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.
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