Egypt. Bernard Montgomery takes command of the Eighth Army. He is (even according to Churchill himself, who appointed him) unpleasant, punctilious, intolerant, and boring, despotic, cantankerous, and inhibited. He reads only the Bible, eats only boiled beef and biscuits, is a teetotaler, and plays a lot of sports. His soldiers, even on the front lines, regularly receive tea at five o’clock. He wears a strange Australian beret and civilian shoes. When it’s cold, he wears a curious Canadian hooded jacket with wooden buttons and twisted cord buttonholes. After the war, this garment will become the “duffel coat.” He never shows up in combat, unlike Rommel. He is an orthodox planner and often uses other people’s brains.

Kalach, on the Don, Southern Russia. The last major pocket of Operation Barbarossa closes: the vanguards of the 16th Armored Division Angerm and General von Hauenschild’s 24th Armored Division join hands.

Egypt. Churchill travels to Cairo accompanied by Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the General Staff. They dismiss the honest commander of the Eighth Army, Auchinleck, who is replaced by Montgomery for the Eighth Army and Sir Harold Alexander for the Middle East. In reality, they were looking for a scapegoat, but Auchinleck had done such a good job with the forces at his disposal that Bernard Montgomery simply continued with the strategy established by his predecessor.

First Allied bombings in North Africa

Glenn Seaborg isolates plutonium for the first time. This is also the first time any artificial element—one that doesn’t exist in nature—has been synthesized in its pure form. It’s the first time the human eye can observe an artificial element. Following the name of the previous element (neptunium), he names it plutonium. It is then pointed out to him that Pluto is also the Roman god of the underworld, or the dead, and he replies that it’s nothing more than a coincidence, and that he wasn’t aware of it.

Benedetto Croce published the famous essay: “Why We Cannot Not Call Ourselves Christians” where he observes: “…the long age of glory that was called the Middle Ages completed the Christianization of the barbarians and encouraged the defense against Islam, so threatening to European civilization.”

The German submarine Innsbruck, departing from its base in Lorient, France, dropped off eight saboteurs off Long Island, New York. Their task was to wreak havoc on the city by sabotaging factories, blowing up bridges, and disrupting power and rail networks. The Germans were discovered and arrested by FBI agents before they could take action. A second attempt followed on November 29, 1944.

Stalin issues Order No. 227: “No more steps back” (Ни шагу назад!; Russian: “ni shàgu nazàd!”). This follows Order No. 270 of August 1941, which equated surrender with desertion, under penalty of execution on the spot (10,000 since the beginning of the conflict) and the arrest of one’s family. The request for the armies to maintain blocking detachments was withdrawn after only three months, on October 29, 1942. Their formation was considered a waste of men, and since the aim was to galvanize the Red Army’s morale and emphasize patriotism, and many officers stopped consistently enforcing the order (seeing its negative effect on the troops), the idea of blocking detachments was quietly abandoned. On November 20, 1944, the blocking detachments were officially demobilized.

Russia. Upon reaching Stalino, the Germans found themselves faced with majestic industrial complexes. Seventy kilometers of factories: from ore deposits to blast furnaces, from partial processing to smelting, to assembly. At Stalino, they began with iron; at Rykovo, tanks rolled out.

Egypt. Rommel’s advance is halted by the British at El Alamein. The fighting is extremely violent, and for the first time, the word “panic” appears in the war diary of a German division.

Richard Feynman and Arline get married in Richmond, en route to a public hospital in New Jersey, where Arline has moved to be closer to Richard. For the trip, Feynman borrows a friend’s station wagon, which he converts into a sort of ambulance for the occasion. The witnesses at the wedding are two strangers.

Benito Mussolini flies to Libya to witness the Italian victory over the British Eighth Army. His arrival is immediately marred by tragedy: the second aircraft collides with a departing bomber, killing three agents and his personal barber, Pietro Sciaretta. Mussolini expects a great victory. Upon arriving in Libya, when he sees trucks carrying British prisoners passing along the Via Balbia, he frowns, grabs a machine gun from an Italian guard, and, juggling it, stands at the side of the road and declares, “If anyone gives me the Victory sign, I’ll shoot them.” The Duce waits another couple of weeks, in vain, but Rommel’s promise to reach Cairo in four days has been shattered by El Alamein.

Italian secret agent Colonel Frank B. Fellers, who had infiltrated the American embassy in Rome, was discovered and recalled to the United States. Through Fellers, the Italians had been able to for months gain advance knowledge of several Allied moves in the Mediterranean.

The Boston Globe headlines: “Mass killings of Jews in Poland top 700,000.”

Libya. Erwin Rommel tells Bastico: “I’ll push forward as far as I can: I’m running out of gas and water, but in this climate of success, the soldiers just want to keep going. The Italian soldiers were also magnificent. Now, on the field, there’s no longer any difference between them and the Germans.”

Libya. Erwin Rommel welcomes the Italians Bastico and Barbasetti (who wish to follow Il Duce’s orders regarding the invasion of Malta) with a harangue about striking while the iron is hot (the Eighth Army is in rout) and also hints at a possible meeting in the Persian Gulf with the Italian-German forces arriving from the Caucasus. He bids them farewell by concluding: “From now on, I invite you to breakfast in Cairo.” This is likely the mistake that will decide the outcome of the North African campaign: the Folgore paratroopers will find themselves marching among the sand dunes of El Alamein, and the Alpine Corps will be sent to the plains of the Don Bend.

Libya. The Italian-German army reaches the sea and completes the encirclement of Tobruk.

Prague. After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in the British SOE’s Operation Anthropoid, the SOE agents, Slovak Jozef Gabčík and Czech Jan Kubiš, who carried out the assassination, are hunted by the Gestapo and the SS. With large sums of money and interrogations, the Gestapo manages to gain access to an SOE safe house. On June 17, 1942, the SS and Gestapo break into the safe house. The landlady asks to use the bathroom and swallows a cyanide capsule. Her 17-year-old son, Ata, is interrogated and tortured for the entire day. He is shown his mother’s severed head and threatened to do the same to his father. Ata relents and tells the Gestapo what they want to know. He will be executed in Mauthausen on October 24, 1942.

Elite Japanese troops land at Gona, New Guinea, to capture Port Moresby by following a trail called the Kokoda Trail; their objective is an outpost for invading Australia; they are stopped by a handful of Australian soldiers in the harsh conditions of the tropical forest.

Aircraft carriers Hiryu, Akagi sunk

Aircraft carriers Soryu, Kaga sunk

Battle of Midway

Bletchey Park. A machine is ordered to decrypt the Tunny code of the Nazi Lorenz SZ 40/42 teleprinters. It will be the famous Colossus, essentially the first electronic (tube) computer, in operation from February 1944.

Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Joe Rochefort’s cryptography unit successfully deciphers Admiral Yamamoto’s orders for his fleet to ambush the U.S. Navy off the coast of Midway. This information will allow the Americans to turn the battle in their favor, inflicting irreparable damage on the Imperial Japanese Fleet (five aircraft carriers sunk), which will go on the defensive for the rest of the war.

Klaus Fuchs, of the Manhattan Project, receives British citizenship and is already an active agent in the service of the Soviets.

General Groves appoints Leo Szilard to head the Manhattan Project

The US Army is tasked with taking charge of the Uranium Project, or the future Manhattan Project.

American chemist Russell Marker worked to produce the steroid cortisone, but his research would prove crucial to the development of the contraceptive pill. He developed a process to obtain pure synthetic progesterone, the same one produced by the female body. Once the side group was removed, many other compounds could be synthesized. This process, the removal of the sapogenin side group, is still used today for the production of synthetic hormones and is known as “Marker degradation.” Marker’s research was conducted on hundreds of plants, primarily in Mexico. It was in Mexico in 1944 that he founded Syntex, a pharmaceutical company that would become one of the world’s leading producers of steroids. A Syntex employee, Carl Djerassi, who joined in 1949, patented Noretindone in 1951, eight times more potent than progesterone as an oral contraceptive. Both progesterone and noretindone were initially intended to be administered to women with a history of previous miscarriages. Then, in the early 1950s, two women, Katherine McCormick and Margaret Sanger, committed to changing the role of noretindone, making it a widely used contraceptive drug for women, as a means of emancipating women. The challenge was finding a state in the United States willing to conduct the trial. Finding none, they turned to Puerto Rico, which at the time was far ahead of the United States in birth control (it had already legalized birth control in 1937, for example). Unintended pregnancies among those taking the drug dropped to 1%, compared to 40% with other forms of contraception. In 1957, the drug Enovid was accepted by the FDA for the treatment of menstrual irregularities. Then in 1960, as a contraceptive. And by 1965, nearly 4 million American women were taking “the pill,” and by 1985, the number had risen to a staggering 80 million women, using Marker’s discovery in Mexico.

Vannevar Bush updates President Roosevelt on the state of atomic bomb technology: 1) several kilograms of Pu239 or U235 can create an explosion of several kilotons; 2) there are four possible methods of preparing the fissile material: electromagnetic U235, diffusion U235, centrifugal U235, or chain reaction production of Pu239; it is not yet known which method is preferable; 3) a sizable industrial production plant is feasible; 4) the whole thing can begin soon enough to be completed to be of military use in the ongoing conflict. The president approves and gives instructions for funding the undertaking, which will soon become the Manhattan Project. It is an effort, the industrialization of a cutting-edge technology in 24 months, which normally in peacetime under “normal” circumstances would have taken decades.

Robert Oppenheimer is appointed director of fast neutron research at Berkeley with the title of Coordinator of Fast Rupture

Prague. Operation Anthropoid. Operation Anthropoid for the assassination of SS-Obergruppenführer and Police General Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office, RSHA), and Reichsprotektor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The operation was prepared by the British Special Operations Executive with the approval of the Czech government-in-exile. Heydrich was only wounded in the attack, but later died of his injuries (perhaps from the SOE’s use of botulinum or similar to infect the bomb shrapnel) on June 4, 1942. His death (Heydrich was very close to Hitler and one of the main architects of the Final Solution for the Jews) led the SS to take terrible revenge on the local population. 13,000 people were arrested and interrogated, approximately 5,000 were shot. The towns of Lidice and Ležáky were destroyed, their citizens killed or imprisoned. The SOE agents, Slovak Jozef Gabčík and Czech Jan Kubiš, who carried out the attack, were hunted by the Gestapo and the SS. With large sums of money and interrogations, the Gestapo managed to gain access to an SOE safe house. On June 17, 1942, the SS and Gestapo broke into the safe house. The owner of the house asked to use the bathroom and swallowed a cyanide capsule. Her 17-year-old son, Ata, was interrogated and tortured for the entire day. He was shown his mother’s severed head and threatened to do the same to his father. Ata relented and told the Gestapo what they wanted to know. He was executed in Mauthausen on October 24, 1942. On June 18, 750 SS men besieged the church where two paratroopers, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, were besieged along with other members of the SOE. The firefight lasted two hours. According to one source, 14 SS men lost their lives. The church was riddled with machine gun fire and doused with tear gas. A fire truck was then sent to flood it. Kubiš was killed along with others in the firefight, while Gabčík committed suicide at the end of the fighting.

Aircraft carrier Lexington sunk

The Biltmore Conference, also known by its resolution as the Biltmore Program, represented a fundamental shift from traditional Zionist policy with its demand “that Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth.” The meeting was held in New York City at the prestigious Biltmore Hotel from May 6 to May 11, 1942, and was attended by 600 delegates and Zionist leaders from 18 countries. The program has been described by numerous historians as “a virtual coup d’état” within Zionism, as the movement’s more moderate leaders were replaced by leaders with more aggressive goals.

Soviet Union. 110,000 Polish prisoners set out on foot from the Gulag, sometimes marching thousands of kilometers, to reach the assembly point. They then boarded cargo ships in the Caspian Sea, reached Iran, received training from the British, moved first to Palestine and then to Egypt, and finally fought in Italy. Ultimately, they were unable to return to Soviet Poland, and almost all ended up in Great Britain, with some in the United States, Italy, and so on. They formed the Second Polish Army Corps, formed when Polish General Sikorski, head of the Polish government-in-exile, convinced Stalin to release all Polish prisoners in the Gulags to contribute to the Allied war effort.

Battle of the Coral Sea

First employees move into newly completed Pentagon

Mauthausen, Austria. On April 30, 1942, the head of the SS Office issued a circular (the “Pohl Circular”) to maximize the exploitation of labor: the German war industry had a growing need for labor. The subcamps arose from the need to shelter the war industries from bombing (in tunnels dug into the mountains) and to decentralize and distribute the enormous number of prisoners needed for this purpose, which could not be concentrated in a single camp, often far from their workplaces. The prisoners were employed in three sectors: infrastructure construction (roads, power plants, and related industries); underground relocation of the war industries (tunnel excavation, machinery installation); and armaments production. In 1942, the main Mauthausen camp took on new functions related to these developments. It served as: the central administrative headquarters for the system of collection, selection, and distribution of slave labor, according to the requests of the various industries; and the financial directorate to control the revenues derived from the rental of prisoner-slaves to the various industries. Central management of the surveillance organization. Consequently, every new transport sent into the Mauthausen area arrived at the main camp, where the prisoners were registered, selected, and prepared for the harsh conditions of discipline and labor in the camp through quarantine. In addition to fulfilling this sorting function, Mauthausen also served as a collection and elimination center for the unfit (who had become so as a result of the treatment they had endured during imprisonment and forced labor) and as a center for the annihilation of specific categories of enemies of the Reich, especially Soviet prisoners of war (gassed), Dutch Jews, and a significant number of Czechoslovakian intellectuals.

Berchtesgaden, the “eagle’s nest.” Hitler and Mussolini meet, accompanied by a large entourage of generals. Things take a turn for the better. Never before had German soldiers raised their flag over such a vast territory: from the Urals to the Atlantic, from the North Cape and the North Sea to Africa. But Hitler’s strategic thinking extends even further: a gigantic pincer movement whose branches, one through the Caucasus, the other through Egypt, would close in on the Persian Gulf, and then make contact with the Japanese via India. A staunch landsman, the Führer harbors an innate aversion to amphibious operations. He neglects the capture of Gibraltar and Malta. Instead, a strike force composed of the Friuli, Livorno, and Superga divisions, the San Marco naval regiment, and the paratroopers and sappers of the Folgore, is prepared for Malta. It is Operation Hercules. The island is subjected to daily bombing by 300 aircraft. Of the 200 Spitfires defending the island, only seven remain. But then Rommel convinces Hitler to postpone the landing on Malta, in order to take Tobruk. And so the Folgore paratroopers, created for the landing on Malta, will be destined to trudge through the Libyan sands.

First bombing (With B-25s from Hornet) on Tokyo

Soviet industrial war production surpassed that of the Nazis. Safely beyond the Urals, the Soviet bear produced 25,000 tanks, 25,000 aircraft, and 30,000 medium- and heavy-caliber artillery pieces in 1942. The USSR, unlike Germany, was also engaged on only one (major) front. The entry of the United States into the war rekindled the hopes of the USSR and the United Kingdom, the only European nations not yet conquered by the Nazis.

Bletchey Park. Several transmissions from encrypted Nazi Lorenz SZ 40/42 teleprinters are decrypted (Tunny code).

Great Britain. Project Habakkuk. The British attempt to determine whether an iceberg could serve as an aircraft carrier. Due to the ease with which icebergs capsize, the project nearly dies, but then comes the invention of pykrete, a mixture of water and wood pulp that, when frozen, is stronger than regular ice, melting more slowly and thus preventing the “ship” from sinking. Pykrete could be worked like wood and cast into molds like metal, and once immersed in water, an insulating shell of wet wood pulp could form on its surface, protecting its interior from further melting. However, Perutz encountered a problem: ice has a viscous flow, and his tests showed that a pykrete ship would slowly collapse if it were not cooled to -16°C. To achieve such a surface, the vessel would need insulation and a refrigeration system and a complex system of ducts. Perutz proceeded to conduct experiments on the feasibility of pykrete and its optimal composition at a secret location beneath the Smithfield Meat Market in the City of London. The research took place in a meat refrigeration room behind a protective screen of frozen animal carcasses.

Werner Heisenberg, in a meeting that includes senior Nazi officials, declares: As soon as such a machine [reactor] is in operation, the question of how to obtain explosive material, according to an idea of von Weizsäcker takes a new turn. In the transmutation of the uranium in the machine, a new substance comes into existence, element 94, which is very probably—just like 92U235—an explosive of equally unimaginable force. This substance is much easier to obtain from uranium than 92U235, however, since it can be separated from uranium by chemical means.

United States. President Roosevelt signs the infamous Executive Order 9066, which, without mentioning the Japanese, authorizes the internment of individuals deemed dangerous. This act paves the way for the imprisonment of thousands of Japanese. His wife, Eleanor, had spoken out against this act, and afterward, she would change her view of her husband and their relationship: she would maintain an emotional distance. Eleanor Roosevelt requested, and was granted, permission to visit the detention camps. Another authoritative dissenting opinion comes from J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI for only five months: he maintains that the request is based on widespread American opinion and political pressure, rather than on specific facts. He also warns that American farmers on the West Coast may have a direct interest in eliminating competition from Japanese farmers.

United States. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI for only five months, opposes President Roosevelt’s request to intern Japanese residents in the United States. Hoover argues that the request is based on widespread American opinion and political pressure, rather than on specific facts. He also warns that American farmers on the West Coast may have a direct interest in eliminating competition from Japanese farmers. Roosevelt, however, will press ahead and sign the infamous Executive Order 9066.

Australia. Japanese bombing of Port Darwin. Only four days after the fall of Singapore, the last British bastion defending Australia. Sixty more bombings of Australia would follow. It became clear to Australians that the only power capable of defending them from the Japanese was the United States, no longer Great Britain. Australia would pay a heavy price for the war: 22,000 prisoners in Japanese military camps, with 36% losing their lives, compared to a 1% mortality rate for American or British prisoners in Nazi camps.

Singapore surrenders to Japan. During World War II, in one of the worst military defeats in its history, Great Britain was forced to cede the previously impregnable Singapore to Japan. Located off the Malay Peninsula and protected by enormous defensive cannons, Singapore was considered unassailable. But the guns, with armor-piercing ammunition and special flat trajectories to decimate enemy fleets, were ineffective against a land attack from the undefended northern side of the island. After sweeping across the Malay Peninsula, the Japanese entered Singapore from the north and entered the city, capturing important Allied positions and forcing the attackers to split into small groups. Short of supplies, the British were forced to relinquish control of a waterway crucial to shipping between India and China. Of the 130,000 Allied soldiers captured, thousands later died as Japanese prisoners.

Of the 3.9 million Russians captured by the Nazis, only 1.1 million are still alive.

The Normandie burns in New York. The Normandie, considered by many to be the most elegant ocean liner ever built, catches fire in New York Harbor while preparing to transport Allied troops. Built in France in the early 1930s, the Normandie dominated transoceanic passenger transport. The first large steamship to cross the Atlantic in less than four days, she was a masterpiece of engineering and refined design. The distinctive bow of this 1,000-foot-long steamer was instantly recognizable, and her elaborate architecture and decorations made the Art Deco style famous. With the American entry into World War II, she was seized by the U.S. Navy for military purposes and renamed the USS Lafayette. But on February 9, 1942, as the troop embarkation was imminent, a welder accidentally ignited a stack of flammable life preservers, and by dawn the following day the ship lay capsized in the harbor like a gutted wreck. She was later towed to New Jersey where she was scrapped.

United States. The Roberts Commission presents its findings on Pearl Harbor to Congress: President Roosevelt is not to blame for the disaster and attributes negligence to Admiral Kimmel, while conceding that he had not been adequately informed by Washington of the imminence of war with Japan.

Soviet Union. Os-Kur Mission near Ust-Usa. Retyunin, a free worker, gathers a couple of hundred detained volunteers, disarms the guards, and escapes on horseback into the Siberian forests. They are captured and killed one by one. For several years, people will be convicted for the “Retyunin case,” even though they had nothing to do with it.

Bletchley Park, central England. First effective decryption of a Nazi message. Brute-force decryption would be impossible (at the time, and perhaps even today). Various tricks were therefore used, such as the final sentence of many German communiqués ending with “Heil Hitler!”. Or the morning communiqué from a specific German ship anchored off the coast of Scotland always began with “Wettervorhersage,” or “Weather Forecast.” It was also extremely likely that in most messages, whatever their nature, the number “1” or the word “one” would appear at least once. In German, this is EIN, and since the ENIGMA keyboard does not have numbers, it must be written entirely in letters. Now, when the word EIN is entered into the three-wheel ENIGMA, it encodes it into one of over 70 million possible words. At Bletchley Park, the EINS BOOK (the book of ones) was created, which is the list of these 70 million possibilities. The Colossus computer searches for one of these in the messages in the morning, and when it finds it, it finds a key. Sometimes there are even lucky breaks, like when someone at Bletchley Park noticed that there wasn’t a single “L” on a whole page. ENIGMA was specifically designed to prevent the same letter from appearing when a certain letter was entered. However, this turns out to be a fatal flaw. Not finding a single “L” means that the ENIGMA operator, perhaps bored, is pressing the “L” key over and over again…

Libya. The second Italian-German counteroffensive in Cyrenaica begins unexpectedly. Cruwell’s 15th Panzer Regiment and Zingales’ Ariete tanks are at the forefront. Caught by surprise, the British quickly retreat. They are inexperienced troops, suffering from a significant inferiority complex compared to the Afrika Corps. In two days, the Panzer Army destroys 299 tanks and armored cars, captures 147 guns, takes 950 prisoners, and suffers 11 soldiers killed and 3 tanks destroyed. Rommel once again strikes fear. Within days, the Italians and Germans reach Benghazi, under pouring rain, overwhelming the British defenses. An entire Indian division is destroyed, and 1,300 valuable trucks, fuel depots, tons of food supplies, and dozens of other tanks are captured.

On Lake Wansee, Adolf Eichmann and other Nazi leaders decide, in a 90-minute meeting, on the “Final Solution” that is, the Holocaust of the Jews.

The number of democracies worldwide is at an all-time low of just 12, after a peak of 29 in 1922. It will rise again after the war, to 36 in 1962.

Boston fire: Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire. 492 people die.

United States. President Roosevelt reads his State of the Union address. Speaking more slowly than usual and enunciating his words, he speaks of Japan’s modest dreams compared to the gigantic aspirations of Hitler’s Germany and the Nazis, a kind of pagan religion. The militarists of Berlin and Tokyo started this war, but the united forces of the rest of humanity will finish it. Every available factory must be converted to military production. The nation needs 60,000 airplanes and 45,000 tanks next year, and 125,000 airplanes and 75,000 tanks the year after that. This will require more than half the national GDP. We have already tasted defeat at Pearl Harbor. There will be others. It will be a long, costly, and bloody war. But the alternative is tyranny and cruelty. A Gallup poll shows that American approval is 84% to 9% against. Roosevelt does not want to call it the Second World War, after the Great War, and prefers Survival War: the war for the survival of our civilization.

Roosevelt, despite his well-known reservations about multinational organizations, chose the name for the new League of Nations: the United Nations. He had been mulling it over for several days, and one day, before breakfast, he burst into Churchill’s bathroom and told him. The British prime minister, still dripping wet, accepted.

Russia. Three million Russian prisoners are in German hands.

Richard Feynman becomes increasingly involved in the Manhattan Project. His wife, Arline, becomes seriously ill.

Richard Feynman meets with Robert R. Wilson, a senior physicist who recently arrived at Princeton. Wilson is involved in what will soon become the Manhattan Project, specifically the separation of the isotope U235. He has received funding and needs help. So he tries to convince Feynman. He’s initially negative: he’s already wasted too much time and is behind on his thesis, so he goes back to work on his thesis… for about three minutes, but then he starts pacing, thinking about the proposal. The Germans had Hitler, and the chances of them developing the atomic bomb first were terrifying. So he decides to attend the meeting at 3:00 PM that same day. By 4:00 PM, he already has a desk, an office, paper, and pen, and is already working intensely and as quickly as possible on the problem of separating the isotope U235.

Stuckwlberg and, independently later, John Wheeler and then Richard Feynman, realized that a convenient way to interpret antimatter is to see it as matter traveling backwards in time.

The Manhattan Project moves from Columbia University to Chicago.

During the war, North American produced 42,683 Texan aircraft, Boeing produced 12,729 B17 Flying-Fortress (including 3,000 from Douglas), 3,890 B29 Super-Fortress; the B17s, with their range of only 3,220 km, were used mainly in Europe, the B29s, with a range of 9,012 km and a pressurized cabin, were exclusively used in the war in the Pacific.

Mexico City. Tina Modotti, a beautiful Hollywood actress and lover of Vittorio Vidali, is murdered on January 1, 1942. After a New Year’s Eve party, organized by Pablo Neruda and attended by several communist veterans of the Spanish Civil War, Tina takes a taxi home, where she is found dead a few minutes later. Neruda dedicates a poem to her: “Tina Modotti is dead.” Also at the party was Vittorio Vidali (aka Carlosa Contreras, aka Enea Sormenti), who disappears from circulation the following day. Vittorio Vidali is an agent of Red Aid, initially a communist solidarity organization, and later Stalin’s armed wing. He actively collaborated in finding and eliminating Trotskyist supporters around the world, including Trotsky himself in Mexico City in 1940.

The German army manages to starve between 1.3 and 1.65 million Soviet prisoners of war.

The British colony of Hong Kong surrenders to Japan.

The daring raiders of the Decima MAS (X MAS) deal a devastating blow to the Royal Navy. Six men, escaping from the submarine Sciré, enter the Bay of Alexandria astride their assault craft, known as “pigs.” They avenge the mockery of Matapan by sinking the battleships Valiant and Queen Elizabeth, as well as a large oil tanker. However, the Italians are captured, and the government in Rome only learns it has regained control of the Mediterranean four months later, when Churchill is required to report to the House of Commons.

Libya. Rommel orders an “offensive retreat” through Cyrenaica. For the second time, Benghazi is evacuated by Axis troops and abandoned to the British.