Battle of Britain
The RAF fights off the Luftwaffe's air offensive
From July to October 1940 the Luftwaffe tried to destroy the RAF ahead of an invasion of England. Helped by radar, the RAF held out, and in September Hitler postponed the invasion; the bombing of cities, the Blitz, went on until May 1941.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 22 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 1 year earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 7 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 8 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 9 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — 11 years earlier
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 4 years earlier
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 1 year later
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 2 years later
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 5 years later
Middle East
- 1915–1917 Armenian genocide — 25 years earlier
- 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement — 24 years earlier
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 8 years earlier
- 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran — 1 year later
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 8 years later
Africa
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 18 years earlier
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 5 years earlier
- 1948 Apartheid begins in South Africa — 8 years later
- 1952 Egyptian revolution of 1952 — 12 years later
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 16 years later
Asia
- 1937–1938 Nanjing Massacre — 3 years earlier
- 1942 Fall of Singapore — 2 years later
- 1943 Bengal famine — 3 years later
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 5 years later
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 13 years later
Americas
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 11 years earlier
- c. 1930–1936 Dust Bowl — 10 years earlier
- 1933–1939 New Deal — 7 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 5 years later
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 7 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 4 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 1 year later
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 2 years later
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 14 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 19 years later
Alive at the time
- Nikola Tesla (aged 84)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 71)
- Winston Churchill (aged 66)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 62)
- Albert Einstein (aged 61)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 59)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 51)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 51)
- Mao Zedong (aged 47)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 22)