1940 - Radar is used for the first time, by the British during the Battle of Britain.
1940 - British Prime Minister Winston Churchill paid tribute to the Royal Air Force, saying, ?Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.?
1940 - Ramon Mercador (Mercader) del Rio, a Spanish Communist, posed as a Canadian businessman (aka Frank Jacson) and fatally wounded Leon Trotsky with an alpine ax to the back of the head in Mexico City. Trotsky died the next day.
1941 - Adolf Hitler authorized the development of the V-2 missile.
1941 - German siege of Soviet city of Leningrad begins
1942 - Plutonium was first weighed. Glenn T. Seaborg was a co-discoverer of Plutonium.
1944 - United States and British forces closed the pincers on German units in the Falaise-Argentan pocket in France.
1944 - Brits launch Operation Wallace and aid French Resistance On this day in 1944, 60 British soldiers, commanded by Major Roy Farran, fight their way east from Rennes toward Orleans, through German-occupied forest, forcing the Germans to retreat and aiding the French Resistance in its struggle for liberation. Code-named Operation Wallace, this push east was just another nail in the coffin of German supremacy in France. The Germans had already lost their position in Normandy, and had retreated from southern France. Most of the German troops in the west were trapped-and were either being killed or taken prisoner--in what was called "the Falaise Pocket," a site around the eastern town of Falaise, which was encircled by the Allies. The Allies were also landing tens of thousands of men and vehicles in France, and the French Resistance was becoming more brazen every day. On the 19th, the French police force announced its loyalty to the Resistance cause by seizing the Prefecture de Police in Paris, raising the French national flag, and singing the Marseillaise, the French national anthem. Major Roy Farran, a veteran of the fighting in Italy, employed his British Special Air Service force to boldly burst eastward from Rennes to the region just north of Orleans through the German lines of defense in order to attack the enemy from within its own strongholds. Along the way, French Resistance fighters joined the battle with him. Farran was taken aback by the strength of the French freedom fighters, and the anticipation of liberation in the air. Describing one Frenchwoman, Farran said, "Her smile ridiculed the bullets."