The Anglo-Americans broke through the Gothic Line in Italy and spread towards the Po; the Gothic Line held the Allies back for 200 days, exacting a toll of 200,000 human lives; on one side Nazis and Italians (the latter on the Ligurian-Tuscan side) and on the other Americans (Ligurian-Tuscan side and Tuscan-Emilian Apennines), Japanese-Americans (Liguria), Black-Americans (Ligurian-Tuscan side), South Africans, Nepalese Gurkhas, Indians, Brazilians (all on the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines), English, Canadians, New Zealanders, Poles (all on the Marche-Romagna side).

502 B29 to Tokyo and then to Osaka, Kope, Nagoya, Yokohama, Toyama

Los Alamos, New Mexico. Physical chemist Joseph Hirschfelder suddenly enters his colleague John Magee’s office, shouting, “What about radioactivity?” The two will be tasked with estimating the impact of radioactivity on the environment surrounding the Trinity Site in the Jornada del Muerto area. Based on wind and weather conditions, they will have to collaborate on the date and time of the explosion to limit the impact on the region.

With the D and F reactors also at full capacity, plutonium shipments to Los Alamos are taking place on a weekly basis.

Wernher Von Braun and hundreds of other German engineers leave Peenemunde to find refuge in a village near the Austrian border

Winston Churchill tells the Chief of Staff that the continued bombing of German cities, intended to terrorize them, albeit under a different pretext, must be reconsidered; otherwise, we will control a devastated land. What in most Western countries is called “area bombing” is called “terror bombing” in countries like Switzerland and Sweden. Ultimately, however, Churchill decides to continue the area bombing, including the controversial bombing of Dresden, aware that it could be heavily criticized.

Los Alamos scientists gather in an impromptu evening meeting to discuss the political aspects of the Manhattan Project. At the last minute, the project leader, Robert Oppenheimer, shows up. Fermi and Feynman also attend. Oppenheimer says that research on the bomb should continue and lead to a test.

334 B-29 SuperFortresses with 2,000 tons of incendiaries bomb Tokyo. Between 130,000 and 200,000 people die. The use of area bombing with 2.7 kg M69 magnesium-phosphorus incendiaries in clusters of 38 bombs was considered after unsuccessfully testing the precision bombing technique so tenaciously defended in Europe. Japan is not Germany: there are thousands of very small businesses, and the urban structure is made up of wooden and bamboo houses. The effect of the incendiaries on Tokyo is terrible: first, two pathfinder planes drop 12 tons of incendiaries on two trajectories intersecting at 90 degrees, forming an immense cross of fire visible to subsequent waves of bombers from 100 km away. A fire forms with a 5km front and temperatures exceeding 200°C, causing the canals to boil. People who throw themselves into the fires to escape die an even more atrocious death. Over the next four months, 57 other Japanese cities will suffer a similar fate.

At Remagen, the Lunderdoff Bridge was captured by the Americans; it collapsed on March 18th after being bombed first by the Americans and then by the Germans; but by then, the American engineers had already prepared six pontoon bridges.

Civil war in Greece. The warring parties, exhausted by the fighting, sign an armistice in Varkiza.

Zgoda, now southwestern Poland, near Świetochłowice. The Poles established a German punishment camp in a labor camp abandoned by Nazi troops. Thousands of local Germans were deported there and forced to work. At its peak, there were 5,048 prisoners. Two-thirds were sent to work in the coal mines every day. Up to 20 people died of starvation each day. The camp was closed in November 1945.

Gothic Line: Brazilian FEB troops re-attack Monte Castello and capture its summit. The Brazilians are tasked with protecting the X Mountain Division’s advance toward Bologna on the left flank. Meanwhile, the partisans are tasked with capturing the positions around Monte Cimone.

Landing on Iwo Jima: 7,000 American dead, 20,000 Japanese (practically all the Japanese soldiers present on the island)

Gothic Line: The U.S. 10th Mountain Division attacks the Riva Mountains. They will capture them the next morning.

The Yalta Agreements shifted Poland’s eastern border significantly westward along the so-called Curzon Line, handing Lviv to Ukraine, Brest-Litovsk to Belarus, and Vilnius to Lithuania. For the Poles, this amounted to endorsing the Soviet invasion of 1939, mostly without even being consulted. There was talk of Anglo-American betrayal and capitulation to Stalin.

Los Alamos, New Mexico. The first shipment of plutonium arrives from the Hanford reactor in Washington State.

Meeting of the Big Three in Yalta. On February 4, 1945, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin met in Yalta, a Ukrainian city on the Black Sea. During the second and more difficult conference, the three allies reached a compromise on the new postwar world order and discussed the military implications of the war against Japan. With victory over the Germans imminent, the three leaders decided to divide Germany into occupation zones. Roosevelt, weakened (he died two months later), was especially committed to involving Stalin in the war against Japan. Stalin agreed, but only after being promised an occupation zone in Korea and possession, after the war, of territories historically disputed between Russia and Japan. The Soviet entry into the Pacific War hastened the Japanese surrender, but Roosevelt was later accused of having made too many concessions to Stalin with the Yalta agreements and of having ceded Eastern Europe and North Korea to communist control. Contrary to popular belief, there is nothing in the Yalta agreements in particular that prevents Italy, Turkey, Iran, and Greece from spontaneously joining the socialist camp.

Yalta Conference between Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill

The Nazi Luftwaffe’s secret Enigma code adopts a new system for enciphering call signs, each time differently. This slows down the decryption at Bletchley Park, and the number of messages deciphered per day drops from 1,800 to 1,000.

At Peenemünde, Werner von Braun called a meeting with the other scientists to decide whether to wait for the Russians or move upstream, hoping to surrender to the Americans. They all unanimously decided to go south, with only one dissenting voice: that of Helmut Grottrup, who would later decide to join the Soviets. Von Braun declared: “Germany lost the war. But our dream of going to the moon and other planets is still alive. The V-2s are not just weapons of war: they can be used for space travel. One way or another, the Russians and Americans will want to know what we know. To whom shall we give our inheritance and our dreams? We absolutely must place this child in the right hands.” Of the 4,325 employees at Peenemünde, more than two-thirds left the base for the West, with the Soviets just 80 kilometers to the east.

Philosopher Bertrand Russell publishes A History of Western Philosophy, for which he will win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Biro sold the ballpoint pen license to Bic, which began mass production. Over the next 60 years, Bic would sell 100 billion pens.

The location of the International Conference between the likely victors of the war is under discussion. Churchill suggests Malta, Roosevelt (very ill: he will die a few weeks later) suggests Sicily, but Stalin (who never left the USSR) is adamant: it will be held in Yalta. Churchill comments without hesitation: “a health resort renowned above all for typhus and poisonous insects.”

Mauthausen, Austria. In the northernmost sector of the camp’s “guarded area,” a tent city was built where typhus, malnutrition, and disease claimed hundreds of victims (many buried in mass graves, as the crematoria were no longer capable of disposing of the corpses). In April, a series of negotiations with the Red Cross allowed the release of several hundred inmates (mostly French). But between April 20 and 28, several hundred prisoners (certainly at least 650) taken from the Krankenlager or Revier (Russian camp) were murdered in the main camp’s gas chamber. Among them, a large number of Italians. On April 29, the gas chamber was partially dismantled. On May 5, 1945, two Allied armored vehicles reached the Mauthausen camp, and the International Resistance Committee (among its members, the Italian Giuliano Pajetta), which had formed clandestinely in March, took over the camp, liberating it with weapons seized from the Nazis. At that time, the main camp held approximately 20,000 prisoners, almost all of them on the brink of survival. More than 10% died within a month of liberation. It is estimated that approximately 230,000 deportees passed through the complex of camps dependent on Mauthausen. At least 120,000 people died.

Romania. Deputy Prime Minister Petru Groza encourages peasants to take over the land of large landowners, effectively preempting agrarian reform.

Kristiakowsky insisted on a plutonium bomb design with so-called “lenses,” or specially shaped explosives that would have formed a sphere when imploded. Oppenheimer, in a critical decision for the project, supported this idea.

The USAF during World War II lost an average of one aircraft every 95 missions

Franklin Delano Roosevelt re-elected to the White House for the fourth time

The Leopoldville disaster, torpedoed by U-boats, killed 802 of the 2,223 Americans on board, while the British officers and Belgian crew were all safe. The incident remained a military secret until 1959. The Belgian government only took a stand in 1992, praising the crew’s conduct.

Signal Intelligence: Nearly 12 months after its introduction, the first Allied countermeasures to the Luftwaffe’s Unkehrwalze Dora (UKD) become operational. The electromechanical Autoscritcher machine deciphers the UKD-encrypted Red code, but is very slow. The electronic version, Superscritcher, will not enter service until after the war.

Back in 1877, Louis Pasteur was the first to demonstrate that one microorganism could be used to kill another. These would be called antibiotics. Note that there is also a broader definition of antibiotic, which includes chemicals derived from dyes that attack certain bacteria. Pasteur demonstrated that the growth of anthrax could be prevented in urine by adding some common bacteria. Subsequently, John Lister investigated the properties of molds and managed to cure a patient with an abscess with a poultice of the mold Penicillum, which had resisted all previous treatments. But only the Scottish physician Alexander Fleming, in 1928, noticed that a mold from the Penicillum family disintegrated some staphylococcal cultures (what is now known as “lysis”). He thus developed penicillin, with an antibiotic but non-irritating effect, applicable directly to infected tissue, and more powerful than John Lister’s phenol. Penicillin also proved effective against meningitis, gonorrhea, and strep throat. But the production boom came with World War II: in July 1943, American pharmaceutical companies produced 800 million units of the new antibiotic, and in 1944, it reached 140 billion units! (a 17,000% increase in one year).

The Soviets are seriously alarmed by both the extent and determination of the resistance they encounter in Lithuania. Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD, orders Lithuania to be cleared of partisans within two weeks. It will take a few more years, but it will be achieved.

Western Ukraine. An anti-Soviet guerrilla resistance movement develops, numbering 400,000 members.

Ardennes. Colonel Skorzeni’s men (the same man who kidnapped Il Duce at Gran Sasso) are increasing the chaos behind the American lines. Disguised as American soldiers, trained to behave like true Yankees, even down to the way they light a cigarette, they infiltrate the retreating US forces, wreaking havoc.

Hitler orders Joachen Peiper’s 1st SS Panzer Division, which had long been preparing to take the port of Antwerp through the Ardennes forests, to launch an offensive. This is part of the larger Battle of the Bulge offensive. The Nazis number 1,500 tanks, and the American casualties are estimated at 35,000. The 101st allows itself to be surrounded to hold Bastogne and is liberated a few days later by Patton’s intervention.

Kitty and Robert Oppenheimer’s daughter, Katherine, is born. As with her first child, Kitty suffers a psychological crisis and leaves Los Alamos for a while, leaving her daughter with Robert and Pat Sherr, who cares for her. After two months, Pat is astonished when Robert suggests adopting the child because he cannot love her.

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 it flies again on December 16th, this time successfully, but the war ends before series production can make a difference, and due to a chronic lack of fuel to keep them flying.

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” suburbs of Athens, and even low-level strafing by RAF fighters. The armistice is signed in February 1945.

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 Manola.

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 special bomb to destroy the Ruhr dams; even the aviators were the same, given the precision required due to the altitude (5,000 m, the bomb broke the sound barrier).

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.