1940s

1 Events and trends
2 People

This article or section has multiple issues. Please help improve the article or discuss these issues on the talk page.

It needs additional references or sources for verification. Tagged since April 2007.
It may not present a worldwide view of the subject. Tagged since July 2008.
It needs to be expanded. Tagged since July 2008.

Millennium: 2nd millennium
Centuries: 19th century - 20th century - 21st century
Decades: 1910s 1920s 1930s - 1940s - 1950s 1960s 1970s
Years: 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949
Categories: Births - Deaths - Architecture
Establishments - Disestablishments

Second World War, the D-Day: Allied troops land on the Axis-occupied Europe during the Normandy landings in 1944

The 1940s decade, known as the forties, ran from 1940 to 1949.

Events and trends

The 1940s was a period between the radical 1930s and the conservative 1950s, which also leads the period to be divided in two halves:

The first half of the decade was dominated by World War II, the widest and most destructive armed conflict in human history. So consequential was this event and its brutal aftermath that it laid the foundation for other major world events and trends for decades to follow. This war was also the first modern civilian war.

The second half of the 1940s marked the beginning of the Cold War, the race between the US and the Soviet Union to invent better technology.

American baseball player Jackie Robinson in a 1945 photograph taken by Maurice Terrell of the LOOK magazine

Nazi Germany loses the Battle of Britain 1940
Nazi Germany invades Denmark, Norway, Benelux, and France from 1940-1941
The United States enter World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941
Germany and Japan suffer defeats at Stalingrad, El Alamein, and Midway in 1942 and 1943
Subash Chandra Bose escapes from house-arrest and founds the INA in Singapore. The INA made of Indian POWs held by the Japanese accompanies the Japanese to the borders of India. However, Axis defeat results in the annihilation of the INA and surrender following Nethaji's death in 1945
D-Day (June 6, 1944)
Germany surrenders May 7, 1945
Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6 and August 9, 1945); Japan surrenders on August 15
World War II officially ends on September 2, 1945
The Holocaust (the shoah)