November 28th ~ { continued... }
1914 – Following a war-induced closure in July, the New York Stock Exchange re-opens for bond trading.
1929 – Commander Richard E. Byrd completed the first South Pole flight.
1941 – The aircraft carrier USS Enterprise departed Pearl Harbor to deliver F4F Wildcat fighters to Wake Island. This mission saved the carrier from destruction when the Japanese attacked.
1942 – Coffee rationing went into effect in the U.S., lasting through World War II.
1942 – The first production Ford bomber, the B-24 Liberator, rolled off the assembly line at Ford’s massive Willow Run plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Two years before, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had urged an isolationist America to prepare for its inevitable involvement in the war, declaring that U.S. industry must become “the great arsenal of democracy.” Roosevelt established the Office of Production Management (OPM) to organize the war effort, and named a former automotive executive co-director of the OPM. Most Detroit automobile executives opposed the OAW during its first year, and were dubious of the advantages of devoting their entire production to war material.
However, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and American citizens mobilized behind the U.S. declaration of war against the Axis powers. Since profit ruled Detroit, the government made Ford and America’s other automakers an economic offer they could not refuse. For their participation in the war effort, automakers would be guaranteed profits regardless of production costs, and $11 billion would be allocated to the building of war plants–factories that would be sold to private industry at a substantial discount after the war.
In February of 1942, the last Ford automobile rolled off the assembly line for the duration of the war, and soon afterward the Willow Run plant was completed in Michigan. Built specifically for Ford’s war production, Willow Run was the largest factory in the world. Using the type of assembly line production that had made Ford an industrial giant, Ford hoped to produce 500 B-24 Liberator bombers a month. After a gradual start, that figure was reached in time for the Allied invasion of Western Europe, and by July of 1944, the Willow Plant was producing one B-24 every hour. By the end of the war, the 43,000 men and women who had worked at Ford’s Willow Run plant had produced over 8,500 bombers, which unquestionably had a significant impact on the course of the war.
1943 – The Teheran Conference begins. Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin and their staffs meet for the first time. The Americans appear to be attempting to distance themselves from the British during the discussions.
1944 – The first Allied convoy reaches Antwerp which is now operational after extensive repairs and mine clearing. Distribution of supplies to the Allied armies in the field remains a difficulty.
1954 – Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi, the first man to create and control a nuclear chain reaction, and one of the Manhattan Project scientists, dies in Chicago at the age of 53. After studying in Germany under physicist Max Born, famous for his work on quantum mechanics, which would prove vital to Fermi’s later work, he returned to Italy to teach mathematics at the University of Florence.
Fermi and others saw the possible military applications of such an explosive power, and quickly composed a letter warning President Roosevelt of the perils of a German atomic bomb. The letter was signed and delivered to the president by Albert Einstein on October 11, 1939. The Manhattan Project, the American program to create its own atomic bomb, was the result. It fell to Fermi to produce the first nuclear chain reaction, without which such a bomb was impossible. He created a jury-rigged laboratory, complete with his own “atomic pile,” in a squash court in the basement of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. It was there that Fermi, with other physicists looking on, produced the first controlled chain reaction on December 2, 1942. The nuclear age was born.
1958 – The US reported the first full-range firing of an ICBM.
1963 – Just six days after the assassination of President Kennedy, President Johnson announced that the Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, would be renamed “The John F. Kennedy Space Center.” Residents voted in 1973 to change the name back to Cape Canaveral.
1964 – The US Mariner IV space probe was launched from Cape Kennedy on a course to Mars. It later flew by Mars in Jul 1965 and saw craters but no canals.
Statistics: Posted by SHOOTER13 — Sat Nov 28, 2015 12:05 pm