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1 July 1944, 3 p.m., Mount Washington Hotel

The United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference formally convened at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, on 1 July 1944, with its inaugural plenary session at 3 p.m.

Henry Morgenthau Jr., designated temporary chairman by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, opened the proceedings, and Roosevelt's message of welcome was read. Hsiang-Hsi Kung responded for China and Ladislav Feierabend for Czechoslovakia.

The conference then appointed its credentials, rules and nominations committees.

44 delegations, 730 people

Forty-four national delegations took part, and total attendance reached 730 people — about three times the expected number, with overflow accommodation as far as five miles from conference headquarters.

Some histories say representatives of 45 countries attended, because Denmark's minister was present in a personal capacity.

What the delegates could and could not do

The participating governments had been invited to formulate definite proposals for an international monetary fund and, if possible, a bank for reconstruction and development. The delegates did not possess authority to bind their governments immediately.

Nothing sprang into legal existence on opening day: the conference completed proposed Articles on 22 July, and the IMF Articles entered into force in December 1945.

The "United Nations" of the conference's title meant the wartime Allied coalition, and the meeting opened while the war was still being fought in Europe and the Pacific.

17 January 1945: the columns start moving

The Soviet Vistula–Oder offensive had broken the front on 12 January 1945, and within days the Red Army was approaching Oświęcim. On 17 January the SS began the final evacuation of the Auschwitz complex, forcing prisoners west on foot. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum dates the start of the death marches to that day; the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial gives 17–21 January for the operation as a whole.

Camp routine did not stop while it happened. At three in the morning during the night of 17–18 January, with prisoners and camp personnel already preparing to move out, a normal roll call was held. A witness estimated that about 11,000 prisoners left during that night, in temperatures around −10°C to −15°C.

Behind the departing columns the SS was already destroying the evidence, burning records and demolishing installations so that the camp would not be handed over intact.

18 January: the main camps and the last women's column

The next day the SS forced prisoners out of Auschwitz I, Birkenau and Monowitz — the date the USHMM gives for the evacuation of the principal camps. The final on-foot evacuation of women from Birkenau went out that day, in groups of roughly 500 escorted by SS personnel carrying rifles and machine guns. One survivor remembered receiving bread and margarine before departure, provisions wholly inadequate for a winter march followed by transport in open freight cars. More than 2,000 sick women stayed behind in the Birkenau hospital.

The last evacuation column left the main complex on 18 January, while departures from the wider subcamp network ran on to 21 January. The Memorial records approximately 56,000 prisoners marched out across those five days.

The road west, and the camp behind

Columns were driven toward railheads about 55 kilometres away at Gliwice or 63 kilometres at Wodzisław, then loaded into freight cars for camps deeper in the Reich; at Gliwice about sixty people were crowded into each open coal wagon, with no protection from the frost. Guards shot prisoners who fell behind; cold, starvation and exhaustion killed others. The Memorial estimates at least 9,000 and more probably as many as 15,000 deaths during the operation.

"Evacuation" was the perpetrators' administrative word for this.

Almost 9,000 prisoners remained across the main camps and subcamps, abandoned without organized care while SS patrols murdered about 700 more. Soviet troops reached Auschwitz, Birkenau and Monowitz on 27 January and found approximately 7,000 people alive.

19 January 1945: the Red Army in Łódź

Troops of the Soviet 1st Belorussian Front entered Łódź on 19 January 1945, ending German occupation of the city during the Vistula–Oder offensive.

They found roughly 870 to 877 Jews still in Łódź — people retained in forced-labour cleanup units, and others who had survived in hiding. Among them was nine-year-old Sylvia Perelmuter, liberated the day before her tenth birthday after being concealed in a cellar with eleven other children.

Local residents helped suppress remaining German resistance, and demolition charges placed in some factories were prevented from being detonated.

A ghetto already emptied

The troops entered a city containing the remnants of a ghetto the Germans had liquidated through mass deportations in the summer of 1944 — not a functioning sealed ghetto with its original population.

About 160,000 Łódź Jews had been forced into the sealed ghetto, and more than 200,000 people passed through it over four years. Approximately 43,500 died there of starvation, disease and other conditions.

Counting the survivors

Authoritative sources differ slightly on the headcount found in the city: USHMM uses both 870 and "some 877", while Yad Vashem gives approximately 900.

Those hundreds were not the only survivors. USHMM estimates a further 5,000 to 7,000 Łódź Jews lived to liberation in camps or elsewhere.

The city began restoring services and forming a new administration within days.

4 February 1945: an hour before the plenary

At 4 p.m. at Livadia Palace on 4 February 1945, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin met privately to discuss the military situation, direct coordination between Eisenhower's staff and the Soviet staffs, and whether France should receive an occupation zone in Germany.

Roosevelt joked to Stalin that he had wagered whether American troops would reach Manila before Soviet troops reached Berlin.

At 5 p.m. he opened the first plenary meeting, attended by Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Stalin and their delegations.

Two fronts, reported

That opening session concentrated on the military situation rather than final postwar settlements. Soviet General Alexei Antonov reported on the Eastern Front, and U.S. General George Marshall described Anglo-American operations and planned offensives in the west.

Churchill pressed for detailed coordination between the three military staffs. The leaders scheduled a tripartite military-staff meeting for noon on 5 February and a Big Three meeting on the political treatment of Germany for 4 p.m. that day.

Dinner at 8:30

At dinner, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill debated the relative authority of great and small powers in the proposed international organization.

The evening ended with Churchill and his own foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, disagreeing over Security Council voting.

By nightfall the conference was formally underway and the next day's sessions were scheduled, but no Yalta settlement had been adopted: the agreements commonly labelled "Yalta" were negotiated across eight days.

10 October 1945: the eighth Berlin meeting

At its eighth Berlin meeting, on 10 October 1945, the four-power Allied Control Council gave final approval to Control Council Law No. 2, "Providing for the Termination and Liquidation of the Nazi Organizations."

It was signed at Berlin by Pierre Koenig, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Vassily Sokolovsky and Brian Robertson, for the French, American, Soviet and British occupation authorities.

Koenig presided over the meeting.

What it outlawed

The law abolished and declared illegal the Nazi Party, its formations, affiliated associations, supervised agencies, paramilitary bodies and other Nazi institutions created as instruments of party domination. It prohibited recreating any of them under either the same or a different name.

It confiscated their real estate, equipment, money, accounts, records and other property for control by the occupation military commands, and exposed violators to criminal prosecution.

Not the beginning of denazification

The Nazi Party had already collapsed in practice, and individual occupation zones had imposed their own dissolution measures. Law No. 2 made the policy quadripartite and Germany-wide, implementing the Potsdam commitment to destroy Nazi political structures.

The measure was publicly announced on 12 October and printed in the Control Council's Official Gazette dated 29 October; neither publication date should be substituted for the 10 October enactment.

After approving the law, Eisenhower argued that the Council should keep meeting frequently, offering to make Berlin his permanent headquarters if necessary.

25 April 1945: a lone horseman at Leckwitz

At 11:30 a.m. on 25 April 1945, in Leckwitz, an American patrol led by First Lieutenant Albert Kotzebue encountered a lone Soviet horseman — the first documented contact between the Western Allied and Soviet armies.

Kotzebue's patrol then reached the Elbe near Strehla. After using a grenade to free a moored sailboat, he crossed with five men and met Soviet officers on the east bank.

His message reported "Mission accomplished" and "No casualties" — and gave the wrong map coordinates.

A bedsheet flag at Torgau

At about 4 p.m., Second Lieutenant William Robertson's four-man patrol made a separate contact at Torgau, climbing onto the twisted girders of a destroyed Elbe bridge to meet Soviet soldiers under Lieutenant Alexander Silvashko.

Robertson's men had fashioned an American flag from a white sheet and red and blue paint found in an apothecary shop. Soviet troops initially fired toward it, because German soldiers had recently used an American flag as a ruse.

A third patrol, under Major Frederick Craig, encountered Soviet troops at 4:45 p.m. before joining Kotzebue's group.

The photographs came the next day

American units had been ordered to send limited patrols toward the advancing Red Army, though several travelled well beyond their authorised five-mile limit. Soviet division commander Vladimir Rusakov welcomed the Americans with repeated toasts.

The first formal meeting between American and Soviet divisional commanders came on 26 April, when Emil Reinhardt met Rusakov. The widely reproduced bridge photographs were recreated that day, although captions sometimes date them 25 April.

On 27 April, Truman publicly declared that the enemy had been cut in two.

23 October 1946: the 34th plenary meeting

The General Assembly's 34th plenary meeting opened at Flushing Meadows on 23 October 1946, resuming the second part of its first session.

This was the Assembly's first meeting in New York, not its first meeting anywhere: the inaugural part of the session had opened in London on 10 January.

Representatives of the 51 member states returned to continue the work begun there.

A skating hall with a 60-foot map

The venue was the former New York City Building from the 1939–40 World's Fair, converted from a skating facility into a temporary Assembly chamber holding 2,400 delegates, staff, reporters and public.

A blue-and-gold world map measuring 60 by 35 feet filled the wall behind the president's rostrum, and approximately 120,000 flowers had been planted around the site.

Three speeches, and no permanent home yet

The meeting was devoted to speeches by General Assembly president Paul-Henri Spaak, Acting Mayor of New York Vincent R. Impellitteri and President Harry S. Truman.

Truman welcomed the delegates on behalf of the United States and presented the meeting as evidence that the country had abandoned its earlier isolation from collective international organization.

The plenary was ceremonial; agenda processing followed on later days, and the resumed session continued at Flushing Meadows until 15 December 1946.

April 1947, approximately

At around April 1947 — no exact day is securely documented — scrolls said to have been found by Ta'amireh Bedouin near Qumran entered the Bethlehem antiquities trade. Khalil Iskander Shahin, known as Kando, and George Isha'ya brought them to the attention of the Syrian Orthodox Metropolitan of Jerusalem, Athanasius Yeshue Samuel.

The manuscript shown to Samuel is now identified as the Community Rule. He became interested in seeing and acquiring the others.

A private transaction, not a discovery announcement

This was circulation and attempted appraisal among dealers and church figures, not a public announcement or a definitive scholarly authentication. Several people Samuel consulted initially judged the manuscripts medieval or of little value.

The first group ultimately comprised seven scrolls: four passed through Kando to Samuel, and three through another Bethlehem dealer, Salahi, to the Hebrew University archaeologist Eleazar Lipa Sukenik, who was the first scholar to recognise their antiquity.

How much of the story is later recollection

Published accounts disagree over whether the first find occurred in 1946, early 1947, spring 1947 or earlier; the names, the lost-animal story and the sequence of visits also vary. The familiar image of a stone breaking a jar comes from later recollections rather than an eyewitness record.

Recent scholarship warns that the antiquities-market scrolls' exact physical connection to the fragments later excavated from Cave 1 is less certain than general accounts suggest.

The public announcement came a year after the month traditionally attached to the scrolls becoming known. John C. Trever photographed three of Samuel's scrolls in February 1948, William F. Albright's influential authentication followed in March, and Millar Burrows issued the general press release on 11 April 1948.

22 May 1947: Public Law 75

President Harry S. Truman signed Public Law 75 of the 80th Congress on 22 May 1947, formally authorizing United States assistance to Greece and Turkey.

The act authorized financial aid, civilian employees, a limited number of military advisers, transfers of articles and services, and training for Greek and Turkish personnel.

The ceiling was $400,000,000 — legal authority, not a same-day transfer.

And an executive order to run it

Truman simultaneously issued Executive Order 9857, delegating primary administrative authority to Secretary of State George C. Marshall and placing each country's aid activity under a chief of mission.

His first instruction after signing was for the U.S. ambassadors in Greece and Turkey to begin immediate negotiations on agreements governing the aid's use.

The money followed later

The appropriation itself came on 30 July. The fiscal-1948 allocation eventually gave $300,000,000 to Greece and $100,000,000 to Turkey.

Turkey was not fighting a communist civil war; aid there chiefly strengthened and modernized its armed forces under perceived Soviet pressure.

The law did not settle sovereignty over the Turkish Straits, which Turkey already controlled under the Montreux Convention.

10:26 a.m. over Muroc

On 14 October 1947, at 10:26 a.m., a modified B-29 released Captain Chuck Yeager's rocket-powered Bell X-1 at 20,000 feet above Muroc, California. Muroc was not renamed Edwards until 1949.

Yeager climbed and accelerated to Mach 1.06 at approximately 43,000 feet — a reported 699.4 mph — completing the first instrumented, officially documented crewed supersonic flight in level flight.

He held the speed for roughly 20 seconds, shut down the engine, and glided to a landing on Rogers Dry Lake.

The stabilizer, the ribs and the broom handle

On the 10 October test Yeager had encountered loss of elevator control near Mach 1. Flight-test engineer Jack Ridley concluded that the X-1's adjustable stabilizer could preserve pitch control, which gave the team a workable method for the 14 October attempt.

Yeager, a twenty-four-year-old Air Force captain flying his ninth powered X-1 mission, entered the cockpit with two broken ribs from a horse accident and used a ten-inch piece of broom handle to lock the hatch. Crew chief Jack Russell spread Drene shampoo inside the windscreen against the icing encountered on the previous flight.

Secret by noon, confirmed in 1948

Air Force officials classified the flight and its data Top Secret about two hours after it ended. News leaked in December 1947, and the Air Force did not officially confirm the achievement until March 1948.

Later accounts claimed George Welch had exceeded Mach 1 in an XP-86 before Yeager. NASA's historical review found no supporting flight data and reports Welch's highest documented 1947 speed as Mach 0.93.

4:00 p.m. at the Tel Aviv Museum

At exactly 4:00 p.m. on 14 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion opened a ceremony at the Tel Aviv Museum, in the former Dizengoff house, and read the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel.

The declaration named the state Israel and specified that statehood and the provisional institutions would take effect when the British Mandate terminated that night — eight hours later.

Invitees had been told to keep the time secret. The reading was nonetheless broadcast live by the new Kol Yisrael radio service, and a large crowd gathered outside.

Institutions that changed their names at midnight

The People's Council became the Provisional Council of State, and the People's Administration became the Provisional Government headed by Ben-Gurion, who also served as defense minister. Thirty-seven members of the Provisional Council were designated signatories; the Provisional Government had thirteen members.

Late handwritten changes meant the ceremonial parchment was not ready, so the signatures were placed on a scroll later joined to the text. The declaration deliberately specified neither the state's borders nor its capital.

Eleven minutes

At midnight local time the Mandate expired and Israel came into being. At 6:11 p.m. Washington time — eleven minutes later — the United States recognized the provisional government de facto.

The declaration did not end the Mandate; Britain had scheduled that termination independently. Intercommunal war had been under way since the November 1947 partition vote, and on 15 May the armies of neighboring Arab states entered it.

11 a.m., 21 June 1948

At about 11 a.m. on 21 June 1948, the Small-Scale Experimental Machine — nicknamed the Manchester Baby — successfully ran a program stored electronically in its cathode-ray-tube memory at the University of Manchester.

Tom Kilburn wrote the 17-instruction program, which searched for the highest proper factor of an input number by repeated subtraction. The first program was entered by hand, one bit at a time, before the start switch was pressed.

A computer built around a memory tube

Frederic C. Williams and Kilburn needed a rigorous, sustained test of their cathode-ray-tube random-access memory, so they built the smallest practical computer around it. Geoff Tootill assisted in construction and later documented the early program.

The successful run showed that the Williams–Kilburn store could hold both instructions and data reliably enough to control an electronic computer. Its capacity was 32 words of 32 bits — 1,024 bits in total.

The 52-minute run came later

The input used in the first successful run was comparatively small. The celebrated calculation for 2^18 — 262,144 — which took 52 minutes, was performed within the following days rather than necessarily on 21 June.

That benchmark involved about 2.1 million instructions and approximately 3.5 million store accesses; the often-quoted 3.5-million figure refers to the accesses, not the instructions.

The word “first” is where the dispute sits. Computer historians have shown that a modified ENIAC ran a coded program from switch-based read-only memory in April 1948, so whether Manchester was first depends on whether the memory must be read-write.