French pilot and author Antoine de St. Exupery publishes The Little Prince, the story of a pilot who crashes and meets a little boy from outer space.
Quotes from The Little Prince: Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.
“Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Also in 1943, Oxford scholar C. S. Lewis makes a series of radio broadcasts that will be adapted as a book, Mere Christianity.
Quotes from Mere Christianity:
“God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.”
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
Also published in 1943: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. Perelandra by C.S. Lewis. The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis. Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Popular in 1943: The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas. One of my favorites. Marcellus is a proud Roman citizen and soldier until he encounters Jesus in Palestine and is forever changed. Guadalcanal Diary by Richard Tregaskis. In the summer and fall of 1942, American Marines landed on the South Pacific island of Guadalcanal and fought their way across the island. Tregaskis, a journalist, tells the story of Guadalcanal in a primary source account. Our Hearts Were Young and Gay by Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough. Two American college age women tell the tale of their 1920 tour of Europe.
In 1943, Bing Crosby has another hit Christmas song with “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” written by Kim Gannon, Walter Kent and Buck Ram. The soldiers fighting the war all over the world and their families at home listened to this song and “White Christmas” and longed for the end of the war with all the troops safely at home.
January 31, 1943. The German Sixth Army surrenders to the Russians at Stalingrad after the Russian winter an snow decimates the Germans and saps their will to fight.
April, 1943. German troops massacre the remaining Jews inside the Warsaw ghetto in Poland, those who haven’t already been sent to extermination camps at Auschwitz and other locations. About 60.000 Jews were still in the ghetto at the beginning of April, and these survivors resist the German butchery with fierce resistance. But the Jews defiance is doomed to failure and largely unreported in the rest of the world. Read Mila 18 by Leon Uris for a complete fictional account of the bravery and tragedy of the Jewish resistance inside the Warsaw Ghetto.
May 12, 1943. The German and Italian armies in North Africa surrender to the Allies.
June 10, 1943. Hungarian hypnotist and journalist, Ladislao Biro,in Argentina with his brother Georg, a chemist, patents a revolutionary new writing instrument, the ballpoint pen. In 1950 Marcel Bich bought the patent from BÃró for the pen, which soon became the main product of his Bic company.
July 13, 1943. After a huge tank battle at Kursk in the Soviet Union in which 1500 German and Soviet tanks fight at close range, the Germans are driven back and Adolf Hitler himself orders a withdrawal.
July 9, 1943. U.S. troops invade Italy at the tip of Sicily, and on July 22 the troops reach and take Palermo in the northwest corner of Sicily. German defenders of Sicily retreat into Italy, and the Sicilians for the most part welcome the Americans.
July 25, 1943. King Victor Emmanuel III and the Fascist Council reject and overthrow Benito Mussolini in Italy and replace him with Marshal Pietro Badoglio. Two days later, Badoglio dissolves the Fascist government and tries to negotiate a peace with the Allies while still trying to placate the Nazis who are scattered in force throughout Italy. Mussolini goes into hiding.
August 2, 1943. The Allies bomb the port of Hamburg, Germany, reducing its shipyards and factories to rubble.
October 13, 1943. Italy surrenders to the Allies and declares war on its former ally, Germany.
November, 1943. Allied leaders Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin meet in Tehran, Iran to coordinate war strategy and plan for the aftermath of the war.
Richard Hannay, the narrator in John Buchan’s spy novel Greenmantle, is an English spy inside Germany at Christmas, 1915, World War I.
“It was the 23rd day of December, and even in war time one had a sort of feel of Christmas. You could see girls carrying evergreens, and when we stopped at a station the soldiers on leave had all the air of holiday making. The middle of Germany was a cheerier place than Berlin or the western parts. I liked the look of the old peasants, and the women in their neat Sunday best, but I noticed, too, how pinched they were.”
Pinched because they were hungry. The British blockade of Germany in the North Atlantic meant that Germans were short of cloth, machinery, raw materials, and even food that was removed from ships sailing to Germany before the ships reached a German port. Germany responded to the British blockade with its own policy of “unrestricted submarine warfare,” and we all know what came next. The Americans entered the war.
My head was beginning to swim, but I made one more effort.
“There is food in my rucksack—biscuits and ham and chocolate. Pray take it for your use. And here is some money to buy Christmas fare for the little ones.” And I gave her some of the German notes.
After that my recollection becomes dim. She helped me up a ladder to the garret, undressed me, and gave me a thick coarse nightgown. I seem to remember that she kissed my hand, and that she was crying. “The good Lord has sent you,” she said. “Now the little ones will have their prayers answered and the Christkindl will not pass by our door.”
The hit song of 1942 is Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, sung by Bing Crosby in the movie Holiday Inn. Crosby first sang the song on Christmas Day, 1941 on an NBC radio show. But the song took off in late 1942, and it’s credited as the best-selling single of all time, with estimated sales in excess of 50 million copies worldwide.
From Arne and the Christmas Star, a story of Norway by Alta Halverson Seymour. Illustrated by Frank Nicholas. Wilcox and Follett Company, 1952.
Arne knew there would be stacks of flatbrod, hard and crisp and round, each piece larger than a plate. Besta baked these right on top of her well-scrubbed cookstove. There would be heart-shaped waffles, and lefse and bakelse and rosettes and all kinds of good coffeecakes. His mouth watered at the thought. If a boy hung around the kitchen at the right times, he was sure to come in for a good many samples, especially broken bits.
He knew there would also be a final scouring of the house just before Christmas, that the windows and the copper flowerpots on the window sills would be gleaming. The geraniums and begoneas would be coaxed into bloom for Christmas. And of course the womenfolk would be busy planning and preparing food to last through the Christmas season.
February 15, 1942. British-controlled Singapore falls to the Japanese advance down the Malayan Peninsula. The Allies now have no dry-dock port between Durban, South Africa and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
January, 1942. Gutzon Borglum completes the carving of four presidents on Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota.
February 1, 1942. Vidkun Quisling becomes Minister-President of Norway, a reward for his cooperation with the German occupation of his country. Quisling agrees to enlist Norwegians to help in the German war effort, and and Hitler promises the restoration of Norwegian independence as so as the war is won. As the war continues, quisling becomes a synonym for traitor among the Allies and the Norwegian resistance.
March 17, 1942. General MacArthur leaves the Philippines after the Japanese almost annihilate U.S. forces in the islands, but he promises, “I shall return!” Listen to a brief (five minute) story of MacArthur’s life. Bataan surrenders on April 9th, and Corregidor surrenders to the Japanese on May 6th.
April, 1942. The first T-shirts are manufactured for sailors serving in the U.S. navy.
June 6, 1942. The Japanese suffer their first major naval defeat in a battle off Midway Island in the Pacific. Some call this battle the turning point of the war in the Pacific.
July 23, 1942. A forced labor and death camp at Treblinka in Poland, built by the Germans as part of their “final solution to the Jewish problem”, opens for the purpose of exterminating all Jews in Poland and Eastern Europe.
August 19, 1942. Several thousand Allied soldiers, mostly Canadians, lose their lives in an Allied attempt at landing in northern France in the German-held port of Dieppe. The raid by the Allies is a complete failure, except as a demonstration of the difficulty that the Allies will have in re-taking Europe from the Germans.
August 23, 1942. The German Sixth Army launches an attack on the Russian city of Stalingrad. The ensuing battle is called the Battle of Stalingrad. It is the largest battle on the Eastern Front an done of the bloodiest battles in the history of warfare, killing perhaps as many as two million civilians and soldiers. The Russians are determined not to retreat beyond the Volga River in spite of the German bombing that has reduced the city to rubble. “Not a step back!†and “There is no land behind the Volga!” are the Russian slogans.
November 4, 1942. British General Montgomery and his Eighth Army halt the German Afrika Corps at El Alamein outside Cairo, Egypt. German General Erwin Rommel was absent on sick leave when the battle broke out.
November 8, 1942. Operation Torch, the Allied push to take over French North Africa, begins as American General Eisenhower leads the Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria.
February 12, 1941. General Erwin Rommel arrives in North Africa (Tripoli, Libya) with German troops to reinforce the Italians who have suffered a series of defeats by the British.
April, 1941. Greece and Yugoslavia surrender to the German army invading their countries. British troops stationed in Greece retreat to Crete and North Africa. Yugoslavian Communist Joseph Broz Tito vows to continue fighting Hitler and his Nazis to the end.
May, 1941. The Blitz, heavy German bombing of London and other British cities, comes to an end as Hitler turns his attention to Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.
May 19, 1941. Italian Fascist troops surrender to the British in Ethiopia, and Emperor Haile Selassie has returned to the throne of Ethiopia after having been forced into exile by the Fascists.
June 30, 1941. The Germans invade the Soviet Union, breaking their non-aggression pact with Stalin.
August, 1941. Churchill and FDR meet aboard the American cruiser Augusta and issue a joint declaration later known as the Atlantic Charter. The agreement brings the United States one step closer to war in alliance with Britain.
September, 1941. All Jews in Germany over the age of six are required to wear the Star of David in public as a “mark of shame.”
September, 1941. 21-year old Mohammed Reza Pahlevi is the new Shah of Iran. He promises to be a “completely constitutional monarch.”
November, 1941. The Russian winter slows the German advance into Russia and towards Moscow. The German Blitzkrieg may be frozen in place.
December 7, 1941. A day which will live in infamy. Japanese aircraft attack the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Eight U.S. battleships are sunk or disabled and more than 2400 people are killed. Following the attack the U.S. and Britain both declare war on Japan. Italy and Germany declare war on the U.S., and President Roosevelt returns the favor.
April 9, 1940. Germany invades Denmark and Norway, claiming that the invasion is purely defensive.
May 10, 1940. German forces invade Holland and Belgium with their Blitzkrieg or “lightning war”. Both countries have no choice but to surrender. The Germans continue on to France.
May 10, 1940. Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister of Great Britain, following Neville Chamberlain’s resignation. On May 13, Churchill makes a famous speech in which he tells the House of Commons and the British people:
I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal.
June 4, 1940. British forces trapped in France flee from Dunkirk. Under constant German bombardment, warships of the Royal Navy and hundreds of smaller vessels manned by volunteers from the coastal villages of Britain rescue nearly 300,000 British, French, and Belgian soldiers from the beaches and ferry them to safety in England.
June 10, 1940. Mussolini announces that Italy will join forces with Germany; Roosevelt calls the announcement a stab in the back.
June 22, 1940. The French surrender to the German Blitzkrieg invasion. German troops entered Paris on June 14th, and now Hitler demands that the French sign an armistice in the same railroad car in which the Germans surrendered to the Allies in November 1918.
July 10, 1940. French Marshall Henri Petain establishes a fascist and authoritarian government answering to the Nazis in Vichy, France. France is no longer a republic.
July-September, 1940. The Battle of Britain. The German Luftwaffe sends 1000 planes daily to bomb British ports, shipping, RAF bases, and British radar installations. The Royal Air Force effectively counters the German raids in the air with the help of warnings from the British radar system. Churchill says of the Battle of Britain and the brave RAF pilots, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
August 21, 1941. Exiled Bolshevik Leon Trotsky is assassinated with an ice pick by Ramon Mercader in Mexico City.
September 24-27, 1940. Japanese aircraft from aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin attack French positions on the coast of French Indochina (Vietnam and Cambodia). The United States, Britain, and the Dutch government in exile respond to Japanese expansionism by placing an oil, iron ore, and steel embargo on Japan.
September 27, 1940. The Tripartite Pact is signed in Berlin, Germany, establishing the Axis Powers of World War II. The pact was signed by representatives of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. The three nations agree to a ten-year alliance. Later, other countries sign the pact, including Hungary, Rumania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Croatia, and Thailand.
October-November, 1940. Seventy people are dying every day, mainly from starvation, in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland. Occupying Nazi troops continue to herd all Jewish Poles into the 1.3 square mile area; eventually over 400,000 Jews will be contained in the Warsaw ghetto. The Nazis close the Warsaw Ghetto to the outside world on November 16, 1940 by building a wall topped with barbed wire, and deploying armed guards. Leon Uris’s novel Mila 18 tells the story (in fiction)of the Warsaw Ghetto and its inhabitants and their resistance to the Nazi persecution.
Pulitzer Prize for the Novel:
John Steinbeck for The Grapes of Wrath.
Published in 1940: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss. Over my Dead Body and Where There’s a Will by Rex Stout. Sad Cypress and One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie. Native Son by Richard Wright. The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis.
Set in 1940: The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico. Semicolon review here. Against the Wind by Brock and Bodie Thoene. Reviewed by Beth at Weavings. Blackout by Connie Willis. Partially set in 1940. Semicolon review here. While We Still Live by Helen MacInnes. Sheila Matthews, a young Englishwoman is visiting in Warsaw when the Nazis invade. She stays and joins the Polish underground to fight against the German occupation. The Winds of War by Herman Wouk. Atonement by Ian McEwen. Semicolon review here.
