February 15, 1945. Over 1000 British and American bombers flatten the city of Dresden, Germany in a single night of carpet bombing. The death toll, mostly civilians, is thought to be as high as 100,000.

February 23, 1945. U.S. troops capture the tiny Pacific island of Iwo Jima and raise the flag on Mt. Surabachi.

February, 1945. Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin and FDR meet in Yalta to decide how to end the war and what to do about the “liberated” countries of Europe in the aftermath of World War II.

March, 1945. Japanese schools and universities are shut down, and everyone over the age of six is ordered to help in the war effort.

April 12, 1945. Franklin D. Roosevelt, president of the United States in his fourth term, dies of a brain hemorrhage. Vice-President Harry S. Truman becomes president.

April 28, 1945. Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci are executed by Italian communist partisans.

April 30, 1945. Adolf Hitler commits suicide in his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellory garden in Berlin. On the 29th, he married Eva Braun, the woman who has been his mistress since 1932, and she joined him on the 30th in a double suicide.

April-May, 1945. Allied troops enter and liberate Nazi camps including Belsen, Treblinka, and Auschwitz. Despite efforts to save the remaining prisoners, hundreds die after liberation from disease and the lingering effects of starvation and torture.

May 8, 1945. V-E Day. The Germans surrenders unconditionally to the Allies on May 7th, and on the 8th Europe and the United States celebrate Victory in Europe Day with fireworks, parades, bonfires, and parties.

May, 1945. Werner von Braun and other German rocket scientists, who were responsible for the German V-2 rockets used to attack Britain, surrender to the U.S. Seventh Army. Von Braun says to the press:

“We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.”

In June von Braun and his fellow scientists are brought to the U.S. to work for the U.S. rocket development program.

July, 1945. The first atomic explosion, a test of the new U.S. weapon the atomic bomb, takes place in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

August 6, 1945. The Americans bomb Hiroshima, Japan, killing an estimated 80,000 people. Three days later on AUgust 9, Nagasaki, Japan is also bombed with the new atomic weapon that was developed in a top secret program in the U.S. called THe Manhattan Project.

September 2, 1945. Japan surrenders to U.S. and ALlied troops on the deck of the U.S. battleship Missouri.