Deep History

Germany, Italy, and Japan join forces to form the core of the Axis Powers.

The Axis Powers strike. Germany invades Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France, while launching a major bombing campaign against the United Kingdom and launching an aggressive u-boat campaign in the Atlantic. Japan invades Indochina. Italy invades Greece and Malta.

The Soviet Union annexes Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

The Soviet Union kills some 22,000 Polish nationals in the Katyn massacre.

President Roosevelt signs the Selective Training and Service Act, the first peacetime draft in American history.

Germany opens the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Over a million people will be executed there.

Plutonium is synthesized for the first time at the University of California, Berkeley.

The first trials begin for "Murder, Inc.", an organization which acted as the enforcement arm for the American Mafia. They are believed to be responsible for up to 1,000 murders.

Japanese planes bomb Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Some evidence suggests that high-ranking government and military officials had advance knowledge of the attack but did not pass this information on to the base commander, Admiral Kimmel. By the time of the Pearl Habor attack, many of Japan's codes had been broken. Memos show that Roosevelt's administration hoped to goad Japan into "firing the first shot" so that America would have an excuse to go to war with Japan and ultimately their ally Germany.

The Axis powers invade Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Hong Kong, the Phillipines, the Dutch East Indies, and Malaya.

The United Kingdom invades Iraq.

The United Kingdom and Soviet Union invade Iran.

Finland and the Soviet Union begin fighting the Continuation War, so named for its relationship to the preceding Winter War.

The Viet Minh is formed.

At the University of Michigan, virologists Thomas Francis, Jonas Salk, and other researchers deliberately infect patients at several mental institutions with influenza.

Researcher William Black deliberately infects a twelve-month-old baby with herpes.

The Nazis begin hypothermia experiments on hundreds of prisoners, sometimes freezing them to death. The tests are principally carried out at Dachau and Auschwitz.

The Nazis begin sterilization experiments on thousands of prisoners at Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, and other camps. Radiation, surgery, and drugs are all tested. Ultimately hundreds of thousands will be sterilized by the Nazis.

The Nazis open the Chelmno, Majdanek, Maly Trostinets, and Sajimiste death camps, at which hundreds of thousands will be executed.

President Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease Act which authorizes billions of dollars of supplies being sent to allied countries.

The Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency, is formed.

The Institute for the Works of Religion, the Vatican Church, is founded. Over the next several decades it will be implicated in numerous clandestine operations supporting the far-right in both the U.S. and Europe.

A UFO appears off the coast of Los Angeles, triggering widespread alarm of another Japanese air attack. Spotlights highlight the craft and over 1,400 anti-aircraft shells are fired at it to no apparent effect. By early morning the craft has vanished.

President Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, authorizing the internment of Japanese-Americans. Over 110,000 Japanese-Americans will eventually be confined to camps.

The Nazis open the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka death camps, where over a million and a half people will eventually be executed.

Britain imprisons Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi.

A planning meeting for the Manhattan Project is held at the secretive Bohemian Grove in Monte Rio, California.

Japan invades Burma, Singapore, and Rabaul, while launching a bombing campaign against Australia. Meanwhile, the Axis advance in Europe begins to stall.

A German V-2 rocket becomes the first man-made object to enter space.

Despite the concerns of many scientists, the chemical DDT goes into widespread use as a pesticide. It will prove to have disastrous consequences for human health and the environment.

The U.S. government seizes the assets of Union Banking Corporation under the Trading With the Enemy Act for its dealings with the Nazis. Prescott Bush [322], father of George H. W. Bush [322] and grandfather of George W. Bush [322], is serving as a director of the corporation at the time.

The Chemical Warfare Service begins a series of experiments which expose thousands of U.S. soldiers to mustard gas.

The U.S. Navy sponsors an experiment in which 64 prisoners in Massachusetts are injected with cow blood.

At the Ravensbruck concentration camp, Nazi doctors carry out bone, muscle, and nerve transplant experiments, operating on victims without the use of anesthesia. Other prisoners are deliberately infected with various bacteria to test the efficacy of sulfonamide, a synthetic antimicrobial agent.

At the Dachau concentration camp, Nazi doctors infect around 1,000 prisoners with malaria and test various antimalarial drugs on them. About half of the victims die. Around the same time, 200 other prisoners are placed in a low-pressure chamber to simulate high-altitude conditions for Nazi fighter pilots. 80 of the prisoners die in the experiments and the others are executed shortly afterward.

Allied forces invade Italy and Germany. Italy surrenders.

In the Biscari massacre, U.S. soldiers kill 73 unarmed German and Italian POWs.

An explosion and subsequent cave-in at the Smith Coal Mine in Montana kills 75 people.

Albert Hofmann discovers the psychedelic properties of LSD.

Norman Rockwell's painting "Rosie the Riveter" appears on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. It is inspired by a Redd Evans song which came out the previous year. J. Howard Miller's "We Can Do It!" poster, commonly misidentified as Rosie the Riveter, is released around the same time. Both images, as well as the song, are designed as war propaganda, but later come to be identified with the feminist movement.

Argentine President Ramon Castillo is overthrown in a military coup.

Newspaper editor and labor organizer Carlo Tresca is assassinated by an unknown gunman.

The U.S. Navy allegedly experiments with turning a ship invisible, either to radar or visibly. This story grows into an urban legend known as "The Philadelphia Experiment", but evidence for the events having actually occurred is exceptionally flimsy.

At Auschwitz, the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele performs numerous experiments on nearly 1,500 sets of twins imprisoned there. Only 200 or so individuals survive.

At Buchenwald, Nazi doctors test various poisons on prisoners. Those who aren't killed outright by the poisons are executed so that they can be autopsied.

Allied pilots make the first formal reports of "foo fighters" - unidentified craft or fireballs which seem to track of fly in formation with their fighter squadrons. The objects often display incredible speed and manueverability. It is initially believed that they are some sort of secret Axis weapon until German and Japanese pilots make similar reports.

The World Bank is created at the Bretton Woods Conference. Plans are also laid for the International Monetary Fund.

Allied forces enter Nazi-occupied France in the Invasion of Normandy. Nazi forces make a massive counter-offensive later in the year known as the Battle of the Bulge. Around 200,000 soldiers are killed on each side during the course of these engagements.

Allied forces are involved in a wave of mass rape during the liberation of France and the occupation of Germany, along with the subsequent liberation of Poland and occupation of Japan. Millions of women are believed to have been raped, and some 10,000 die in a surge in abortions in the following years.

At Dachau, Nazi doctor Hans Eppinger forces 90 Roma prisoners to subsist solely on seawater to determine how long it would take them to become gravely ill or die.

Despite the fears of some scientists that a nuclear explosion had the potential to ignite the atmosphere, the United States detonates the first atomic bomb, code-named Trinity, in New Mexico. The bomb was developed by The Manhattan Project, headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Although the project  employed over 100,000 people, only a few dozen people knew its true purpose. Soviet spies eventually learned what was going on, but the truth was hidden from both the American people and the Axis powers, demonstrating the extent of the government's ability to keep secrets through the compartmentalization of knowledge.

Part of the research for The Manhattan Project includes giving injections of plutonium to three medical patients without their knowledge or consent.

General Douglas MacArthur [33] learns of Unit 731, a secret Japanese chemical and biological warfare center which killed tens of thousands in grisly human experiments. Rather than see that they are prosecuted for war crimes, MacArthur offers the units leaders immunity in exchange for their information on biological and chemical warfare.

Malaria experiments at the Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois are brought to light. Inmates were exposed to malaria and had several antimalarial drugs tested on them. Nazi doctors at the subsequent Nuremburg Trials point to these experiments in defense of their own human experimentation projects.

Allied forces overrun Germany and capture the Reichstag building.

U.S. and British forces carry out the controversial bombing of Dresden. It is claimed that the industrial and rail facilities there make it a legitimate military target. It has also been argued, however, that these facilities did not contribute significantly to the German war effort, and that they were largely untouched as most bombs fell on the populated city center. In any event, nearly 25,000 people, mostly civilians, are killed.

With its fleets crippled, Japan attempts to negotiate an end to World War II with Russia. The following month, the United States drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing 150,000-246,000 people, mostly civilians.

World War II ends. With a death toll of over 73 million, it is the most devastating conflict in human history.

The U.S. begins Operation Paperclip, an effort to recruit as many Nazi scientists and capture as much Nazi technology as possible before Russia could do the same.

The United Nations is formed. 

The International Monetary Fund is created as a sister organization to the World Bank, created the year prior. Together they facilitary international trade and monetary policy.

Projects SHAMROCK and MINARET begin. The government copies and accumulates all telegraphic data entering or exiting the United States. No court has authorized the operation, and there are no warrants.

The Tavistock Institute is launched. Officially a British charity concerned with psychology, the institute has long been scrutinized as a source of social engineering, mass psychology, and propaganda in the Western World.

The Libertarian think-tank  Foundation for Economic Education is formed.

The First Indochina War begins. Although initially neutral, the U.S. will eventually begin to provide modern weaponry and support operations to the French-allied forces.

Mercenary corporation DynCorp is founded.

Ku Klux Klan member Wesley Smith founds the Church of Jesus Christ-Christian. It becomes an important group within the white supremacist Christian Identity movement.

The School of the Americas is founded at Fort Benning in Georgia.  It is used to train right-wing American proxies in Central and South American countries brutal counter-insurgency techniques including torture, assassination, and terrorism.

In Project Diana, the U.S. Army Signals Corps bounces a radio signal off of the moon for the first time. 

Researchers at the University of Rochester inject Uranium-234 and Uranium-235 into six subjects to test the results.

 The Ferndale Center in Massachusetts conducts radiation experiments on mentally retarded boys as part of a "Science Club". Founder Walter Ferndale was a leading American proponent of eugenics.

U.S. researchers led by John Charles Cutler infect over 700 Guatemalan civilians, including children, with syphilis. Cutler will later go on to participate in the Tuskegee syphilis experiments on American civilians.

Right-wing Zionist organization Irgun bombs the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91.

The National Security Act is signed, creating the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense,  the National Security Council, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Allied forces conduct a failed operation variously known as BGFIEND, OBOPUS, or VALUABLE to incite a civil war in Albania. Although the operation cost over 300 lives, it was kept as one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War, with documents confirming its reality only coming to light in 2006.

Irgun members incite a riot and subsequent series of massacres by throwing grenades into a crowd of Arab day-laborers outside the gates of the Haifa Oil Refinery.

Lehi, a Zionist group which split from Irgun, sends a number of letter bombs to President Truman and high-ranking White House staff. The bombs are defused by the Secret Service after a tip from British Intelligence.

The General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs (GATT) is signed to clear the way for a globalized economy.

Executives of IG Farben, the company which produced Zyklon B for gas chamber in Nazi death camps, are placed on trial. A number of those convicted go on to become executives in other companies, including Hermann Schmitz, who would join the board of Deutsche Bank, and Fritz ter Meer, who would join the board of pharmaceutical company Bayer.

An explosion at the Centralia Coal Mine in Illinois kills 111 people.

US Marines land in Athens to assist in the re-establishment of the Greek Monarchy and the arrest of  Communist insurgents.

The US Navy conducts Project CHATTER to test various interrogation drugs on human and animal subjects.

Pilot Kenneth Arnold describes seeing nine unidentified flying objects travelling at the (then unheard of) speed of 1,200 mph near Mount Rainier in Washington state. It is the first widely reported post-war UFO sighting, and numerous other sightings are reported over the next two to three weeks.

An aerial object crashes at a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. Initially described as a "flying disk," the military later claimed that the debris was from a weather balloon, and then later claimed that it was actually from a Project Mogul balloon which was meant to detect Soviet nuclear tests.

General George Schulgen sends a memo to General Nathan Twining inquiring about the UFO situation. Twining, then-head of Air Material Command's intelligence and engineering divisions at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, sends a reply now known as the Twining Memo. It states, in part, that "The phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious. [...] There are objects probably approximately the shape of a disc, of such appreciable size as to appear to be as large as a man-made aircraft. [...] The reported operating characteristics such as extreme rates of climb, maneuverability (particularly in roll), and action which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar, lend belief to the possibility that some of the objects are controlled either manually, automatically or remotely."

Occultist and Thelema founder Aleister Crowley dies. The leadership of his two secret societies, Ordo Templi Orientis and A∴A∴, will become a matter of much dispute.

The U.S. uses a V-2 rocket to launch the first animals (fruit flies) into space.

David Ben-Gurion, head of the World Zionist Organization, declares the creation of Israel as a Jewish state.

Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte is assassinated by Zionist organization Lehi. One of the men who planned the assassination is Yitzhak Shamir, who will go on to become a prime minister of Israel.

Operation Gladio begins. The CIA and intelligence agencies of various allied countries organize clandestine "stay-behind" armies of anti-communist guerrillas. Over the coming decades they will perpetrate numerous terrorist attacks against communists as well as false flag attacks on civilians which they will blame on the communists.

The CIA's Special Activities Division interferes with the Italian election, buying votes, broadcasting propaganda, infiltrating and disrupting political groups, and threatening or attacking activists to keep the Italian Communist Party from winning.

Mahatma Gandhi is assassinated by a member of the right-wing Hindu Mahasabha.

The World Health Organization is founded.

The United State implements the Marshall Plan to provide assistance to allied Western European countries and to prevent the spread of Communism.

The RAND Corporation is founded by the Douglas Aircraft Company to act as a think tank for the United States armed forces.

The CIA begins a domestic media-manipulation campaign which will later become known as Operation Mockingbird. The operation involves buying off journalists to present the CIA's propaganda as fact as well as funding student and cultural organizations.

William Donovan and Allen Dulles help to create the anti-communist American Committee on United Europe. It will channel funds into many organizations which will play large roles in the creation of the European Union.

Federally funded researchers at John Hopkins Hospital insert radium rods into the noses of 582 school children to test their use as an alternative in a medical procedure called an adenoidectomy.

Andrija Puharich creates the Round Table Foundation to study paranormal phenomenon. Puharich is a medical doctor and army officer who will go on to help with mind control experiments like MKULTRA and remote viewing projects like Stargate. The Foundation itself is notable for its influence on the New Age movement, science fiction, and popular culture. One woman connected with the group, Ruth Paine, will secure a job at a certain book depository for a young man named Lee Harvey Oswald.

Civilians from three towns in Kentucky call local police to report a UFO seen in the early afternoon. Military observers at the nearby Godman Airfoce Base soon spot the object and request that a nearby patrol of the Kentucky Air National Guard investigate. Four fighter planes approach the object, but only Captain Thomas Mantell has enough fuel to close in. The object speeds up and away and Mantell pursues it to 30,000 where it is presumed that Mantell passes out from lack of oxygen, and his plane plummets to the earth soon after. The Air Force variously tries to explain the object away as the planet Venus or a Skyhook balloon, even though Venus was not visible in the sky at the time and there were no Skyhook balloons deployed in the area.

The Air Force undertakes Project Sign to study UFOs. The report concludes that while many UFO sightings had mundane explanations, some were likely of extraterrestrial origin. When the study reaches the desk of General Hoyt Vandenberg, he orders all copies of it destroyed and disbands the project.

Through a front called the National Committee for a Free Europe, the CIA sets up Radio Free Europe to broadcast pro-capitalist propaganda to Soviet-bloc and Middle Eastern countries.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is formed.

Israel joins the United Nations.

In response to the Marshall Plan, Russia and several other communist states for an economic alliance known as the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.

The Central Intelligence Agency Act is passed, allowing the CIA to keep many of its organizational details and functions a secret, as well as allowing it to use confidential fiscal procedures and exempting it from many of the usual limitations on the use of federal funds.

Former Secretary of Defense James Forrestal dies after falling from a 16th-floor window of the National Naval Medical Center. Although his death was ruled a suicide which followed a period of depression, the Navy kept the full transcript of its official hearing and final report on his death secret. It later emerged that investigators had found broken glass inside the room, on his bed.

The CIA sponsors a coup in Syria which overthrows the democratically elected government of Shukri al-Quwatli. Al-Quwatli had blocked the creation of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, which begins to move forward immediately after the coup.

In a test called "Green Run," the government secretly releases a cloud of radioactive iodine-131 and xenon-133 over populated areas of the United States. The radioactive fission products were produced at the Hanford Site plutonium facility.

The Air Force replaces Project Sign with Project Grudge and beings a PR campaign to let the American people know that UFOs can all be explained as mundane phenomena.

The FBI issues a classified memo entitled "Protection of Vital Installations". The document notes that “Army intelligence has recently said that the matter of ‘Unidentified Aircraft’ or ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,’ otherwise known as ‘Flying Discs,’ ‘Flying Saucers,’ and ‘Balls of Fire,’ is considered top secret by intelligence officers of both the Army and the Air Forces". The memo expresses concern over the violation of airspace over Los Alamos and other sensitive facilities by unknown craft displaying exceptional maneuverability and travelling at up to 27,000 mph.