Ion Antonescu, right, meets with Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler, during World War II.
By Phil Kohn. Dedicated to the memory of his father, GM3 Walter Kohn, U.S. Navy Armed Guard, USNR, and all men and women who have answered the country’s call in time of need. Phil can be contacted at ww2remembered@yahoo.com.
Ion Antonescu, wartime prime minister of Romania, and twelve of his cabinet ministers are sentenced to death by a Bucharest court on May 17, 1946. Six of the condemned are still at large. In the face of a threatened strike by U.S. railroad engineers, conductors and trainmen, President Truman seizes the country’s railroads in an attempt to delay the walkout. A general election is held in the Netherlands for the first time since 1937.
On May 18, just minutes before the scheduled 4:00 p.m. railroad strike across the U.S., President Truman announces that the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers have agreed to postpone the walkout for five days.
In Tokyo, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators protest on May 19 against food shortages and against the government of Japan’s incoming prime minister, Shigeru Yoshida, who has been appointed by the Allied occupation authorities.
On May 20, a U.S. Army C-45 twin-engine, Beechcraft transport plane crashes into the 58th floor of the 72-story Bank of Manhattan building on Wall Street in New York City, killing all five persons aboard the aircraft. The accident happens at 8 p.m. in heavy fog, and most of the 5,000 persons who normally would have been in the building have left for the day.
The Soviet Red Army completes its evacuation of Iran on May 21. Almost two months after 400,000 U.S. coal miners go on strike, President Truman issues Executive Order 9278 that mandates the seizure by the federal government of all U.S. bituminous-coal mines whose workers are on strike. At the Los Alamos, New Mexico, nuclear laboratory, Canadian physicist Louis Slotin accidentally triggers a fission reaction that releases a burst of ionizing radiation while he is manually conducting a plutonium-core experiment. Slotin and seven observers in the lab with him are immediately rushed to the hospital to be treated for extremely intense radiation exposure. The accident ends all hands-on nuclear assembly work at Los Alamos.
Shigeru Yoshida on May 22 takes office as prime minister of Japan, replacing Baron Kijuro Shidehara. In Czechoslovakia, Karl Hermann Frank, former chief of police in Bohemia and Moravia, is hanged before 5,000 people in Prague. He had ordered the liquidation of the town of Lidice in retaliation for the assassination in 1942 of Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia Reinhard Heydrich. The first U.S. rocket to reach the edge of space (a WAC Corporal, developed in the U.S.) is fired from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. (An altitude of 50 miles above the earth’s surface is the U.S. definition of “the edge of space” at the time.) At 12:01 a.m., the federal government seizes bituminous-coal mines where miners are striking and places them under the supervision of U.S. Secretary of the Interior Julius A. Krug.
Chinese Nationalists retake Changchun from the Communists on May 23. In the U.S., 250,000 railroad workers walk off their jobs over wages and work rules. President Truman mobilizes government resources in an attempt to make up the transportation deficit. In addition to the halting of freight shipments, the strike strands millions of travelers in what has been described as “the most crippling work stoppage the nation ever suffered.”
Siam is invaded at dawn on May 24 by 800 soldiers of the French Army, who cross the Mekong River from Laos (at this time part of French Indochina). The French troops are supported by planes and artillery, and clash with local forces while pursuing Communist rebels. Meeting in Jerusalem, the Arab Higher Committee — an organ of the seven-nation Arab League — demands the withdrawal of British troops from Palestine, an end to the British Mandate, an end to Jewish immigration, and the creation of an Arab Palestine. At 9 p.m. Eastern Time, U.S. President Harry S. Truman makes a nationwide radio address regarding the railway strike, and delivers an ultimatum: “If sufficient workers to operate the trains have not returned by 4 p.m. tomorrow, as head of our government, I have no alternative but to operate the trains by using every means within my power. . . . I shall ask our armed forces to furnish protection to every man who heeds the call of his country in this hour of need.” Having set a deadline of 19 hours for action, Truman closes by saying that he will address a joint session of Congress the next day at 4 p.m.
Under the Treaty of London, signed on May 25, the British Mandate of Transjordan is ended and the country is declared independent. A constitution is promulgated, and Abdullah ibn Hussein becomes the first monarch of the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan, renamed from the Emirate of Transjordan. (The name will change again, in 1949, to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.) Ibrahim Hashim becomes the new nation’s first prime minister. In the U.S., the strike by 250,000 rail workers is settled. With only three minutes left before a deadline of 4 p.m., at which time the Army would seize control of and operate the nation’s railroads, the leaders of both striking railway workers’ unions sign a settlement at the White House. A verbal agreement is reached at 3:50 p.m., and the written pact is signed at 3:57 p.m.
On May 26, Communists gain a plurality of seats in parliamentary elections held in Romania. In the first democratic elections in Czechoslovakia since the end of World War II, Klement Gottwald becomes the nation’s 14th prime minister, the first Communist to hold the post. The U.S. railway workers’ strike having been settled, the federal government returns the nation’s railroads to their owners.
U.S. miners of bituminous coal on May 27 resume their strike after a two-week truce expires. In Vietnam, the French colonial government creates an administration for the minority Montagnard population — separate from that for the Vietnamese people — with its headquarters at Buôn Ma Thuột in the Central Highlands.
At Landsberg Prison, west of Munich, Germany, 14 former Nazis are hanged on May 28 for their wartime actions at the Dachau concentration camp. Manuel Roxas is inaugurated as (the last) president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines. The U.S. Army Air Forces initiates the Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft (NEPA) program. Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corp. is selected to study the possibility of developing a long-range, strategic bomber powered by a nuclear reactor. Physicists Klaus Fuchs and John Von Neumann — working for the still-ongoing Manhattan Project — file an application for a U.S. patent for a better way of detonating a hydrogen bomb. The first nighttime baseball game at Yankee Stadium, in New York City, is played. The Bronx Bombers lose to the Washington Senators, 2-1.
Chinese Nationalist forces capture Kirin, in northeast China, from the Communists on May 29. In Germany, 14 more former Nazis are hanged at Landsberg Prison, west of Munich, for their activities at the Dachau concentration camp. One week after President Truman seized the coal mines, and two months after their strike began, U.S. bituminous-coal miners reach a settlement with the government. Workers will receive pay increases and retirement benefits. After 45 days, the nationwide walkout of American bituminous-coal miners has ended, with the signing, at the White House, of a new contract by UMWA President John L. Lewis and U.S. Secretary of the Interior Julius A. Krug. Lewis announces that the nation’s 400,000 soft-coal miners will be back to work by June 2. Pennsylvanian Eddie Klep becomes the first white baseball player in the Negro Leagues when he pitches seven innings for the Cleveland Buckeyes in an 8-6 win over the Chicago American Giants in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Louis Slotin, the 35-year-old Canadian physicist at Los Alamos who was exposed to a burst of intense ionizing radiation during an experiment on May 21, dies after suffering “an agonizing sequence of radiation-induced traumas.” The other seven individuals exposed along with him survive but suffer various ills that may or may not be directly related to their radiation exposure. Slotin is initially commended (including by one of the people in the room with him) for his quick action in ending the fission reaction, thereby reducing the radiation dosage received by the others who were present. One of the other observers who was present, however, claims that Slotin had a low concern for nuclear safety and had used improper and unsafe procedures during the experiment.
