Explore 3063 historical events from 1940–1949.
William Charles "Razor" Smith was a Surrey slow bowler. Nicknamed "Razor" because of his extreme thinness, Smith was a frail man and prone to serious injury; he could rarely get th…
Razor Smith, English cricketer and coach (born 1877)
Dragoljub "Draža" Mihailović was a Yugoslav Serb general during World War II. He was the leader of the Chetnik Detachments of the Yugoslav Army (Chetniks), a royalist and nationali…
Draža Mihailović, Serbian and Yugoslav general (born 1893)
Florence Ada Fuller was a South African-born Australian artist. Originally from Port Elizabeth, Fuller migrated as a child to Melbourne with her family. There she trained with her …
Florence Fuller, South African-born Australian artist (born 1867)
Gualberto Villarroel López was a Bolivian military officer who served as the 39th president of Bolivia from 1943 to 1946. A reformist, sometimes compared with Argentina's Juan Peró…
Gualberto Villarroel, Bolivian soldier and politician, 45th President of Bolivia (born 1908)
Gertrude Stein was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and …
Gertrude Stein, American novelist, poet, and playwright (born 1874)
Alphonsa of the Immaculate Conception, born as Anna Muttathupadathu, was an Indian Catholic nun and educator. She is the first woman of Indian origin to be canonized as a saint by …
Saint Alphonsa, first woman of Indian origin to be canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church (born 1910)
The League of Nations was the first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. It was founded on 10 January 1920 by the Paris Pea…
The final session of the League of Nations concluded in Geneva, with delegates agreeing to transfer much of its assets t
The Naperville train disaster occurred on April 25, 1946, on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad at Loomis Street in Naperville, Illinois, when the railroad's Exposition Fl…
Two passenger trains collided in Naperville, Illinois, leaving 45 people dead and some 125 injured
Masaru Ibuka was a Japanese electronics industrialist and co-founder of Sony, along with Akio Morita.
Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita founded the telecommunications corporation Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, later renamed Sony
Plutonium is a chemical element; it has symbol Pu and atomic number 94. It is a silvery-gray actinide metal that tarnishes when exposed to air, and forms a dull coating when oxidiz…
While working with a mass of plutonium known as the demon core, Manhattan Project physicist Louis Slotin accidentally ex
The 1946 Vancouver Island earthquake struck Vancouver Island on the coast of British Columbia, Canada, on June 23 at 10:15 a.m. with a magnitude estimated at 7.0 Ms and 7.5 Mw. The…
Canada's largest recorded onshore earthquake struck Vancouver Island, British Columbia
Bikini Atoll, known as Eschscholtz Atoll between the 19th century and 1946, is a coral reef in the Marshall Islands consisting of 23 islands surrounding a 229.4-square-mile (594.1 …
Named after Bikini Atoll, the site of the nuclear-weapons test Operation Crossroads in the Marshall Islands, the…
The 1946 La Paz riots were a series of increasingly violent strikes and protests which culminated in the lynching and hanging of then president of Bolivia, Gualberto Villarroel, an…
After weeks of unrest, rioters lynched Bolivian president Gualberto Villarroel, desecrating and hanging his corpse in…
Montese is a town in the province of Modena, Emilia-Romagna, Italy.
World War II: Montese, Italy, is liberated from Nazi forces
A bomber is a military combat aircraft that utilizes air-to-ground weaponry to drop bombs, launch torpedoes, or deploy air-launched cruise missiles.
World War II: Over 1,000 bombers attack the small island of Heligoland, Germany
The Surrender at Caserta of 29 April 1945 was the written agreement that formalized the surrender of German and Italian Fascist forces in Italy, ending the Italian Campaign of Worl…
World War II: The Surrender of Caserta is signed by the commander of German forces in Italy
Stalag Luft I was a German World War II prisoner-of-war (POW) camp near Barth, Western Pomerania, Germany, for captured Allied airmen. The presence of the prison camp is said to ha…
World War II: Stalag Luft I prisoner-of-war camp near Barth, Germany is liberated by Soviet soldiers, freeing nearly 9,0
The Surrender at Caserta of 29 April 1945 was the written agreement that formalized the surrender of German and Italian Fascist forces in Italy, ending the Italian Campaign of Worl…
World War II: The surrender of Caserta comes into effect, by which German troops in Italy cease fighting
Wöbbelin was a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp near the city of Ludwigslust. The SS had established Wöbbelin to house concentration camp prisoners whom the SS had evac…
World War II: The US 82nd Airborne Division liberates Wöbbelin concentration camp finding 1,000 dead prisoners, most of
The Battle of Castle Itter was fought on 5 May 1945, in the Austrian village of Itter in the North Tyrol region of the country, during the last days of the European Theater of Worl…
World War II: Battle of Castle Itter, one of only two battles in that war in which American and German troops fought coo
U-boats are naval submarines operated by Germany, especially during World War I and World War II. The term is an anglicized form of the German word U-Boot, a shortening of Untersee…
World War II: Last German U-boat attack of the war, two freighters are sunk off the Firth of Forth, Scotland
The German Instrument of Surrender was a legal document effecting the unconditional surrender of the remaining German armed forces to the Allies, ending World War II in Europe. It …
World War II: The German Instrument of Surrender signed at Berlin-Karlshorst comes into effect
The Sétif and Guelma massacre was a series of massacres by French colonial authorities and pied-noir European settler militias on Algerian civilians in May and June 1945 around the…
Hundreds of Algerian civilians are killed by French Army soldiers in the Sétif massacre
Yevgeny Ananyevich Khaldei was a Soviet naval officer and photographer. He is best known for his World War II photograph of a Soviet soldier raising a flag over the Reichstag in Be…
World War II: Yevgeny Khaldei's photograph Raising a Flag over the Reichstag is published in Ogonyok magazine