Full list  |  Top British Economist John Maynard Keynes, writing to US President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933: ‘If you fail, rational choice will be gravely prejudiced throughout the world, leaving orthodoxy and revolution to fight it out. But, if you succeed, new and bolder methods will be tried everywhere, and we may date the first chapter of a new economic era from your accession to office.’ Winston Churchill, 1934: ‘His impulse is one which makes toward the fuller life of the masses, which as it glows the brighter may well eclipse the lurid flames of German-Nordic self-assertion and the baleful unnatural lights which are diffused from Soviet Russia.’

USA, THE AMERICAS. On November 8 1932 American voters elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt as thirty-second president of America. The Democrat president from New York (who, by the way, also won the three presidential elections after this one – an American record of four succesive wins never to be repeated) promised he would initiate a bundle of economic reforms. And he was true to his word. 

What became known as the New Deal changed much of the century’s thinking, both within America and elsewhere. Changed most was thinking about what governments could not do and what they could. Roosevelt’s administration arguably proved for ever – for many had their doubts – that the world’s strongest economy could actually get by with a fair degree of government intervention. Thus, effectively ended was a central point of laissez-faire economics that parts America once believed sacrosanct – there should be no government intervention and if there was government intervention the economy would perish. 

The turning point that Roosevelt personified was especially significant because his ‘New Deal’ had deep roots in the most obvious symptom of capitalist ebb and flow: the Wall Street crash of 1929. After ‘Black Thursday’ unemployment in America rocketed from around five per cent to twenty-five per cent. When Roosevelt acquired office manufacturers throughout America had close to zero optimism.

Roosevelt was Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 1932 and again in 1934 and 1941; the only twentieth century President to win four elections (1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944) and the only one to win three Time Magazine Person of the Year awards. After Roosevelt every President bar Ford won it twice except the assassinated Kennedy (1961 only), Carter (1976 only) and George H Bush (shared in 1990 with his son, the other George Bush. Ford was the only president post-1927 not to win the award which is perhaps apt seen as how he was the only president not to win an election.

Full list  |  Top Mao Ze-dong, 1927: 'In a very short time several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back.' Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, 1941: 'Every clique is a refuge for incompetence. It fosters corruption and disloyalty, it begets cowardice, and consequently is a burden upon and a drawback to the progress of the country. Its instincts and actions are those of the pack.'

CHINA, ASIA. On October 16 in 1934 Communist troops in southern China evaded encircling Nationalist forces. Well, it was October 16 or thereabouts for with a lot of dates in Chinese history certainty is often absent. But it was a fairly spirited evacuation some time in the autumn of 1934. Around 80,000 Communists troops plus another 10,000 or so in support fled. 

More accurately we should say it became seen as a spirited evacuation. For escaping Communists were seen by quite a lot of Chinese. The defeated force marched first westwards and then northwards, ending up several thousand kilometers away in Yenan in central China. 

En route this escape from a superior force galvanized two things in fairly equal measure. First, the Communist cause before this time had not acquired as much traction in the countryside as, for example, the Bolsheviks had in Russia; yet by the end of the March it had come back to life. Second, the march also galvanized the career of Chairman Mao. As images from the time show, the Chairman did not necessarily march the whole way – although there were odd claims that he did – but he did shadow the march at critical points. 

Full list  |  Top German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, 1936: ‘Do you really think that I will allow myself to be photographed shaking hands with a Negro?’ Jesse Owens: 'I wanted no part of politics. And I wasn't in Berlin to compete against any one athlete. The purpose of the Olympics, anyway, was to do your best. The only victory that counts is the one over yourself.'

GERMANY, EUROPE. August 8, 1936 saw the African-American athlete Jesse Owens win a fourth gold medal at the Berlin Olympics: the 100 and 200 metres individual, 400 metres relay and the long jump.

Perhaps this might be considered a bit of a fluke and some were rather surprised at this accomplishment, not least Mr Owens himself who had not held such hopes before the games. At one point he was even advised on long jump technique, so the story goes anyway, by other athletes. Perhaps this is true. Certainly his athletic career afterwards was at best mixed and his health marginal; he was a dedicated smoker and died of lung cancer in the 1980s.

Nevertheless, for those vital days in Berlin the world was transfixed as a non-Aryan neatly pricked the ideas of Aryan supermacism that were swirling around ominously. It was not just Owens either – by the end of the Berlin Olympics over a dozen medals had been won by blacks.

Probably by 1936 the Nazis had already done enough to dismay the International Olympic Committee and would not have received the Games. But the decision had been made in 1931, a couple of years before Hitler came to power, and there was nothing for the world to do but live with it.

Much is made of Hitler avoiding the Owens medal winning ceremonies. That's been exaggerated by people who wanted that to be true more than they wanted to take in reality. Mr Owens himself noted Hitler actually waved at him and did not feel especially aggrieved at his treatment from the Fuhrer. Cuttingly he remarked that he got less respect from the American President Rooseelt than the German Fuhrer. There was also some talk that the absence of the German Chancellor was scheduled anyway, though one rather feels if Aryans had won the 100 metres dash, the pinnacle then as now of the track events, the Reich Fuhrer would have squeezed the medal ceremony into his schedule.

Full list  |  Top British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, 1938: 'In spite of the hardness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face, I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.' Winston Churchill, 1938: 'You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.'

GERMANY, EUROPE. September 30, 1938 saw the final and most notorious of the generous but ultimately useless 'Big Three Appeasements' of Nazi Germany. Munich followed occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, on the west of Germany and another victory for Nazis, and Anschluss with Austria to the south of Germany in 1938. Now in late 1938 and on the very thin pretext of protecting three million ethnic Sudeten Germans the Nazi regime secured another win, this time a significant slice of Czechoslovakia, and again without firing a shot in anger.

After two bloodless victories in as many years Hitler was probably the least surprised he landed a third. The German Chancellor had a homing beacon oriented around appeasement making a lot of sense to a lot of elites in the capitals of London and Paris and elsewhere. As a political ideal, at least as a political ambition which Munich came to symbolize, he sensed the muddy kaleidoscope through which the Versailles treaty was viewed and especially the acceptance that several critical injustices were enforced unfairly on a Germany that was, after all, only narrowly defeated. And nor was Germany exclusively responsible for the tapestry of alliances that had sucked countries into war in 1914.

Perhaps this sense of guilt over Versailles best explains why it was French and British leaders pulling notable punches in visiting the German Chancellor to negotiate for peace rather than Hitler visiting London or Paris to politley invite acceptance of his proposals. When Britain's Neville Chamberlain and France's Edouard Daladier and Italy's Benito Mussolini and Germany's Adolf Hitler signed the Munich Pact and appeared in front of the media for photogaphs it was hard to avoid the impression that although the western allies thought they had raised a few strong words with the uppity German in reality Chancellor Hitler had raised in return a few strong paragraphs.

Those around the Chancellor were similarly confident. Goring, a long-time component of the Nazi inner circle, openly chucked in racial slurs against the Czechoslovakians: 'This miserable pygmy race without culture – no-one knows where it came from – is oppressing a cultured people and behind it is Moscow and the eternal mask of the Jew devil.' Miserably pygmy race, the eternal mask of the jew devil, this was radical stuff.

In simple terms Munich devastated Czechoslovakia. First, and most notable of all at the political level, it confirmed Czechoslovakia's mutual assistance treaties with France and in turn the Soviet Union were brittle and pointless promises. Until further notice the country that would hold sway over the Czechs would not be from Western Europe or the east but their large Aryan neighbour to the north. At the territorial level the core elements of Bohemia and Moravia lost a third of their land plus over three million citizens. At the military level nearly the entire western protective line of Czechoslavakia was neutered. Before then it had stood as the strongest line of forts and protection in Europe outside France's Maginot line. After it was simply a military novelty. And finally at the economic level Czechoslovakia ceded to Germany a devastating chunk of industrial power – two-thirds of its iron and steel capacity and a similar proportion of electrical power. Signature factories including the famous Škoda works were subsumed into the Nazi war machine.

To add insult to the injury the Czech dissection was not all about transfer to Germany. Hungary received nearly 12,000 square kilometers in southern Slovakia and Poland (briefly) acquired around 1,000 square kilometers around Těšín. In combination the small but feisty and proud Czechoslovak Republic, fathered by the carve-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and mothered by Wilson's right to self-determination and the Fourteen Points, effectively ended. The new nation created from Saint-Germain had lasted not even two brief decades.

Perhaps it was inevitable for something carved so roughly from the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian empire. After the German occupation (despite promises at Munich Nazi Germany finally invaded Prague within six months of the agreemeent in March 1939 and from then until the end of the war held the country under mostly German administration) the country reappeared as the Czech Republic. But that lasted even less time than its inter-war predecessor and was gone in fifteen years (1945-1960). The Czech Socialist Republic lasted a little longer (thirty years from 1960-1990) but it too was replaced by a federal republic combining Czech and Slovak republics. In 1993 came another split, this time into two countries of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.     

Was there any good about Munich? Perhaps one beneficial outcome from Munich, and one much talked about in London and Paris in the following years, was that war involving England and France was delayed for around 336 days – the gap between September 30, 1938 and September 1, 1939. Chamberlain's peace in our time speech resonated throughout Britain and Europe and the wider world. ‘Phew’ went the whispered response. ‘This might work.’ But whether England or France or Germany gained most from this extra breathing space is hotly debated. Most analysis does suggest the relative rate of English and France munitions production increased greatly after Munich and surpassed the Fatherland by the autumn of 1939 when jaw jaw finally morphed into war war. But had France and England gone to war in the autumn of 1938, rather than the autumn of 1939, there are several voices who estimate they would have been relatively stronger.

Certainly German air power would have been less important as a threat against London and the wealthy south-east. Indeed nearly all of eastern Britain would have been largely invulnerable to the Luftwaffe if war happened over Czechoslovakia in 1938 (rather than Poland in 1939) because in the late 1930s most German planes did not have enough range to reach Britain from German airfields. Only with the conquest of the Low Countries and France could Nazi bombers reach important British cities.

Beyond military balances it seems bizarre that anyone or any country could have assumed the dissection of Czechoslovakia would assuage Hitler's desire for lebensraum, or living space. The Nazi Chancellor may have said of the Sudetenland that 'it is the last territorial claim I have to make in Europe.' Yet in March of 1938, six months before Munich, Germany had pushed through union or Anschluss with neighbouring and very Germanic and somewhat Nazi Austria. It seemed Chamberlain had only the haziest idea of this. Yet this happened despite Hitler's earlier claim, dating from 1935 when he had been in office for a couple of years, that Nazi Germany 'neither intends nor wishes to interfere in the internal affairs of Austria, to annex Austria, or to conclude an Anschluss.' (Shortly after the Anschluss the record shows Hitler issued a secret directive for war against Czechoslovakia to begin no later than October 1 of 1939.) Meanwhile German participation in the Spanish Civil War, including the Luftwaffe's destruction of Geurnica had proceeded apace, along the way revolutionizing aerial combat, and the Pact of Steel alliance signed with Italy in May 1938 looked increasingly menacing. Mussolini's forced occupied Albania during 1938.  

Despite this very questionable situation Chamberlain and many British elites still turned a blind eye to the reality of Nazi Germany. There seemed to be a continuing and pesistent hope that while perhaps distasteful war could be dodged at the expense of a few fudges and compromises and betrayals.

When Chamberlain died in late 1940 Churchill, who succeeded him as Prime Minister, claimed his predecessors fate was to have been 'deceived and cheated by a wicked man,' by which he meant Hitler at mostly Munich. But this hard-to-swallow eulogy carefully left open that Chamberlain's msicalculations had a broader dimension for the Prime Minister had been influential in other odd acts besides Munich. Not many remember that earlier in 1938, which was the final full year of peace in Europe before war, Chamberlain signed the Anglo-Italian agreement. This accepted Italian possession of Ethiopia – then called Abyssinia – provided Italy withdrew from Spain and the Spanish Civil War. After that event, and echoic of his same conclusion after Munich, Mr Chamberlain concluded that 'clouds of mistrust and suspicious have cleared away.' Jan Masaryk, son of the founder of Czechoslovakia phrased his diagnosis of Chamberlain a little less charitably: 'The senile ambition of Chamberlain to be peacemaker of Europe will drive him to success at any price, and that will only be possible at our expense.'

In fairness Mr Chamberlain was not the only one enthralled by the idea of negotiating ways around war. Many elites in London and other capitals of Europe had lived through the tragedy of the Great War in 1914-1918 and had at least a smidgen of similar thoughts. So when war was averted, or at least it looked like war was averted, there was little seething talk of thirty pieces of silver or treachery unbecoming or Judas or Matthew 26:15. Instead there was talk of the best possible compromise, all things considered, and jaw jaw trumping war war. The House of Commons in London backed Chamberlain's actions at Munich by 366 votes to 144. Preference for negotiation over confrontation was alive over the Atlantic too: Time Magazine made Adolf Hitler their Person of the Year in 1938 and on returning from Munich Chamberlain received a telegram from Washington DC, from the then decidedly isolationist President Roosevelt, which read simply and directly, 'Good Man'. In the east too appeasement influenced Stalin's approval of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in August 1939, a year or so after Munich. So it is perhaps unfair that in the history of appeasement Mr Chamberlain seems to be the magnet for all criticism.

Arguably the biggest tragedy of Munich is not that a few men like Chamberlain tragically misinterpreted the unfolding endgame but that it was the last serious chance to remove Hitler without continent-wide and full-scale war. In 1938 as the conversations and negotiations swirled around Munich the military imbalance was still against Germany - just. France had over 60 infantry and mechanised divisions on the Franc-German border compared to a dozen divisions within all of Germany. Even factoring in German tenacity and French unenthusiasm for combat the outcome should still have been fairly obvious. An under-strength Germany should have lost. The conclusion is even starker considering the German conquest of the Czechoslovakian fortress would have been extremely difficult. Even without also fighting the French (and others) at the same time reaching Prague would have absorbed bulk of German military attention for several months and far more than its rolling success in Poland and the drive to Warsaw a year later. Later Hitler personally inspected the Czech fortifications and privately noted that Germany would have shed 'a lot of blood' to capture them militarily. Czechoslovakia's 35 divisions might even have sucked in the bulk of German forces for as much as a year.    

Another tragic miss from Munich was within Germany itself and particulalry within the German High Command. After the war talk and some evidence surfaced that elites in the German army had planned to overthrow Hitler if he ditched what was offered at the negotiation tables of Munich and went to war over Czechoslovakia. The so-called Halder plot was thin on detail and thick on emotions not a million miles from appeasememnt - the prevailing preference was to avoid war rather than to depose a mad dictator - but was probably advanced enough to have worked if it had not rested around signing Munich agreement.

When public opinion in Britain could no longer tolerate the continued territorial pushes, this time against the city of Danzig which Germany had lsot to Poland at Versialies, and finally resulted in a tough stance by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain over Poland (the declaration to uphold Polish territorial integrity was made on March 31, 1939 with the backing of France) Hitler reportedly flew into a rage. The German leader shouted: 'I'll cook them a stew they'll choke on!'

Full list  |  Top Former Prime Minister David Lloyd George, 1936: 'Hitler is as immune from criticism as a king in a monarchical country. He is something more. He is the George Washington of Germany – the man who won for his country independence from all her oppressors.' German Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, 1937: ‘We want for Germany an upper stratum, a new nobility continually selected over the centuries, which replenishes itself continually from the best sons and daughters of our nation.’

GERMANY, EUROPE. November 9, 1938 was probably the most decisive end of hopes for a still-peaceful Europe. The first large-scale act of anti-Jewish violence and horror finally appeared from within the bowels of Nazi Germany and after today both Germany and Europe and much of the wider world were on a steady slide to war. Certainly from now on the only likely direction for some Nazi elites was the grisly ‘final solution’ to the relations between Germany and Judaism. No longer could the sinful underbelly of Nazism be blithely ignored.

Named Kristallnacht to reflect the broken windows of Jewish-owned businesses during this one brutal night mostly Nazi-led gangs smashed over 7,000 Jewish businesses. Over a hundred Jews died. 

In the 1930s before this day there was still some hope that large-scale violence and genocide against Jews was unlikley. Certainly the Nazi rhetoric that Adolf Hitler had injected into Germany since assuming power in 1933 was more and more offensively anti-Semitic. The trend was neauseating yet looked often verbal and contained. There may have been increasing numbers of offensive signs saying ‘Achtung Juden’ (Warning, Jews) but there was also a reasonably broad political view, slimmer inside Germany than outside but never fully extinguished until now, that would be as far as it went. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws had effectively removed Jews from public office but had not locked them in concentration camps. The trumped up excuses arising from the Reichstag Fire in February 1933 - a short time after the Nazis reached power - had targeted Communists, true, but not to the extent of a pogrom. From this amalgamation of offensive but somewhat contained actions arose the hope that Nazi Germany might only be moderately distasteful without being utterly fetid.

The view seems improbable with hindsignt but held some logic at the time. Aryan nationalism had blown up in the Chancellor’s face at the Berlin Olympics. Then non-Aryan athletes did well but in response had come nothing overly reactive. Nazi elites seethed privately but it had not fermented any violence.

Considered in this light it was also possible to take comfort from German's path to republicanism in 1918 and the failed Munich Kapp Putch in 1923 (coincidentally also marked on November 9, as was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989). Both the removal of the Kaiser and a minor rebellion showed important events in Germany could unfold fairly peacefully. Peaceful reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 and union with Austria in 1938 also helped some find hope. Germany might look balshy and haughty but ultimately it would never lose its orientation around a peaceful Europe. 

Kristallnacht showed this hope was largely futile and a seriously nasty demon breathed inside the Nazi heart. If the day did not seal matters what followed certainly ended any ambiguity. Responding to the news of the dead an important member of the Nazi inner circle, Joseph Goebbles, further ignited passions by arresting without-trial nearly 30,000 more German Jews. At the time this was nearly 10% of German Jews.

The events were decisive not only for revealing where Nazi sentiments ultimately laid and how they would express themslevs given a chance. It also uncovered the Nazi potential for systematic and organised abuse. Shortly after Kristallnacht new 'special' prisons appeared at Dachau near Munich, in the south of Germany, and Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin. Later these names gained infamy not as overflow prisons but as concentration camps where genocide happened against Jews and all manner of ‘non-Aryans’, from gypsies to homosexuals to communists. 

01/04/1939 | Saturday | Decisive day 30 of 100
Nationalists defeat Republicans in Spanish Civil War

Full list  |  Top General Franco, 1937: 'In a civil war, a systematic occupation of territory, accompanied by the necessary purges, is preferable to a rapid defeat of the enemy armies, which in the end leaves the country still infested with enemies.' Howard Koch, US screenwriter, 1943: 'You will recall the proud statement made recently by a Fascist genera: 'We have four columns in front of Madrid and a fifth inside the city".'

SPAIN, EUROPE. The three years conflict of the Spanish Civil War alerted the world to how a global war with multiple participants might look. It would be bloody and long and in the end wasteful beyond human understanding. 

By the end of the Spanish Civil War much had changed. Well over 50,000 Italian regular troops supported Franco. Germany had sent the kernel of their air force and bombed Geurnica. The deveastation that Germany was capable of inflciting featured in the famous painting by Pablo Picasso: The Day Geurnica Died. 

The war itself was relatively less damaging for Spain than Europe. Large tracts of the country, especially along the Mediterranean Coast and into the capital, avoided too much damage. Yet refugees feeling through the Pyrenees into France and much else captured the popular imagination. 

Franco, ironically, survived the two other Fascists that had helped him. Both Mussolini and Hitler were dead within a few years of the end of the Spanish Civil War. They were both disowned by their people. Franco survived four more decades until 1975 and was never quite disowned by the Spanish people, though they never quite embraced him either. His rule was always tenuous and dependent on force until the end. 

Full list  |  Top Generalleutnant Adolf Galland, 1943: 'For the first time I was flying by jet propulsion. No engine vibrations. No torque and no lashing sound of the propeller. Accompanied by a whistling sound, my jet shot through the air. Later when asked what it felt like, I said, "It felt as though angels were pushing".' Captain Picard in Star Trek: 'Flying an aeroplane with only a single propeller to keep you in the air. Can you imagine that?'

GERMANY, EUROPE. August 27, 1939, saw the first piloted jet in Germany. Part of the early Heinkel family of aircraft one of the distinctive advances of the Messerschmitt 262 was was using new kerosene burning fuel. A second was encasing the propellors in ways that overcame the limits on piston-driven engines turning large and exposed propellers. Things changed from the days of the Wright brothers. Now, air was not swirled by propellors over a carefully designed wing but instead rammed down the engine, compressed to an inch of its life before being ignited with a carefully measured mixture of kerosene and air and then expelled to give energy - or in the jargon of the time 'jet propulsion'.

This advancement on the piston engine turning a conventional propellor helped the aircraft reach speeds aproaching 900 km/h. This was a serious jump in technology. Compared to the extreme ranges of conventional propeller driven aircraft at around 700 km/h this was around a +20% improvement on other aircraft of the time. Bombers that could exceeded the range of bombers like the Avro Lancaster (a British classic that entered the European theatre in 1943) and B29 SuperFortress (an American pioneer with a pressurised cabin for high altitude action from 1944 that saw action in both European and Asian theatres of operations).  

Sadly on this actual flight history was cruel, or perhaps kind according to your view, and ensured in very large measure that the jet aircraft was a codicil to World War two rather than a conclusion. The landing gear would not retract and from this key figures in the Nazi military elite were insufficiently impressed. In consequence Germany spent the war largely focused on propeller-driven aircraft. Had the gear retracted properly and the test flight been successful Germany might have been far more advanced in jet aircraft. 

In the end and perhaps fairly the first jet airplane is known not as a Heinkel but as the Gloster Meteor. That flew in 1941 and the American design Bell XP-59 flew in 1942. Both topped 900 km/h. The jet engine had originally been conceived by Frank Whittle in Britian during the 1920s who concluded that encasing propellors in round tubes would make them more efficient. In the end all fighting countries came up with military jets though all appeared only in the dying months of World War Two. None were able to make a decisive impact on the war. 

The revolutionary effects of jet fighting came later and in civilian applications were commercial air travel. After the first commercial jet service, from London to Johannesburg, in 1952 jets have gradually taken over nearly all commercial travel. Propellors are used mostly on small training planes or heavy military lifters where speed is less important.  

Full list  |  Top German General Estienne, 1921: 'The blitzkrieg tactic is brutally simple: spearhead tanks move forward smashing all obstacles, reducing houses to rubble: motorized infantry, supporting artillery follow them, taking advantage of the path they have carved out; the enemy forward lines, caught unawares, are soon broken and the fast armoured penetration dashes on to bring victory, just as the cavalry did in the past.' USSR Foreign Minister Molotov, 1941: 'This war has been forced upon us, not by the German people, not by German workers, peasants and intellectuals, whose sufferings we well understand, but by the clique of bloodthirsty Fascist rulers of Germany who have enslaved Frenchmen, Czechs, Poles, Serbians, Norway, Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Greece and other nations. This is not the first time that our people have had to deal with an attack of an arrogant foe. At the time of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia our people’s reply was for the fatherland, and Napoleon suffered defeat and met his doom.'

POLAND, EUROPE. September 1, 1939 saw German blitzkrieg – lightning war – produce an electrical and jaw-dropping dissection of Poland between German Nazis in the west and Russian Communists in the east. Within weeks over 50,000 Poles died. Five times as many were wounded and fifteen times as many were imprisoned. It was among the most quickest military catastrophes not just in the twentieth century but in all history.

As early as November, 1939 the Nazi governor of German Poland required Jews to wear a blue star. War, Poland, Europe, America, the world changed forever.

No other country in Europe has had borders that move so much as Poland. International politics shake the country like a lump of jelly first a little to the east, then to the west and back slightly to the east. In the 1770s, Poland was larger than every European country bar Russia and had more population than every European country bar France. But by the twenieth century the Polish power waned. At Versailles the Poles made the especially grievous mistake of being too greedy and too cocky. This continued until the 1920s when Poland persuaded France into a secret military agreement specifying that if Germany attacks either nation the other will assist the other. If Poland was attacked by Soviet Russia then France agreed to neuter Germany. The manoevering came back to haunt signatories, both at the 1918 Declaration of the Independence of Poland by Jozef Pilsudski and two decades later in 1939. Molotov of the USSR touched on Russian thinking when he described Poland as ‘That bastard of Versailles treaty.’ 

Much is made of the speed of Poland’s defeat in 1939. It is true that few countries have been conquered so decisively and so quickly. Indeed by mid-October German troops controlled the key parts also of Romania. Yet it is often forgotten that the Russians did not invade their part of Poland, the east, until mid-September. This was over a fortnight after the Germans invaded from the west. The Poles as a whole lasted until early October, nearly six weeks later. 

Blitzkrieg shocked the modern world. Transport, efficient planning, co-ordination between different sectors of the armed forces had created something immeasurably faster than the glacial pace of trench warfare in the Great War. Two decades ago it had taken literally years to advance not even ten kilometers – at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. By the time Germany and Russia were done, they had tilted military thinking forever in the new world of radio communications. The likelihood of the world repeating trench warfare effectively ended on this day in 1939. 

There was a curious coincidence on this day. Later in the day of September 1, 1939 in Washington DC, the person responsible for American aid that would rebuild Europe after war was appointed Chief of Staff of the United States Army – George C. Marshall. It was an intriguing example, of several in the war, where the good and the bad happened simultaneously, each unaware of the other. the Spanish people, though they never quite embraced him either. His rule was tenuous and dependent on force until the end. 

Full list  |  Top Albert Einstein, 1939: 'Some recent work by E Fermi and L Szilard leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the near future. The new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat or exploded in a port, might well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.’ Erich Fromm, US psychologist, 1955: 'The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced—by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix.'

USA, THE AMERICAS. October 11 in 1939 saw a letter from Albert Einstein delivered to American President Roosevelt. Concerning atomic weapons it recommended exploring the manufacture of atomic bombs. Carefully executed, the letter noted, such bombs could destroy huge cities with one blast. With this communication, even though it was not acted upon immediately, a critical and irreversible step on the road towards nuclear weaponry happened. 

Even before Dr Einstein grasped the significance of the atomic bomb he was an ascendant scientist. Already in the 1920s the German professor had won the Nobel Prize for physics. Genius, alas, had not saved him from Nazism and he fled Germany for a teaching post at Princeton University in the USA. 

All things considered it was a fortuitous emigration. As war unfolded in Europe, the genius resident in America was encouraged to write directly to President Roosevelt about his knowledge of uranium chain reactions. His letter was chillingly precise: ‘…it has been made probable through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future. This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs…’ 

Despite its chilling content the letter did not ignite immediate action. Roosevelt cautiously delegated responsibility down the chain of command. Only after Pearl Harbour was a large-scale atomic project activated. In the summer of 1942 this became the famous ‘Manhattan Project’, named for its location in New York City. 

Einstein himself was always removed from weaponising atomic science. Indeed he only spoke publicly on the atomic bombing of Japan in 1946. It allowed him over a year to reflect on the devastating proof that he had been right. In that later communication Professor Einstein came down squarely against Truman. He declared that if Roosevelt had been alive – he died in the spring of 1945 just before the bombs were used – he would have not bombed Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Einstein mused that he had made a mistake to write to Roosevelt with the information. Later he told his biographer it was the one great mistake if his life. Nevertheless, and true to his mysterious and ambiguous style, Einstein added there may still have been some justification – the ‘danger that the Germans would make them.’