Bernard Baruch, the author of the Baruch Plan to control nuclear weapons. Politico.
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.
On June 14, 1946, financier Bernard Baruch, the U.S. representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, presents his “Baruch Plan,” a proposal that all nuclear weapons be controlled by the UN. No agreement is ever reached on the idea.
The “Big Four” foreign ministers (U.S., U.K., U.S.S.R. and France) reconvene in Paris on June 15 to work out the details of various peace agreements with countries that were former Axis allies. The Blue Angels, the aerial demonstration team of the Navy and Marine Corps, makes its first public performance at Craig Field in Jacksonville, Florida.
Following the breakdown of negotiations on Indian independence, British Viceroy Viscount Wavell on June 16 unilaterally invites 14 prominent Indians to form a government.
On June 17, Jewish terrorists blow up the central workshop of the Palestine Railway in Haifa, as well as 11 highway and railroad bridges across the mandate. No injuries are reported. AT&T, in conjunction with its subsidiary Southwest Bell, inaugurates commercial mobile-telephone service in St Louis, Missouri, allowing customers to place and receive phone calls from their automobiles.
Members of Irgun — a Zionist paramilitary organization operating in Mandatory Palestine — kidnap five British officers in Tel Aviv and one in Jerusalem on June 18 and hold them hostage to prevent the execution of two of their members. The British are released after the death sentences of the Irgun members are commuted.
In northwestern Germany, 63 Germans and 20 Ukrainian refugees are killed on June 19 when ammunition, hidden by the Nazis in a salt mine, explodes near Celle, in the state of Lower Saxony. The first boxing title match to be televised takes place at Yankee Stadium in New York City. Joe Louis defeats Billy Conn in eight rounds for the heavyweight championship. Three NBC TV stations carry the fight to an estimated 140,000 viewers.
In Paris, at the “Big Four” foreign ministers’ meeting, it is agreed on June 20 that all Allied occupation troops will be withdrawn from Italy within 90 days. Likewise, the U.S.S.R. agrees to pull all its forces out of Bulgaria in the same timeframe.
At Nuremberg, Germany, Albert Speer, former Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, on June 21 tells the War Crimes Tribunal that the Nazis were about “a year or two away from splitting the atom.” He testifies that the program to develop a nuclear bomb was delayed because many atomic scientists had fled Germany to escape the Hitler regime.
Speaking at a prayer meeting in New Delhi, India, on June 22, Mohandas Gandhi calls on the South African government to stop “hooliganism” by whites, who are attacking Indian residents there. Gandhi had practiced law in South Africa for 21 years and it was there that he first used nonviolent resistance in a campaign for civil rights.
French civil servant Jean Monnet proposes a war-reparations plan on June 23 in which the French — to offset their war losses of 4.86 trillion francs (about 40 billion U.S. dollars) — would dismantle 200 industrial plants in the French Occupation Zone of western Germany and move them to France. Over the next three years, 22 factories in the Ruhr and Saar areas are taken apart and transported to France and another 88 facilities are destroyed.
On June 24. in Washington, D.C., former Secretary of the Treasury Fred M. Vinson is sworn in as Chief Justice of the United States, replacing Harlan F. Stone, who had died in April.
The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (known as the World Bank) begins operations on June 25. Eugene Meyer, former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, is its first president. In Hungary, the nation’s hyperinflation peaks at 42 quadrillion per cent per month. To keep up, the government issues banknotes in the denomination of 100,000,000,000,000 pengő. (The hundred-trillion-pengő note is worth approximately 20 U.S. cents.). The Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) is passed. It permits private parties to sue the U.S. in a federal court for most torts (civil wrongs resulting in legal liability) committed by persons acting on behalf of the United States. Hồ Chi Minh, president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, travels to France for talks on Vietnamese independence.
Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek on June 26 launches a nationwide military campaign against Chinese Communist forces led by Mao Tse-tung, widening the Chinese Civil War. The Nationalist Army moves into central China to take back rural areas that have been under Communist control. On the same day, a Nationalist Chinese pilot defects and delivers a B-24 Liberator bomber to the Communists, starting a wave of similar defections. By 1949, 54 pilots and 20 airplanes have gone over to the Communist side.
On June 27, Canada becomes the first member of the British Commonwealth to create its own citizenship laws. The Canadian Citizenship Act separates Canadian citizenship from British nationality, effective January 1, 1947.
In Tokyo, Japanese radio on June 28 announces the first recorded birth in Japan of a baby born to a Japanese mother and a member of the American occupation forces.
British authorities in Palestine on June 29 conduct “Operation Agatha” — also known as “Black Sabbath” — “to end the state of anarchy existing” in the Mandate. Between 10,000 and 25,000 British security forces search for arms and documentary proof of sabotage. Some 2,700 Zionists are arrested. In response, the Haganah — the main paramilitary organization of the Jewish population in Mandatory Palestine — escalates its anti-British operations. Yugoslav and Italian civilians battle in Trieste, located on the border between the two countries. Over three days, two people are killed, and 60 injured.
The Soviets on June 30 begin to prevent movement of Germans from their occupation zone to the those of the three western Allies. At midnight in the U.S., the wartime emergency powers of the Office of Price Administration (OPA) expire, ending almost five years of wage and price controls. Also expiring at midnight is the mandate of the War Relocation Authority, which carried out the internment of over 100,000 Japanese Americans during the war.
On July 1, the United States explodes the first atomic bomb since the bombing of Nagasaki (on August 9, 1945) in “Operation Crossroads,” at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands. “Test Able” is the first of three planned bomb-drops to see what a nuclear weapon would do to warships. The detonation of the 20-kiloton atomic bomb — witnessed by reporters and other invited guests — destroys or sinks five retired and unmanned naval vessels and damages 14 others. Briton Charles Vyner Brooke, the last White Rajah of Sarawak (located in the northwestern part of Borneo), cedes the territory to the British Crown. Sarawak’s annexation by the United Kingdom ends the personal rule of the Brooke family after 105 years. Allied forces manage to revert all the Netherlands East Indies to Dutch control, except for Java and Sumatra. In Atlanta, Georgia, the federal Communicable Disease Center (today’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) begins operations. Its mission: to eradicate domestic cases of malaria.
Two days of rioting ends in Ahmedabad, in western India, on July 2. Some 33 people are killed when Muslims attack Jains in conflicts over representation in an independent India. In the U.S., the Luce-Celler Act of 1946 becomes law, giving Philippines citizens living in the U.S. the right to become naturalized American citizens. In the American Zone of Occupation of Germany, U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Lucius Clay, the deputy military governor, pardons all former Nazis under 27 years of age, except those accused of war crimes, thus restoring German citizenship to more than one million men.
Klement Gottwald on July 3 is sworn in as prime minister of Czechoslovakia, the nation’s first communist leader. The Cape Passive Resistance Council is formed at a mass meeting in Cape Town, South Africa. The gathering is attended by 1,500 people — mostly Indian and African — to protest the government’s apartheid (an Afrikaans word meaning “apart-hood” or “separateness”) and discriminatory policies.
The Philippines gains its independence from the United States on July 4. Manuel Roxas y Acuña is inaugurated in Manila as the fifth president of the Philippines and the first president of the Third Republic. The Philippines had become a territory of the United States in 1902, ceded by Spain after the Spanish-American War. A postwar pogrom in Kielce, Poland, leaves 42 people — mostly Jews — dead and 50 injured. Army and security officers take part in the attack that was sparked by a false story that a boy had been kidnapped by Jews.
