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World War II, 1939–1945

The Second World War around the world, with the road to it from 1919 and its end in 1945–46: the war in China from 1937, the war in Europe from 1939, the Eastern Front, North Africa, the Pacific, the Holocaust, the conferences and the surrenders. A sample built from the sources cited on each moment: Wikipedia, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem for the Holocaust. **How to read it.** Chapter headings mark the stages of the war. Wars, theatres, campaigns, battles and sieges are durations (navy for the wars, brick for theatres, ochre for battles, dark violet for the Holocaust and the Nanjing Massacre); everything else is a moment, linked to what it led to. Tags pull out a thread: `europe`, `eastern front`, `africa`, `asia`, `pacific`, `holocaust`, `diplomacy`, `home front`. **Time.** The line is in UTC. A moment known to its day sits at the start of that day, the date as historians give it. The few moments with a known local time (Poland, Kota Bharu, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Trinity, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Berlin surrender, the Emperor's broadcast and the signing in Tokyo Bay) sit at their exact instant in UTC, with the local time in Date precision: so Hiroshima, 08:15 on 6 August in Japan, falls on 5 August on this line. Two moments on the same day are set a few hours apart, and say so. **Numbers.** Death tolls are estimates, and labelled so; sources differ with what they count.

113 moments · 1919-01-01T00:00:00Z CE – 1946-10-01T00:00:00Z CE · by @athan · @athan

Famine in Bengal

  • asia
  • home front

Wartime shortages, the loss of rice from Japanese-occupied **Burma**, a cyclone and failures of the British government of India bring famine to **Bengal**. Estimates of the dead range from about 0.8 to 3.8 million.

Date precision
The famine lasted through 1943 and into 1944; placed at mid-1943. The death toll is an estimate.

Sources

Open Famine in Bengal in the timeline