Bengal famine
Millions die of hunger and disease in wartime Bengal
In 1943 between 2.1 and 3 million people in Bengal died of hunger and disease. Rice imports from Japanese-occupied Burma stopped, a cyclone hit the harvest, wartime inflation sent prices soaring, and the colonial authorities long failed to declare a famine.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 25 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 4 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 4 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 5 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 6 years later
Europe
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 15 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 10 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 7 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 2 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 10 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — 14 years earlier
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 7 years earlier
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 2 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 1 year earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 2 years later
Middle East
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 11 years earlier
- 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran — 2 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 5 years later
- 1948–1949 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba — 5 years later
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 10 years later
Africa
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 8 years earlier
- 1948 Apartheid begins in South Africa — 5 years later
- 1952 Egyptian revolution of 1952 — 9 years later
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 13 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 15 years later
Americas
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 14 years earlier
- 1933–1939 New Deal — 10 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 2 years later
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 4 years later
- 1955 Salk polio vaccine declared safe — 12 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 7 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 2 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 1 year earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 11 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 16 years later
Alive at the time
- Nikola Tesla (aged 87)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 74)
- Winston Churchill (aged 69)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 65)
- Albert Einstein (aged 64)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 62)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 54)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 54)
- Mao Zedong (aged 50)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 25)