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Today is September11, 2026 Friday.

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The World in 1943 the year pennies were made of steel

Around three million people died in the Bengal famine in eastern India, most of them of hunger and the diseases that come with it. That is close to the whole population of Chicago at the time.

Life back then

Music kept people going. Dance halls stayed packed, though plenty of bands were short of players who had been drafted, and a long strike by American musicians kept many singers off new records. In Britain about thirty million cinema tickets were sold every week, and the newsreel came before the film. Copper was needed for shell casings, so the US Mint struck the 1943 steel cent instead, a penny that looked like a dime. In India, a bad harvest, the loss of Burma and wartime rules on rice turned shortage into famine.

The year in 8 events

• ❄️Feb 2 The last German troops at Stalingrad surrender after months of fighting in the ruined city.
• 🌋Feb 20 A volcano pushes up through a cornfield in Mexico. Paricutin grows into a cone more than a thousand feet high.
• 🎭Mar 31 Oklahoma! opens on Broadway and goes on to run for more than five years.
• 🕯️Apr 19 Fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto resist deportation. The uprising holds out for nearly a month.
• ⚔️Jul 5 German and Soviet armies meet at Kursk in the biggest tank battle ever fought.
• 📻Sep 8 Italy's surrender to the Allies is announced on the radio. German troops take over much of the country.
• ⚓Nov 20 US Marines land on Tarawa in the Pacific. The tiny island costs thousands of lives in three days.
• 🤝Nov 28 Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin meet face to face for the first time, in Tehran.

Who Was in Charge?

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