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 holes (p). He kept the news secret for over a month and then patented it in his own name.

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 so, while Shockley had worked on similar topics in the past, but in recent months had been occupied with other matters.

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 by Swiss national team manager Karl Rappan, included one player each from France, Switzerland, the Republic of Ireland, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, and the Netherlands, as well as two players each from Sweden and Denmark. Playing in front of a crowd of over 130,000 at Hampden Park in Glasgow, Great Britain (wearing navy shirts and socks with white shorts) secured a comfortable 6-1 victory with goals from England’s Wilf Mannion (22′, 33′) and Tommy Lawton (37′, 82′), Scotland’s Billy Steel (35′), and a 74th-minute own goal for the European Championship. Sweden’s Gunnar Nordahl scored the only goal for the rest of Europe in the 24th minute. Italian Parola (who committed an own goal) was also there. Parola played for Juventus and became famous for his bicycle kicks, including the one that became the symbol of Panini stickers.

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 Mark-3 was complicated and delicate. The trigger was a car battery, which took three days to charge and had to be recharged every week. This required completely disassembling the bomb, which had not been designed for this, and therefore required considerable time. By 1947, the United States had enough plutonium to assemble several dozen Mark-3s, but only one was operational and several were partially built.

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 Alamos and briefs President Truman on the matter. The maximum number of atomic bombs immediately available in the event of conflict is: 1. And it’s disassembled, but it can probably be reassembled quickly. Truman doesn’t want to believe it. He has just presented the Truman Doctrine to Congress. He suddenly realizes that the threat of destroying the USSR in the event of an invasion of Western Europe is a bluff. The exact configuration and design of the Hiroshima bomb has not been fully committed to paper, and remains mostly in the minds of the assemblers. Production of the Mark 3, the one used for Nagasaki, has begun.

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 Ukrainian Problem.

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 Balkans and the Levant on March 31st. Britain, finding itself unable to shoulder the burden, is handing it over to the United States, starting with Greece and Turkey. This involves the transfer of the baton of command to the United States for what the British called the Great Game, for control of the Dardanelles to prevent Russian access to the Mediterranean, but also control of Central Asia to prevent Russian access to India.

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 in space? Perhaps they are the flies on the captured V-2 rockets, launched from White Sands, New Mexico. This is obviously a suborbital flight, but beyond the Karman line, which marks the beginning of space at 100 km.

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 apparatus. But the United States soon realized that a strong and economically dynamic Germany would be advantageous in its European confrontation with the Soviet Union. It was decided that Germany would only repay its World War I debts, with subsidized installments not exceeding 3% of exports. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, things would not go the same way, and the USSR would demand immediate payment with the shipment to Russia of a significant portion of East German industrial assets. For Japan, the solution would be more drastic: General Douglas MacArthur would have full power in his hands. The armed forces would be disbanded, and the constitution would be rewritten. For several years, Japan will be treated as an American territory, without sovereignty.

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 of World War I to advocate for Vietnamese independence and communist revolution. On September 2, 1945, hours after Japan’s surrender in World War II, Ho proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, hoping to forestall France’s reclamation of its former colonial possessions. An attempt to secure independence through diplomacy failed, and in November 1946, French warships bombarded the North Vietnamese city of Haiphong. On December 19, 1946—the date conventionally marking the beginning of the First Indochina War—the Viet Minh attacked the French. Eight years later, an armistice was signed, dividing Vietnam into two regions: North and South. Ho was appointed leader of the North, and Emperor Bao Dai of the South, until free elections could be held. In 1975, at the end of the Second Indochina War, Vietnam was reunified under a communist regime.

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, 41 Arabs, and 17 Jews.

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