The World in 1941 the year the war went around the world

American factories turned out about 19,000 military planes, roughly one every half hour, and the plants had barely started. The next year they built more than twice as many.

Life back then

Most Americans first heard about Pearl Harbor from the radio, in a bulletin that cut into a Sunday afternoon football game. Until then the war arrived as newsreels and headlines. In Britain clothes went on ration in June, so collars were turned, socks were darned and coupons were counted before anyone bought a shirt. Orson Welles, then twenty five, put out Citizen Kane in May, and the newspaper owner it seemed to mock tried to keep it off screens. Big bands still filled the dance halls, and a nickel in the jukebox bought three minutes of Glenn Miller.

The year in 8 events

• 🛠️Mar 11 Roosevelt signs Lend-Lease, sending American weapons and food to Britain and later the Soviet Union.
• 👑May 5 Haile Selassie rides back into Addis Ababa, five years after Italian troops drove him out of Ethiopia.
• ⚓May 27 British ships and planes sink the German battleship Bismarck, three days after it sank HMS Hood.
• ⚔️Jun 22 Germany invades the Soviet Union along a front more than a thousand miles wide.
• 🕯️Sep 8 German troops cut the last land route into Leningrad. The siege lasts nearly 900 days and starves hundreds of thousands.
• 🕯️Sep 29 German units shoot more than 30,000 Jews at Babi Yar, a ravine outside Kyiv, over two days.
• 🕯️Dec 7 Japanese planes attack the US fleet at Pearl Harbor. Japan strikes Malaya, Hong Kong and the Philippines within hours.
• ⚓Dec 10 Japanese aircraft sink two British warships off Malaya, proof that big ships cannot survive without air cover.

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