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| | | | World History timeline |
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| 1942 |
| | | French music student Pierre Boulez joins a harmony class taught by Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire | |
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| 1942 |
| | | Italian director Luchino Visconti's first film, Obsession, brings neorealism to the cinema | |
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| c. 1942 |
| | | US poet Ezra Pound, in Italy during the war, broadcasts Fascist propaganda aimed at the United States | |
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| 1942 |
| | | US poet Randall Jarrell publishes his first collection, Blood for a Stranger | |
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| 1942 |
| | | Michael Curtiz directs Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca | |
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| 1942 |
| | | James Cagney stars in the screen musical Yankee Doodle Dandy, directed by Michael Curtiz | |
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| 1942 |
| | | Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy star in the first of many films together, Woman of the Year | |
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| 1942 |
| | | A rich hoard of Roman silver is unearthed near Mildenhall, in Suffolk | |
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| 1942 |
| | | English children's author Enid Blyton introduces the Famous Five in Five on a Treasure Island | |
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| 1942 |
| | | Thornton Wilder's play The Skin of our Teeth has a mixed reception at its New Haven premiere | |
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| 1942 |
| | | US crooner Bing Crosby sings Irving Berlin's White Christmas | |
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| 1942 January |
| | | Aung San's Burma Independence Army enters Burma as part of the Japanese invasion | |
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| 1942 January |
| | | Before the end of the month the Japanese control the whole of Malaya | |
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| 1942 January 20 |
| | | Reinhard Heydrich convenes a meeting at Wannsee to discuss the practical details of the 'final solution' | |
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| 1942 February |
| | | Arthur Harris is put in charge of British Bomber Command, and is later much criticized for his ruthless approach | |
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| 1942 February |
| | | Joseph Stilwell is appointed to head the US military mission to Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) | |
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| 1942 February |
| | | An Indian National Army is formed among Indian soldiers captured by the Japanese, with the purpose of evicting the British from India | |
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| 1942 February |
| | | Hitler's chief architect, Albert Speer, is put in charge of Germany's armaments programme | |
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| 1942 February 1 |
| | | Vidkun Quisling, founder of the Norwegian Fascist party, is appointed president of German-occupied Norway | |
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| 1942 February 15 |
| | | Singapore falls to the continuing Japanese onslaught in southeast Asia | |
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| 1942 February 19 |
| | | Japanese aircraft attack Australia, bombing Darwin's harbour and air force base | |
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| 1942 March |
| | | The Nazis build a new style of concentration camp, at Auschwitz in Poland, in which the fit will work and the unfit will be killed | |
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| 1942 from March |
| | | German industrial enterprises are moved from the vulnerable Ruhr valley to the slave labour facilities of Auschwitz | |
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| 1942 March 8 |
| | | The Japanese invasion of Papua signals the start of the three-year New Guinea campaign | |
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| 1942 April |
| | | British engineer Barnes Wallis designs a bouncing and rotating bomb for use against German dams | |
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| 1942 April |
| | | Pierre Laval becomes head of the government in German-backed Vichy France | |
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| 1942 April |
| | | Germany launches a bombing campaign specifically targeting historic British cities with three stars in the Baedeker guidebook | |
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| 1942 April 15 |
| | | George VI awards the George Cross (for civilian valour) to the entire besieged island of Malta | |
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| 1942 April 18 |
| | | US planes, flying from an aircraft carrier, undertake a difficult bombing raid on Tokyo | |
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| 1942 May |
| | | After losing the Philippines to the Japanese, Douglas MacArthur declares 'I shall return' | |
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| 1942 May |
| | | Burma becomes the last in the series of important southeast Asian territories to fall into Japanese hands | |
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| 1942 May |
| | | German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer flies to neutral Sweden to contact the British on behalf of conspirators against Hitler | |
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| 1942 May |
| | | William Slim gets the remaining British forces back to India from Burma, in a fighting withdrawal that lasts two months | |
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| 1942 May 27 |
| | | Reinhard Heydrich is fatally wounded by Free Czech agents parachuted in from Britain | |
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| 1942 May 31 |
| | | Three Japanese midget submarines penetrate Sydney harbour in Australia | |
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| 1942 June 7 |
| | | US physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer is appointed director of the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon | |
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| 1942 June 7 |
| | | US planes sink four Japanese aircraft carriers in the battle of Midway, halting for the first time Japan's aggressive expansion | |
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| 1942 June 9 |
| | | Hitler orders a massacre at Lidice, a village near Prague, in retaliation for the death of Heydrich | |
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| 1942 June 21 |
| | | German general Erwin Rommel captures Tobruk, along with 33,000 British soldiers and valuable supplies | |
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| 1942 July |
| | | Anne Frank and her family go into hiding in an Amsterdam attic | |
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| 1942 July |
| | | Treblinka is constructed, in Poland, as the Nazis' first large-scale and purpose-built death camp | |
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| 1942 July |
| | | A renewed German campaign eastwards in Russia results in the capture of Sebastopol and the Crimea | |
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| 1942 July |
| | | Russia's new heavy industry is relocated to the east to escape the German advance | |
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| 1942 July 4 |
| | | Auchinleck finally stops Rommel's advance, in the first battle of El Alamein | |
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| 1942 August |
| | | US general Dwight Eisenhower is appointed to command Allied landings in north Africa | |
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| 1942 August 7 |
| | | US and Japanese forces begin a violent six-month struggle for Guadalcanal, one of the Solomon Islands | |
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| 1942 August 13 |
| | | Bernard Montgomery is appointed commander of the demoralized British and Commonwealth Eighth Army in North Africa | |
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| 1942 August 19 |
| | | Canadian troops provide most of the assault force in a disastrous raid on Dieppe | |
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| 1942 August 30 |
| | | Rommel's new thrust towards Alexandria is halted by the British at Alam al-Halfa, a ridge near El Alamein | |
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| 1942 September 13 |
| | | A desperate battle begins for the city of Stalingrad, with house-to-house fighting between Germans and Russians | |
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| 1942 October 3 |
| | | The German V-2 rocket is successfully tested by Wernher von Braun and his team at Peenemünde | |
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| 1942 October 23 |
| | | Montgomery launches the second battle of El Alamein against Rommel | |
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| 1942 November |
| | | In a few weeks Montgomery and the Eighth Army push Rommel back some 1200 miles, into Tunisia | |
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| 1942 November 8 |
| | | American and British forces, under Dwight Eisenhower, land in Morocco and Algeria | |
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| 1942 November 11 |
| | | Hitler, disregarding the armistice, sends German troops to take control of Vichy France | |
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| 1942 November 12 |
| | | After three days of resistance the French commanders in north Africa bring their troops over to the Allied side | |
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| 1942 November 25 |
| | | Soviet tanks complete the encirclement of 20 German divisions at Stalingrad | |
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| 1942 November 27 |
| | | French crews in Toulon scuttle the fleet to prevent it falling into German hands | |
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| 1942 December 2 |
| | | Enrico Fermi and his team in Chicago achieve the first nuclear chain reaction | |
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| 1942 December 2 |
| | | The loss of merchant shipping to U-boats reaches a peak in the Battle of the Atlantic, with 1.5 million tons sunk in the last quarter of the year | |
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| 1942 December 17 |
| | | An international declaration condemns Germany's 'bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination' | |
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| 1943 |
| | | French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre expounds his theory of existentialism in Being and Nothingness ('L'Être et le néant') | |
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