Scientists experiment with radioisotopes in 1946 during an early time of usage. Wikimedia.
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.
The first sale of radioisotopes in the U.S. occurs on August 2, 1946, as the Barnard Free Skin & Cancer Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, purchases a container of carbon-14 from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee. The hospital was founded in 1905 to provide free cancer care for the underserved.
Retired industrialist Louis J. Koch opens Santa Claus Land in Santa Claus, Indiana, on August 3. With rides and décor coordinated with a Christmas motif, the venue is considered the world’s first theme park. (The town of Santa Claus, named such in 1856, is in the southern part of the state, about 80 miles west of Louisville, Kentucky. The theme park was renamed Holiday World in 1984 and still exists as Holiday World & Splashin’ Safari.)
On August 4, more than 100 people die in the Dominican Republic from a tsunami generated by an 8.1-magnitude earthquake just offshore of the island of Hispaniola, on which the Dominican Republic is located. Over 20,000 are left homeless in the Dominican Republic and in Haiti, which shares the island.
A year-and-a-half of purges of the Bulgarian military begins on August 5. In Ohio, Neil Armstrong — who 23 years later would become the first human to set foot on the moon — earns his student pilot’s certificate on his 16th birthday.
The U.S. on August 6 officially submits to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, a principal organ of the United Nations. Seated in The Hague, the Netherlands, the World Court, as it is often called, adjudicates disputes between nations. In Budapest, $32 million of Hungary’s gold reserves arrive from Frankfurt, Germany, where they had been held by the Nazi government. The return of the gold helps stabilize the Hungarian economy, devastated by hyperinflation during the previous two months. Two unmanned U.S. Army B-17 bombers arrive in California after flying 2,174 miles from Hawaii piloted entirely by remote radio control. The Army says that “Operation Remote” proves that “guided missiles . . . can be launched by remote control and hit a target more than two thousand miles distant.”
Joseph Stalin on August 7 sends a demand to Turkey that the Dardanelles Strait — which separates European Turkey from Asian Turkey at Istanbul and connects the Sea of Marmara with the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas — should be jointly defended by Turkey and the U.S.S.R., with the implication that Soviet troops should enter Turkish territory. Concerned that a takeover of Turkey would give the Soviet Union control of the Middle East, U.S. President Harry Truman sends the aircraft carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt and two destroyers to the region.
The U.S.S.R. seizes 200 industrial operations in the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany on August 8 and will operate them for its own benefit.
On August 9, Yugoslav fighter planes fire on and force down a U.S. transport plane that Yugoslavia claims violated its air space. The plane lands near Ljubljana, in Slovenia, and the 11 passengers and crewmembers are interned. The U.S. Army Air Forces flies the Convair B-36 Peacemaker bomber for the first time. Designed to carry an atomic bomb and capable of flying 6,000 miles, the plane is the first intercontinental nuclear-weapons carrier. For the first time ever, all eight scheduled major-league baseball games in the U.S. are played at night.
The Allies approve a temporary constitution for Berlin on August 10. In Washington, Congress passes the War Brides Act of 1946 that, among other things, repeals an earlier Chinese Exclusion Act, allowing Chinese males in the U.S. to bring their wives from Asia.
In a close contest, schoolteacher Léon Dumarsais Estimé on August 11 becomes the first elected president of Haiti since the end of the U.S. occupation in 1934. Because of his efforts to reverse the accords that the previous administration had struck with the U.S. that Estimé feels are disadvantageous to Haiti, the new Haitian president finds that the U.S. unfavorably views his government as radically left-wing. In attempts to modify this view and solidify ties with the U.S., Estimé will exaggerate communist threats to his government.
Lord Wavell, Viceroy of India, on August 12 invites the Hindu-dominated Indian National Congress to form a provisional government. The United Kingdom announces that all Jewish immigration to Palestine, other than that already scheduled, is ended. Any Jews caught attempting to enter Palestine will be sent to detention camps. In Italy, the remains of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, stolen from an unmarked grave in April, are found at a monastery in Pavia, around 22 miles south of Milan. The perpetrators are admirers of Il Duce.
British authorities implement “Operation Igloo” on August 13 to deport recent Jewish immigrants in Palestine to detention camps in Cyprus. Some 1,300 Jews are put on ships in Haifa and sent to Cyprus. An incoming ship with 600 Jewish immigrants is seized in the port of Haifa. In response to the British actions, a mob of angry Jews tries to attack the port area; three people are killed and seven injured when British troops fire into the crowd. The secretary-general of the Arab League says that the British policy is “a step on the right road.” In London, British author H.G. Wells — often referred to as the father of science fiction — dies at the age of 79.
Chiang Kai-shek promises in Shanghai on August 14 that his one-party rule will give way to democracy and constitutional government “without delay.” The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union issues a “Resolution on the Journals Star and Leningrad:” They are banned for publishing the works of poet Anna Akhmatova and author and satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko. It is the beginning of a postwar assault on the arts and intelligentsia in the U.S.S.R. A U.S. B-29 reconnaissance plane discovers an “ice island” floating in the Arctic Ocean 300 miles north of Alaska. Dubbed “Target X,” the 17-mile-long, 9-mile-wide ice floe is deemed suitable for the basing of aircraft. (In 1952, the ice floe — by then known as Fletcher’s Ice Island — becomes the first of three floating-ice-island air bases used by the U.S. Fletcher’s Ice Island remains in service from 1952 to 1974, when the floe begins breaking up.)
President Truman announces to Congress on August 15 a foreign policy formulated to thwart Soviet geopolitical expansion. (It becomes known as the Truman Doctrine.) Acting on his tenet, Truman tells Turkey’s president, İsmet İnönü, that the U.S. will assist Turkey in resisting Soviet demands to control the Dardanelles Strait. Over the next year, the U.S. will provide over $400 million to Turkey and Greece as part of its Middle East strategy. The Raytheon Company demonstrates a new “micro-wave” relay communications system, in Waltham, Massachusetts. Regular network programming begins on the DuMont Television Network. Its flagship station, in New York City, is WABD-TV, which carries the initials of the company’s founder, inventor Allen B. DuMont. Its other station is W3XWT (soon to be WTTG) in Washington, D.C.
