Fall of Singapore
The largest surrender in British military history
On 8 February 1942 General Yamashita's army, having swept through Malaya, landed on Singapore, Britain's main base in the East. On 15 February General Percival surrendered, and some 80,000 British, Indian and Australian troops were taken prisoner.
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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
- 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran — 1 year earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 6 years later
- 1948–1949 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba — 6 years later
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 11 years later
Africa
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 7 years earlier
- 1948 Apartheid begins in South Africa — 6 years later
- 1952 Egyptian revolution of 1952 — 10 years later
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 14 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 16 years later
Americas
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 13 years earlier
- c. 1930–1936 Dust Bowl — 12 years earlier
- 1933–1939 New Deal — 9 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 3 years later
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 5 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 6 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 1 year earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — same year
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 12 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 17 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)