Showing posts with label 1946. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1946. Show all posts

Thursday, June 25, 2026

Tuesday, June 25, 1946. The World Bank commences operations.

The World Bank commenced operations.

Nationalist Chinese troops killed ten demonstrating middle school students at Xuzhou when their commander, Feng Yu-xiang Fang Jingxing ordered them to be fired on by machine guns.

The US was struggling through a post war meat shortage.  Denver newspapers were reporting that the Office of Price Administration was accordingly being kept in operation and that Denver butcher shops were nearly bare.

The YB-35 flew for the first time.


Long considered a real oddball, the aircraft anticipated the B-2.

Last edition:

Saturday, June 22, 1946. History rhyming

Monday, June 22, 2026

Saturday, June 22, 1946. History rhyming

U.S. Senator Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi, a former Governor of that state, running for re-election in the Democratic primary, said in a radio broadcast that he was calling on every "red-blooded Anglo-Saxon man in Mississippi to resort to any means to keep hundreds of Negroes from the polls in the July 2 primary.And if you don't know what the means, you are just not up on your persuasive measures.

He won the primary and the generals, but the Senate would refuse to swear him in due to his racist comments.

Today he'd be a Republican, they'd excuse his comments, and he'd be sworn in.

Bilbo retired and wrote a book entitled; Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization.  He died in 1947.

Last edition:

Thursday, June 20, 1946. Allied withdrawal.


Saturday, June 20, 2026

Thursday, June 20, 1946. Allied withdrawal.

The Allied powers agreed to withdraw their troops from Italy and Bulgaria.

Fred M. Vinson was confirmed Chief Justice of the United States.


Wanrong (婉容), wife and empress consort of Puyi, the last emperor of China, died a prisoner of the Chinese Communist from malnutrition and opium withdrawal.  Her fate was unknown to the outside world at the time.

As the Chinese Imperial household was polygamist, her husband remained married in spite of her death, of which he was unaware.  Two of his prior spouses had divorced, but he remained married at the time to Li Yuqin, who was also a prisoner and would divorce the former emperor, Puyi (溥儀) in 1957, although she commenced visiting him in 1955.  Puyi would remarry in 1962.

Last edition:

Sunday, June 16, 1946. Night of the Bridges.

Tuesday, June 16, 2026

Sunday, June 16, 1946. Night of the Bridges.

The Hagenah took out eleven highway and railway bridges, while causing no causalities, disrupting mandatory Palestine's communications with neighboring states.

Last edition:

Friday, June 14, 1946. No nukes.

Sunday, June 14, 2026

Friday, June 14, 1946. No nukes.

The United States proposed to the  United Nations Atomic Energy Commission a proposal for United Nations to control all nuclear weapons. 

The proposal was remarkable for a number of reason, not the least of which was that it would have subjected the entire collection of the world's nations to a sort of limited central government.  It also shows how liberal politics in the U.S. were at the time.

Last edition:

Wednesday, June 12, 1946. British reject Jewish immigration to Palestine.

Friday, June 12, 2026

Wednesday, June 12, 1946. British reject Jewish immigration to Palestine.

The British government rejected the recommendation of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry to allow up to 100,000 European Jews to immigrate to Palestine.   The British Labour Party attributed the findings to an American desire to avoid immigration to the United States.

Last edition:

Tuesday, June 11, 1946. The Administrative Procedures Act passed into law.

Thursday, June 11, 2026

Tuesday, June 11, 1946. The Administrative Procedures Act passed into law.

Not a particularly interesting thing to note, but it is a major legal event.

More interestingly, the Hercules H-4, nicknamed the Spruce Goose due to its plywood construction, was moved from Hughes Airport in what is now Playa Vista to Long Beach, in sections, so that it could be reassembled and tested.

The huge flying boat was already obsolete which was known to all, but Howard Hughes having started it was determined to finish it.

There was crabbiness at the Supreme Court.


Surplus items I'd really love to find today were being sold at Lowry.

The Spruce Goose did make the papers but not until page 20.

Last edition:

Saturday, June 8, 1946. British victory parade.

Sunday, June 7, 2026

Friday, June 7, 1946. BBC Television resumes broadcasting.

BBC Television, which had been off the air since September 1, 1939, resumed broadcasting.  The resumption was for only an hour on June 7, but it signaled its first return. The programming featured speakers welcoming the audience back, a performance by ballerina Margo Fonteyn, a talk segment, and a rebroadcast of Disney's Mickey's Gala, the latter being the last thing broadcast in 1939.

There were over 18,000 television sets in the US when service was suspended.

The players of the Pittsburgh Pirates, which had threatened to walk out if they were not allowed to join the American Baseball Guild, didn't.

First flight of the Short Sturgeon.


The design was to have been a carrier borne aircraft, but like a lot of revolutionary piston engined aircraft of its era, it wasn't around very long.  Only 28 were built.

Last edition:

Wednesday, June 3, 2026

Monday, June 3, 1946. Irene Morgan and the bus.

Signaling the beginning of a new ear in the Court, the U.S. Supreme Court found segregation of interstate bus passengers to be illegal.

Last edition:

Sunday, June 2, 1946. Latinate elections.

Tuesday, June 2, 2026

Sunday, June 2, 1946. Latinate elections.


Shield of the Italian Christian Democracy Party, Democrazia Cristiana.

Italians abolished the Italian monarchy and elected seats to the Constituent Assembly in a nationwide vote, the same being the first in which women were allowed to vote.

The Christian Democracy party won 207 out of 556 seats and formed a coalition government with the Socialists (115) and Communist (104) parties.  The CD would lead successive Italian governments until 1981.  The party was dissolved in 1994 with the successor party being the Italian People's Party ( Partito Popolare Italiano)

In French parliamentary elections, the French Communist Party lost its plurality (from 159 to 153), the Popular Republican Movement (MRP) gained 16 seats (from 150 to 166) and the Socialist Party dropped from 146 to 128.  No one party had a majority.

Carrie Ingalls of her sister Laura's Little House on the Prairie fame died.

Last edition:

Saturday, June 1, 1946. Cochin China.

Monday, June 1, 2026

Saturday, June 1, 1946. Cochin China.

French High Commissioner Georges Thierry d'Argenlieud recognized a French controlled "Autonomous Republic of Cochin-China" in French Indochina in violation of the Ho-Sainteny agreement.  The proto state, which had been a pre World War Two administrative unit, would later become South Vietnam and would lead directly to the French Indochinese War.

Ho Chi Minh was in France negotiating under presumptions raised by the Ho-Sainteny agreement at the time.

Georges Thierry d'Argenlieu is an unusual figure as he was a French diplomat, Admiral, and a Catholic Priest.  From a family of naval officers, he started off in life in that path before becoming a Priest in the 1920s.  During World War Two he was recalled to naval service and would serve the Free French.  He was an ardent Gaullist and it was that, rather than an opposition to Communism, that pushed him towards the creation of Cochin China.

Seriously devout, upon retiring from naval service in 1947, he entered a monastery, where he died in 1964 at age 75.


The Senate granted Truman emergency powers to end strikes. The House had done so the prior week.

Second World War Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu was executed.

Romania tends not to get that much attention in the West and therefore Antonescu, who remains a large and controversial figure in Romania, does not.  His reign was abhorrent and attendant with all the crimes that the Nazis afflicted during World War Two.  He none the less retains a small following.

Last edition:

Thursday, May 30, 1946. First post war Indianapolis 500.

Saturday, May 30, 2026

Thursday, May 30, 1946. First post war Indianapolis 500.

The Indianapolis 500 was run for the first time since 1941.  George Robson, took the race.


Robson was killed in a racing accident that September.

Over 90 passengers were killed in a railway accident at Hengyang, China.

The day prior the Senate had defeated a really badly thought out plan by Truman to draft striking rail workers.



Air travel was expanding.




Last edition:

Saturday, May 25, 1946. Jordanian independence, Railroad strike ends.

Monday, May 25, 2026

Saturday, May 25, 1946. Jordanian independence, Railroad strike ends.

Jordan achieved full independence.

Railroads and Railway workers signed an agreement at the White House averting a Federal seizure of the railroads.  Truman's order to take control was only three minutes away from implementation.

Last edition:

Friday, May 24, 1946. Truman and the railroad strike.

Sunday, May 24, 2026

Friday, May 24, 1946. Truman and the railroad strike.

President Truman made a radio address promising that if railway workers had not returned to work by 4:00 p.m. May 25, he was going to seize control of the railroads.



 
The French Army crossed the Mekong into Thailand from Laos in pursuit of Communist forces. Both Communist troops and Thai forces clashed with them there.

Last edition:

Thursday, May 23, 1946. Chick-fil-A.

Saturday, May 23, 2026

Thursday, May 23, 1946. Chick-fil-A.

Railroad workers went on strike across the US at 4:00 P.M.

The Dwarf Grill opened by S. Truett Cathy in the Atlanta suburb of Hapeville, Georgia near the Ford Motor Company Atlanta Assembly Plant.  It would later evolve into:

M'eh.

It's signature product was not part of the original menu and required a technological development which allows for chicken for sandwiches to be cooked as rapidly as hamburgers can be.

Chick-fil-a is closed on Sundays, which is one of the admirable things about it, however.

A tornado outbreak occurred across the Central and Midwestern United States which would continue into the following day.

Last edition:

Monday, May 20, 1946. Air disaster in Manhattan, War in Iran, Nationalization of Coal in the UK.

Wednesday, May 20, 2026

Monday, May 20, 1946. Air disaster in Manhattan, War in Iran, Nationalization of Coal in the UK.

The House of Commons voted to nationalize the British coal industry.  The House of Lords would follow and Royal Assent would be received on July l2.

C-45.  By LanceBarber at English Wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Liftarn using CommonsHelper., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12001474

A C-45 crashed into the 58th floor of the Bank of Manhattan building killing all five passengers but nobody else, given that it occurred at 8:00 p.m.

Things were not going well in Iran.


We've dealt with this a bit already, but this event was caused by Soviet support for Azerbaijani and Kurdish rebels. 

Cher in high school.

Cherilyn Sarkisian, better known by her stage name Cher, was born in El Centro, California.  Bobby Murcer, the baseball announcer and player, was born in Oklahoma City.

Murcer passed away in 2008, but Cher is still with us.


Last edition:

Sunday, May 19, 1946. Food protests in Japan.