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.
January 26, 1939. Franco’s Spanish Nationalist troops, aided by Italy, take Barcelona.
January 28, 1939. German physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman find a way to bombard uranium atoms with neutrons until the atoms split, releasing huge amounts of energy in the process. Hahn calls the discovery “nuclear fission”. It may be possible to use the energy produced by this process to make a bomb that will have immense destructive power.
March, 1939. Swiss company Nestle launches a new product in the United Kingdom, instant coffee.
March 15, 1939. Hitler enters Prague, Czechoslovakia as the German army takes over the remainder of the country.
August 23, 1939. Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin sign a non-aggression pact and agree to divide Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, eastern Poland and Bessarabia (today Moldova), and the northeast province of Romania are to go to the Soviet Union; Lithuania and western Poland are to belong to Germany.
September 1, 1939. Germany invades Poland. Norway, Finland, Sweden, Spain and Ireland declare their neutrality. Later in September U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt announces that the U.S. will also remain neutral in the war.
September 3, 1939. The United Kingdom, France, New Zealand and Australia declare war on Germany.
September 17, 1939. The Soviet Union invades Poland and then occupies eastern Polish territories.
September 28-29, 1939. Poland surrenders to Germany.
October 11, 1939. Manhattan Project. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt is presented a letter signed by Albert Einstein, urging the United States to rapidly develop the atomic bomb.
November 30, 1939. Soviet forces of over a million troops attack Finland and reach the Mannerheim Line, starting the war with Finland.
I happen to have a 10 year old, Z-baby, and she’s also a reluctant reader. I would suggest the following series for the 8, 9, and 10 year olds in your life, especially for the baby of the family, the reader who needs a little “push”, or the precocious six or seven year old.
Clementine books by Sara Pennypacker. I love Clementine, and there’s a new book in the series, Clementine and the Family Meeting. In this fifth book in the series, Clementine’s family is experiencing some changes. But according to Clementine’s Awesome Dad, who reminds me a little bit of Engineer Husband, “It will be fine, we’ll adapt. Because this how we roll, Clementine, this is how we roll.” (I’m going to start using that phrase with my urchins and see how they like it.) Semicolon review of Clementine’s Letter.
Dyamonde Daniel books by Nikki Grimes.Semicolon review of the third book in the series, Almost Zero. Dyamonde is growing up in a lower middle class single parent family in the city, and she’s learning how to appreciate what she has and share with others. This series is the perfect antidote to Christmas (or anytime) greed and consumerism.
Ruby Lu books by Lenore Look.Semicolon review of Ruby Lu, Star of the Show. Ruby Lu is a star—a Chinese American, Spanish-learning, Haiku Heroine, dog training, hair cutting, hard working, list making, washing machine wearing, self-sacrificing center of attention and activity.
Ramona books by Beverly Cleary. These stories still hold up quite well after, what, 30 years? You can get The Complete Ramona Collection, beginning with Beezus and Ramona, for $23.78 at Amazon.
The Boxcar Children books by Gertrude Chandler Warner. Not the new books added to the series, but the old ones that Ms. Warner wrote more than thirty years ago. The idea of children living on their own and solving mysteries by themselves is irresistible to a certain type of child.
This second book in the series Stanley Park Tales comes from Canada and takes place in Vancouver. Sammy and Rodney leave the safety of their home in the park to brave the dangers of the big city, all for the sake of a friend. Judy Crow has been crow-napped, and Rodney and Sammy feel they must try to rescue her, no matter how unqualified they might feel for the task.
The animals in the story all have alliterative names, and each has his or her own special personality characteristics. Rodney is always hungry. Sammy is a reader and user of big words like “serendipity.” Judy Crow, who prefers to be called Judith Raven, is a bit uppity and proud, but as Sammy says, “No one’s perfect” and ‘Isn’t it important for an animal to stand up for a friend and do the right thing?” And so they do.
The drawings that illustrate this simple story of friendship are lovely, as you can see from the cover illustration. Illustrator Gordon Clover certainly deserves some of the credit for making this book work as a gentle tale of woodland wonder. It won’t be right for everyone; the pace and plot are not movie-style exciting. But for those children, and adults, who enjoy a slower pace, meandering through the woods rather than rushing breathlessly through non-stop adventures, Sammy Squirrel and Rodney Raccoon will be a welcome breath of fresh Canadian air.
*This book is nominated for a Cybils Award, and I am a judge for the first round thereof. However, no one paid me any money, and nobody knows which books will get to be finalists or which ones will get the awards. In other words, this review reflects my opinion and Z-baby’s and nothing else.
What is there to say about Mo Willems and his easy reader creations, Elephant and Piggie? The books are deceptively simple, a long comic strip in book form. However, this form is not so simple to conceive, write, and illustrate well. I’ve seen attempts by other authors fall flat. Mr. Willems has the gift or the genius or the 99% perspiration or something.
In Should I Share My Ice Cream?, Gerald Elephant obsesses over whether or not to share his ice cream with his friend Piggie, until the issue becomes moot when the ice cream cone falls splat on the ground. Of all the elephants in children’s literature, Gerald is the Charlie Browniest. But unlike good old Charlie Brown, Elephant has a friend in Piggie, and in this story Piggie saves the day.
The story of how I Broke My Trunk begins with Elephant and a bandaged trunk. Of course, Piggie (and readers) want to know how Elephant broke his trunk, but hold on, because it’s a long crazy story. Suffice it to say that “two hippos, one rhino, and a piano on your trunk are very, very heavy,” and very, very funny. But that’s not even the whole story.
Happy Pig Day! Is it just for pigs, or can Gerald Elephant celebrate Pig Day, too? Again, I am reminded of what Charlie Brown could have been if he had had even one faithful friend. (Peppermint Patty doesn’t count. She couldn’t even get his name right, and she was undependable.)
The exciting thing about these books is that beginning readers of all ages can enjoy them over and over again. My fourth/fifth grader whose reading skills and interest leave a lot to be desired loves Elephant and Piggie. She reads the books to herself, reads them to her dad, reads them again to herself, and chuckles softly. Then she tells me to read them or else she reads them to me. Elephant and Piggie and other books like them are what the Sunday comics were to another generation. How many adults can say they learned to love reading and stories from their reading of the comic strips on Sunday mornings?
*These books are nominated for a Cybils Award, and I am a judge for the first round thereof. However, no one paid me any money, and nobody knows which books will get to be finalists or which ones will get the awards. In other words, this review reflects my opinion and Z-baby’s and nothing else.
Published in 1937: Dumb Witness, Death on the Nile, and Murder in the Mews by Agatha Christie. Out of Africa by Isak Dineson. To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway. More about Hemingway. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Life and Death of a Spanish Town by Elliot Paul. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien. I was blogging through The Hobbit earlier this year as Z-baby and I were reading it aloud, but I only made it through chapter seven with the blog entries. Z-baby and I finished the entire book and enjoyed it very much.
January, 1937. Leading Communists go on trial in Russia, accused of Trotskyism and participating in a plot to overthrow Stalin and his government. The Soviet Union finally executes thirty-one people for Trotskyism. In August, Stain continues The Great Purge in which hundreds of thousands of political opponents, peasants, writers, artists, intellectuals, Trotskyites, and military leaders are killed for disagreeing with or offending Stalin in some way.
February, 1937. Spanish Civil War. Battle of Jarama: Nationalist (Franco’s fascist Falangists) and government (Republican and Communist) troops fight to a stalemate. Italian troops and German tanks help the Nationalists. British, Irish, Balkan, French and Belgian volunteers fight in support of the Republican government.
April 26, 1937. German planes bomb Guernica, Spain in support of Francisco Franco’s Nationalists, killing 200 to 300 civilians. The Spanish Republican government commissions Pablo Picasso to create this large mural for the Spanish display at the Paris International Exposition in June, 1937.
May 6, 1937. The German airship Hindenburg explodes on its approach to Lakehurst Field, NJ after a transatlantic flight from Frankfort, Germany. 35 of the 97 passengers and crew on board die in the explosion.
May 27-28, 1937. Golden Gate Bridge opens to pedestrian traffic, creating a vital link between San Francisco and Marin County. The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt pushes a button in Washington, D.C., signaling the start of vehicle traffic over the Golden Gate Bridge. At 1.7 miles the bridge is the longest suspension bridge in the world in 1937.
May 28, 1937. Neville Chamberlain becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
June 3, 1937. Wallis Simpson marries the Duke of Windsor, the former Edward VIII of the United Kingdom, in France.
July 2, 1937. Amelia Earhart disappears after taking off from New Guinea during her attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world.
July 7, 1937. Japanese troops open fire on a Chinese patrol outside the Chinese capital, Peking (Beijing). The Japanese claim the Chinese provoked the exchange of fire, but the Chinese are claiming a Japanese invasion. This incident begins the Second Sino-Japanese War as Japan attempts to take over mainland China. By the end of 1937, Japan will control most of the coastal cities of China, including Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Nanjing, and others.
December 13, 1937. The city of Nanjing, China falls to the Japanese invaders. Up to 300,000 Chinese are brutally murdered by the Japanese army in the Nanking Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing during the next six months of Japanese control.
, beginning with Beezus and Ramona, for $23.78 at Amazon. 
