1942

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This article is about the year. For the 1984 Capcom arcade game, see 1942 (video game).

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1942 (MCMXLII) was a common year starting on Thursday (the link is to a full 1942 calendar).

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Events

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January

January 1 - World War II: The term "United Nations" is first officially used to describe the Allied pact.
January 2 - World War II: Manila is captured by Japanese forces. The Japanese Admiral stays in Solvec (owned by Charles Henry de Silva), Philippines.
January 7 - World War II: Siege of the Bataan Peninsula begins
January 11 - World War II: Japan declares war on the Netherlands and invades the Netherlands East Indies.
January 11 - World War II: The Japanese capture Kuala Lumpur.
January 19 - World War II: Japanese forces invade Burma.
January 20 - World War II: Nazis at the Wannsee conference in Berlin decide that the "final solution to the Jewish problem" is relocation, and later extermination.
January 25 - World War II: Thailand declares war on the United States and United Kingdom
January 26 - World War II: The first American forces arrive in Europe landing in Northern Ireland.

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February

February 9 - World War II: Top United States military leaders hold their first formal meeting to discuss American military strategy in the war.
February 9 - Daylight-saving time goes into effect in the United States.
February 11 - Operation Cerberus - Flotilla of Kriegsmarine ships dash from Brest through the English Channel to northern ports; British fail to sink any one of them
February 15 - World War II: Singapore surrenders to Japanese forces.
February 19 - World War II: 242 Japanese warplanes attack Darwin, Australia.
February 19 - World War II: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs executive order 9066 allowing the United States military to define areas as exclusionary zones. These zones affect the Japanese on the West Coast, and Germans and Italians primarily on the East Coast.
February 20 - Lieutenant Edward O'Hare becomes America's first World War II flying ace
February 22 - World War II: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt orders General Douglas MacArthur out of the Philippines as American defense of the nation collapses.
February 23 - Japanese submarine I-17 fires sixteen high-explosive shells toward an oil refinery near Santa Barbara, California, causing little damage.
February 24 - Propaganda: The Voice of America begins broadcasting.
February 25 - Princess Elizabeth registers for war service
February 26 - Coal dust explosion in Honkeika mine in China - 1549 dead
February 27 - World War II: the USS Langley, the first United States aircraft carrier, is sunk by Japanese warplanes off Java.

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March-April

March 9 - The Secretary of War reorganized the United States Army into three major commands - Army Ground Forces, Army Air Forces, and Services of Supply, later redesignated Army Service Forces

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April 3 - World War II: Japanese forces begin an all-out assault on the United States and Filipino troops on the Bataan Peninsula. Bataan fell on April 9 and the Bataan Death March began.
April 5 - Second World War: Japanese Navy attacks Colombo in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Royal Navy Cruisers HMS Cornwall and HMS Dorsetshire are sunk southwest of the island.
April 9 - Second World War: Japanese Navy launches air raid on Trincomalee in Ceylon (Sri Lanka); Royal Navy Aircraft Carrier HMS Hermes and Royal Australian Navy Destroyer HMAS Vampire are sunk off the country's East Coast.
April 27 - World War II: A national plebiscite is held in Canada on the issue of conscription.

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May

May - first test of an undersea oil pipeline in Operation Pluto
May 6 - World War II: On Corregidor, the last American forces in the Philippines surrender to the Japanese.
May 8 - World War II: The Battle of the Coral Sea comes to an end. This is the first time in the naval history where two enemy fleets fought without seeing each other's fleets.
May 8/May 9 - Second World War: On the night of 8/9 May 1942, gunners of the Ceylon Garrison Artillery on Horsburgh Island in the Cocos Islands rebelled. Their mutiny was crushed and three of them were executed, the only British Commonwealth soldiers to be executed for mutiny during the Second World War.
1942 - World War II: Second Battle of Kharkov - In the eastern Ukraine, the Soviet Army initiates a major offensive. During the battle the Soviets will capture the city of Kharkov from the German Army, only to be encircled and destroyed.
May 15 - World War II: In the United States, a bill creating the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC) is signed into law.
May 20 - First colored seamen taken into US Navy
May 27 - World War II: Operation Anthropoid - assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague

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June

June 4 - World War II: Reinhard Heydrich dies in Prague due to the assassination by Czechoslovak paratroopers (Operation Anthropoid)
June 4-June 7 - World War II: The Battle of Midway.
June 7 - World War II- Japanese forces invade the Aleutian Islands. This is the first invasion of American soil in 128 years.
June 9 - World War II: Nazis burn the Czech village of Lidice as reprisal for the killing of Reinhard Heydrich.
June 10 - World War II: the Gestapo massacred 173 male residents of Lidice, Czechoslovakia in retaliation for the killing of a Nazi official.
June 12 - Holocaust: Future essayist Anne Frank receives a diary for her thirteenth birthday.
June 13 - The United States opens its Office of War Information, a center for production of propaganda.

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July

July 1 - July 27 - World War II: the First Battle of El Alamein
July 9 - Holocaust: Anne Frank's family goes into hiding in an attic above her father's office in an Amsterdam warehouse.
July 13 - World War II: German U-Boats sink three more merchant ships in Gulf of St. Lawrence.
July 16 - Holocaust: On order from the Vichy France government headed by Pierre Laval, French police officers round-up 13,000-20,000 Jews and imprison them in the Winter Velodrome.
July 16 - Georges Bégué and others escape from Mauzac prison camp
July 18 - World War II: The Germans test fly the Messerschmitt Me-262 using only its jets for the first time.
July 19 - World War II: Battle of the Atlantic - German Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz orders the last U-boats to withdraw from their United States Atlantic coast positions in response to an effective American convoy system.
July 22 - Holocaust: The systematic deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto begins.
July 31 - The Oxford Committee of Famine Relief (OXFAM) founded

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August-September

August 7 - World War II: Battle of Guadalcanal begins - US Marines initiate the first American offensive of the war with a landing on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.
August 8 - World War II: In Washington, DC, six German would-be saboteurs are executed (two others were cooperative and received life imprisonment instead).
August 8 - Quit India resolution was passed by the Bombay session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC), which led to the start of a historical civil disobidience movement across India
August 9 - Indian leader, Mohandas Gandhi is arrested in Bombay by British forces.
August 9 - FC Start, led by Nikolai Trusevich, play football against the German Luftwaffe team Flakelf in Nazi-occupied Kiev. Against all odds, they win 5-3. They are later arrested and tortured, and most are killed.
August 13-14 night - In London instruments detect a massive burst of cosmic rays
August 16 - Polish-Jewish teacher Janusz Korczak follows a group of Jewish children into Treblinka death camp
August 19 - World War II: The Dieppe Raid - Allied forces raid Dieppe, France.
August 22 - World War II: Brazil declared war on Germany and Italy.
September 3 - Francisco Franco fires foreign minister Serrano Súñer
September 3 - An attempt by the Germans to liquidate the Jewish ghetto in Lakhva leads to an uprising.
September 12 - RMS Laconia, carrying civilians, Allied soldiers and Italian POWs is torpedoed off the coast of West Africa and sinks.
September 24 - Andrée Borrel and Lise de Baissac became the first female SOE agents to be parachuted into occupied France.

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October

October 2 - British cruiser Curacao collides with the liner Queen Mary off the coast of Donegal and sinks - 338 drowned
October 3 - First successful launch of A4-rocket from Test Stand VII at Peenemünde, Germany. The rocket flew 147 kilometres wide and reached a height of 84.5 kilometres and was therefore the first man-made object reaching space.
October 9 - Statute of Westminster Adoption Act formalizes Australian autonomy.
October 11 - World War II: Battle of Cape Esperance - On the northwest coast of Guadalcanal, United States Navy ships intercept and defeat a Japanese fleet on their way to reinforce troops on the island.
October 14 - A German U-boat sinks the ferry SS Caribou, killing 137.
October 16 - Hurricane and flooding in Bombay - 40,000 dead
October 23 - November 4 - World War II: the Second Battle of El Alamein
October 28 - The Alaska Highway is completed.
October 29 - Holocaust: In the United Kingdom, leading clergymen and political figures hold a public meeting to register outrage over Nazi Germany's persecution of Jews.

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November

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November 3 - World War II: Second Battle of El Alamein ends - German forces under Erwin Rommel are forced to retreat during the night.
November 8 - World War II: Operation Torch - United States and United Kingdom forces land in French North Africa.
November 8 - World War II: French resistance Coup in Algiers, by which 400 French civil resistants neutralized the vichyist XIXth Army Corps and the vichyist generals (Juin, Darlan, etc.), so allowing the immediate success of Operation Torch in Algiers, and from there in the whole French North Africa.
November 9 - World War II: U.S serviceman Edward Leonswki hanged at Melbourne's Pentridge Prison for the "Brown-Out" Murders of three women in May
November 10 - World War II: In violation of a 1940 armistice, Germany invades Vichy France following French Admiral François Darlan agreement to an armistice with the Allies in North Africa.
November 12 - World War II: Battle of Guadalcanal begins - A naval battle near Guadalcanal starts between Japanese and American forces.
November 13 - World War II: Battle of Guadalcanal - Aviators from the USS Enterprise sink the Japanese heavy cruiser BB- Hiei.
November 15 - World War II: Battle of Guadalcanal ends - Although the United States Navy suffered heavy losses, it was able to retain control of Guadalcanal.
November 19 - World War II: Battle of Stalingrad - Soviet Union forces under General Georgy Zhukov launch the Operation Uranus counterattacks at Stalingrad, turning the tide of the battle in the USSR's favor.
November 21 - The completion of the Alaska Highway (also known as the Alcan Highway) is celebrated (the "highway" was not usable by general vehicles until 1943, however).
November 22 - World War II: Battle of Stalingrad - The situation for the German attackers of Stalingrad seems desperate during the Soviet counter-attack Operation Uranus and General Friedrich Paulus sends Adolf Hitler a telegram saying that the German 6th army is surrounded.
November 23 - German U-boat sinks SS Ben Lomond off the coast of Brazil. One crewman, Chinese second steward Poon Lim, is separated from the others and spends 130 days adrift until he is rescued April 3 1943
November 27 - World War II: At Toulon, the French navy scuttles its ships and submarines to keep them out of Nazi hands.
November 28 - In Boston, Massachusetts, a fire in the Cocoanut Grove night club kills 491 people.
November 28 - The large-scale German "pacification" of Zamojszczyzna begins.