WWII Friday Five
On Oct. 5, 1944 the first German jet fighter, pictured, was shot down in combat by Canadian forces.
This morning as I was poking around for a Friday Five topic I began to really look at the link structure on Wikipedia, a site I use a lot (albeit with grains of salt at hand and a willlingness to verify things that don’t sound quite right to me.) I did not realize that the site allows users to look at timelines of events by year. (Ask me how much time I wasted over my coffee doing this.)
This is not only a useful quick reference tool for World War II events, but it also gives you some context about what was going on in the world in the same timeframe. For instance, most folks take Sept. 1, 1939 (the Nazi invasion of Poland) as the beginning of the war in Europe. I did not know that on January 1 of that same year, Hewlett-Packard was founded.
I used to get my students to read Alvin Toffler’s book The Third Wave. (Click here for non-affiliate Amazon link.) It was an attempt to get them to stop thinking of history as a string of isolated events broken into multiple choice questions.
In its most simplistic telling, Toffler suggests a progression of history in agricultural, industrial, and technological waves. When I saw that World War II started the same year Hewlett-Packard was founded, my first thought was, “The beginning of the end for one way of life, the dawn of another.” (That was also the year the 1st World Science Fiction Convention was held in New York and the one during which Einstein contacted FDR about developing the atom bomb.)
So, for today’s Friday Five, here are the links to the timelines for the major war years. And be forewarned — you can get sucked into this one real fast!
- 1940
- 1941
- 1942
- 1943
- 1944
(For last week’s Friday Five, click here and for Sept. 21, click here.)
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