EAM) resign from the government. Demonstrators take to the streets. Police open fire, killing at least 10 people and wounding over 150. British forces stationed in the country later intervene. There is street fighting in the “red”

Von Braun’s A9/A10 project, the first two-stage intercontinental ballistic missile project, frozen in 1943, was revived, now belatedly, under the name of Projekt Amerika, with the aim of bombing the United States.

Limidi Events: 60 citizens of Limidi were lined up by the Nazis in front of the wall of the church of San Pietro in Vincoli to be shot; they were saved by the mediation of Bishop Della Zuanna; among them was Urges Zanardi, known as

Tromso, Norway. Operation Catechism: The German battleship Tirpitz, sister ship to the Bismarck, is sunk in a Norwegian fjord: it is hit head-on by at least two gigantic Talboy bombs (plus one near miss) specially constructed by the same English engineer who also built the

The B reactor at Hanford, Washington State produces the first plutonium.

The Nazi secret code Heer (of the Wehrmacht) adopts a new system for encrypting “call signs” (alphanumeric codes identifying a military unit). This temporarily sidelines the British, until March 1945, when a copy of the codes is captured.

Battle of Leyte Gulf, Philippines: 37 ships sunk (30 Japanese and 7 American), 10,000 Japanese soldiers lost their lives, 2,800 Americans; the largest naval battle of all time; kamikazes appear for the first time; the Yamato, the largest battleship in the world (later sunk), fires

American cryptographers are beginning to be able to crack the new Japanese codes with the new codebook (N), the additive tables (62 and 63), and the operating system. JN-25 is once again interpretable by Washington.

The Battle of Aachen ends: 5,000 Allies and 5,000 Germans killed, 5,600 Germans taken prisoner; Aachen (former capital of the Holy Roman Empire aka First Reich) is destroyed.

Ted Hall, of the Manhattan Project, during a 15-day vacation period decides to spontaneously go to the Soviet consulate and simply make a written statement in which he reveals several secrets about American activity at Los Alamos.

Tsunami in Nachi River, Japan, with a 200m high wave

Gothic Line: Modena partisan Mario Ricci “Armando” and his partisan brigade enter Lizzano in Belvedere.

John von Neumann, as a consultant for the ENIAC project, pushes the concept of having the program stored in the same memory where the data is also located.

6.43pm: Two typical supersonic booms are heard over London and immediately afterwards two enormous sinkholes tear through the ground at Chiswick and Epping causing 3 deaths and 17 injuries: these are the first V-2s over London.

Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA. The decision to use the Jornada del Muerto area in New Mexico for the first-ever nuclear test becomes official.

Baron von Stauffenberg led a conspiracy of German officers against the Führer; the assassination attempt was carried out in the heart of Hitler’s headquarters, the so-called Wolf’s Lair, in Rastenburg (now Ketrzyn in Poland) and was dubbed “Operation Walkyrie”: the bomb, contained inside a briefcase,

The port of Ancona is captured by Poles of the Second Polish Army Corps. Veterans of the Soviet Gulag, who had passed through Iran, Palestine, and Egypt, had raised the Polish flag on the ruins of the monastery at Monte Cassino a few weeks earlier.

The Americans take St.Lo and complete the capture of the Carentan peninsula with the port of Chebourg

Rommel signs the ultimatum to Hitler; he wants to let the Anglo-Americans pass and get them to Berlin before the Russians.

Finland. After the end of the Continuation War, the third and final Finnish-Soviet conflict of the 20th century, Finland, in order to comply with Soviet demands, must put its Prime Minister and entire government on trial. President Ryti, Prime Minister Rangell, Foreign Minister Linkomies, four

Manhattan Project: Arrival of the first plutonium sample at Los Alamos. A new way to detonate the bomb is designed: a subcritical mass (not capable of triggering a reaction) is taken and surrounded with traditional explosives. The explosion compresses the plutonium mass, which, due to

At least 3172 V-2 (Vergeltungswaffe-2 or Agregat 4) were launched by the Nazis, of which 1664 on Belgium: Antwerp (1610), Liège (27), Hasselt (13), Tournai (9), Mons (3), Diest (2), 1402 on England: London (1358), Norwich (43), Ipswich (1), 76 on France: Lille (25), Paris

In Italia e Civiltà, a magazine published by the Salo Republicans, an article states, “Let Roosevelt, Churchill, and their cronies know that the most aware fascists have always recognized communism as the only living force opposed to their own. They have always identified the true

Fortitude Plan: At 1:30 the Fuhrer changes his mind and revokes the order to implement Case IIIA and blocks the 500 tanks and 50,000 men already moving towards Normandy: the Fortitude Plan has worked and Hitler believes in the simulation of the preparations for the

Fortitude Plan: Shortly after midnight between June 8th and 9th, Spanish double agent Juan Pujol Garcia, alias Garbo to the Allies, alias Arabal to the Nazis, began transmitting a long message to the Nazis describing the preparations for the Calais landings.

Fortitude Plan: In the evening, the Allied military radios in the South-East of England, which had been transmitting continuously, suddenly went silent, just as the military radios in the South-West of England had done before the Normandy landings. At the same time, Roman Czerniawski, alias

The 168th Infantry Regiment of the 34th Division captures the 280mm K5 Leopold and Robert guns that had been pounding the American lines since the Anzio landings.

6:30 am: H time at Omaha Beach and Utah Beach for the XXIX, IV, I div.USA

1:30 a.m.: Hans Von Luck and Bayerlein, commanders of the XXI Panzer Div. and the PanzerLehr, gather their men and start their engines, but will wait for the order to depart until evening (the German headquarters of the Seventh Army thinks it is facing a

First US divisions enter Rome

Villa Pentetorri was bombed. It was the Este villa of the Pentetorri (or Count Rainusso), also unusually called the Four Towers, and stood in the greenery of the immediate outskirts of Modena. Designed by order of Francis I, it was designed by the great Reggio

Saturday, 2:36–2:45 PM. Modena. American aircraft bombed. 500 bombs were dropped on the city center. Nearly thirty of them unexploded, including one in the lake in the Public Gardens. The Duomo and the Palazzo Ducale (the balcony overlooking Piazza Roma), the stands of the Marzari

Signal Intelligence: In the United States, there are 87 “Bombes,” electromechanical machines (designed by Alan Turing) used to decrypt the Nazi Enigma code. Downtime is only 2.7% and repair time is about 2.5%: very low figures, almost incredible given the non-industrial nature of the machines.

Chechens and Ingush are deported en masse by Stalin’s order on charges of collaboration with the Nazis; approximately 170,000 people die.

Monte Cassino. Below the summit of Monte Trocchio, opposite Cassino, Captain Matarehua Wikiriwhi, commander of the XXVIII Maori Battalion, leads the traditional propitiatory haka dance, performed for the first time in Italy. 343 Maori die and 1,200 are injured. Wikiriwhi himself is left with a

Final offensive against Cassino: Gustav line breached

Los Alamos. Manhattan Project. Niels Bohr and his son, Aage, were tasked with designing the chain reaction initiator. The soon-to-be-developed solution would be called the “urchin,” a spherical version of the neutron sources Fermi had used in Rome. The initiator would be located inside a

Groves demands that Oppenheimer reveal the mysterious intermediary he mentioned to the FBI. Reluctantly, Robert names Chevalier, claiming he is completely innocent of the espionage charges related to the Chevalier affair.

Italy declares war on Germany

Tunisia. Battle of Enfidaville. A gigantic Allied effort begins on a front of just 3 kilometers at Medjez el Bab. The front breaks. The tanks break through.

Tunisia. Rommel, resentful and grim-faced, announces he is retreating to Germany for treatment.

Stalingrad. It’s Christmas. A 36-year-old doctor and theologian, Kurt Reuber, assigned to the 16th Panzer Division, draws a mother holding her child in her lap on the back of a Soviet map. Beneath it, he writes, as in the Gospel of John: “Light, love, life.”

Southern Russia. The Italian divisions on the Don River collapse. The Julia corps rushes in to plug the gap: until mid-January 1943, the 15,000 Alpini, with their paltry complement of 48 guns, will hold off an entire Soviet army equipped with tanks and supported by

On September 17, 2023, Corriere della Sera published the news (on its “Culture” page), later relaunched on CNN’s front page: Pope Pius XII, during the war, knew details of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews during the Holocaust as early as 1942, according to

Werner Heisenberg, in Germany, decides to focus on the nuclear fission reactor before the bomb; following this decision, Himmler’s SS will decide to focus instead on the group of the soldier Kurt Diebner, an explosives expert.

Stalingrad. The vanguards of T-34s from the north (Kravchenko’s IV Panzer Corps) and the south (Volsky’s IV Mechanized Corps) embrace on the frozen steppe. The Russian tank crews celebrate with sausages and vodka. The encirclement of Paulus’s entire Sixth Army is complete: 280,000 men are

El-Alamein: The Italian Trento and Bologna divisions are in rout, the Trieste, Littorio, and Ariete divisions no longer exist, and the “Giovani Fascisti” regiment, the only one in the army composed entirely of volunteers, claims 1,330 casualties out of 2,387.

El-Alamein: 3:30 PM. Last statement from the Ariete division: “Ariete surrounded, but Ariete continues to fight.”

El Alamein, Egypt. The Folgore Division, in the center of the front, withstands the onslaught of the British Eighth Army. The paratrooper commander sends a three-word report: “Folgore morale is wonderful!”

Afrika Korps advance in North Africa (Rommel) towards Egypt

Bir Hacheim, Libya. The remains of two silted-up Roman cisterns form two small hills, called Les Mamelles by the French. The Germans attempt to take the site, but the heroic resistance of a Free France contingent composed of Jewish, Maori, and Foreign Legion volunteers prevents

United States. An epidemic of Fort Bragg Fever develops quickly and then dies out just as quickly.

Iran. With the first advance guards of what would become the Second Polish Army Corps, which was being formed, Polish civilians also arrived, also former Gulag prisoners, including the little girl Irene. At a train station, she saw a teddy bear in the arms of

Chudovo and Lyuban Forests, Northern Russia. The two Soviet armies that had broken through towards Leningrad in early January 1942 were destroyed: 17 divisions and 8 brigades.

Demyansk, in the Valdai Mountains (source of the Volga), Russia. General Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt’s Nazi II Corps is encircled by the Soviets for twenty days. 100 men and 20,000 horses are resupplied during this time by white-painted Junkers Type 52 trimotors: 65,000 tons of supplies. Eventually, the

Erik Holmberg, a young astronomer at the Lund Observatory in Sweden, conducted the first simulation of a universe. In the absence of efficient digital computers, he made do as best he could. He distributed 37 light bulbs to represent the distribution of gravitational force in

Germany invades Norway. During World War II, Nazi Germany invaded neutral Norway, surprising Norwegian and British defenses and capturing several strategic positions along the coast. In the preliminary phase of the invasion, Norwegian fascists led by Vidkun Quisling acted as a fifth column for the

In France, some scientists, including the Curies, realized that, in a homogeneous medium, the speed of neutrons emitted during uranium fission would decrease continuously, thus passing through certain values called resonance, where they are more easily absorbed by other uranium atoms. They wanted to use

Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact between Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union: the Germans and the Soviets agree to divide Poland and give the Red Army a free hand in the Baltics. Only Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa will put an end to this agreement. In the first hours

Gaetano Arturo Crocco, a renowned aeronautics pioneer, and his son Luigi designed and tested the first liquid-propellant combustion chamber conceived in Italy at the University of Rome La Sapienza. It was fueled by gasoline and nitrogen peroxide.

Ettore Majorana left Naples on a Tirrenia steamship for Palermo, where he stopped for a couple of days: the trip had been recommended to him by his closest friends, who had urged him to take some time off. That same day, before leaving, he wrote

Sergei Korolev, head of a research group for aeronautical propulsion and future head of Soviet cosmonautics, was interned in a Gulag in Siberia; he was freed in 1939 thanks to the intervention of his mentor Andrei Tupolev.

Hermann Goering has his fleet of airships destroyed

At the laboratories of the Swiss company Sandoz, chemist Albert Hofmann prepared a derivative of lysergic acid (an alkaloid from which ergot, the cause of ergotism, is also derived). It was the twenty-fifth he produced, and so he called it LSD-25 (Lysergic Acid Diethylamine-25), now

The specifications for the V-2 rocket were drawn up: to carry a payload of 1 ton of TNT 250 km; they were designed at Peenemunde and built at the Zeppelin and Heinkel factories.

Grote Reber builds the first radio telescope (9.4m diameter)

During the Rape of Nanking, two Japanese officers, Toshaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda, are reported to have agreed to a contest to be the first to cut off 100 heads of Chinese prisoners. Doubts about this event later arose, even though it was indeed described

The Rape of Nanking. During the Sino-Japanese War, Nanking, the capital of China, fell to Japanese forces, and the Chinese government fled to Hankow, a city further inland along the Yangtze River. Japanese General Matsui Iwane had ordered the destruction of Nanking to exhaust Chinese

Barcelona. The anarchist movement firmly seizes power. The city is gripped by an iconoclastic fever and teems with the movement’s red and black flags. These initial successes of the anarchists, especially those of the Trotskyists, attract the attention of Stalin, who, initially uninterested in the

Hitler is the guest of Oswald Mosley, British fascist and anti-Semitic leader

Pike’s Peak, Colorado. Seth Neddermeyer, at 4,300 meters above sea level, uses a cloud chamber to detect incoming particles and records particles similar to electrons but 400 times heavier, both positively and negatively charged, with a decay time of 2.2 microseconds. They decay into electrons.

Rome. Thanks to Enrico Fermi’s slow neutrons, the ancient prophecy of the alchemists comes true: the transmutation of one element into another. A few years later (1942), the first nuclear pile is built in Chicago. Once again, an Italian explorer arrives in the New World.

Fermi and his team patented the slowing of neutrons using paraffin. The method used to slow neutrons will be crucial, as it allows for the theoretical possibility of a chain reaction.

Via Panisperna, Rome. Enrico Fermi and his team achieved the first induced radioactivity by neutron bombardment. They proceeded methodically, one element at a time, starting with platinum, and the first results were obtained with aluminum. The laboratory notebook containing the detailed notes was lost for

In Rome’s Via Panisperna, Enrico Fermi’s group successfully extracts natural radioactivity from aluminum. With this achievement, Italy enters the nuclear race.

Francesco Illy patents the automatic espresso machine

The Glass-Steagal Act, as announced by President Roosevelt, goes into effect, creating a federal depository to ensure the safety of citizens’ bank deposits.

Kelly Johnson (real name Clarence Johnson) is hired by Lockheed. He will found the Skunk Works team, which will make a difference in the US military aviation field.