The Battle of Midway
Minutes that turned the tide of the Pacific War
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American codebreakers had uncovered the Japanese plan to trap what was left of the US fleet at Midway Atoll. On 4 June 1942 dive bombers set three Japanese carriers ablaze within minutes, and a fourth was lost by evening. The US lost the carrier Yorktown. After Midway, Japan never regained the initiative in the Pacific.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 24 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 3 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 5 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 6 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 7 years later
Europe
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 14 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 9 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 6 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 1 year earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 11 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — 13 years earlier
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 6 years earlier
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 1 year earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — same year
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 3 years later
Middle East
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 10 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 6 years later
Africa
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 20 years earlier
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 7 years earlier
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 14 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 16 years later
- 1960 Year of Africa — 18 years later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 3 years later
- 1945 Indonesia proclaims independence — 3 years later
- 1947 Independence and Partition of India — 5 years later
- 1949 Founding of the People's Republic of China — 7 years later
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 11 years later
Americas
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 13 years earlier
- c. 1930–1936 Dust Bowl — 12 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 3 years later
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 5 years later
- 1955 Salk polio vaccine declared safe — 13 years later
Alive at the time
- Nikola Tesla (aged 86)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 73)
- Winston Churchill (aged 68)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 64)
- Albert Einstein (aged 63)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 61)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 53)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 53)
- Mao Zedong (aged 49)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 24)