1940

The war decade redefines Henkels & McCoy’s lines of business as many unique construction opportunities present themselves. The 1940s will mark the firm’s entry into gas work, as well as the undertaking of significant power work and a 1,100-mile telephone pole line rehab for Southern Railway, spanning seven southern states.

Closer to home base, Henkels & McCoy removes all the old overhead and underground lines of the former Keystone Telephone System when that company is purchased by Bell Telephone Company. And of course, like many contractors, we are involved in much Secret government work for the war effort. Many Henkels & McCoy employees will soon begin to depart for military training as the first peacetime draft goes into effect.

Link to An American Adventure  Chapters 8 through 11
 

Clouds Over Europe
The  escalating war in Europe will dominate the headlines. During 1940, the world will add new terms to a growing war-induced lexicon. Blitzkrieg (lightning war) is a strategy of rapid, mechanized ground assault with close air support. The armies of Germany's western neighbors are swept aside by devastatingly quick strikes by numerically superior forces. Hitler's Wermacht seems unstoppable.
 
January 8
Strict food rationing begins in Britain.

April 9
Germany attacks Denmark and Norway.

April 20
RCA demonstrates first electron microscope.

May 6
President Roosevelt, reacting to developments in Europe and Asia, asks Congress for an immediate appropriation of $896,000,000 for defense spending, including the production of 50,000 warplanes per year.

May 10
Mechanized divisions of the German army, supported by the Luftwaffe launch a Blitzkrieg attack along the entire Western Front: Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg. France expects a head-on attack on its eastern border with Germany, along the fortified Maginot Line. The Germans simply move around it and invade from the north.

May 13
Winston Churchill replaces Neville Chamberlain; declares in his first speech as British Prime Minister to the House of Commons, "I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."  Churchill will also serve as Minister of War, an unprecedented and bold


 








 
 These Parisian faces say
 it all, as German troops
 march into the City of Light
 on June 14. Hitler
 later toured the city


 Winston S. Churchill
 takes over as Prime
 Minister to lead Britain's
 war effort.

May 28
King Leopold of Belgium surrenders his army of 500,000 soldiers to the advancing Germans.

May 26 – June 3
British Expeditionary Forces (BEF) troops, beaten back to the French seacoast by German army divisions. evacuate Dunkirk in northwestern, France. Over 900 private boats, sloops, yachts, steamers, sailboats and fishing boats come to the aid of the Royal Navy and help rescue and evacuate 340,000 soldiers, including over 100,000 French and Belgian troops, to the relative safety of Dover, England.

June 4
Churchill addresses the House of Commons following Dunkirk: stating, "We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."

June 5 - 22
With the main British Army out of the way, German troops sweep southward and enter Paris on June 14. France surrenders on June 22.

June 9-10
Norway surrenders to Germany. Italy declares war on France and Britain.

July 1
At a press conference, Japanese Prime Minister Matsuoka Yosuke announces the adoption of a foreign policy he calls the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." The phrase turns out to be a euphemism for replacement of European colonial powers in Asia by the forces of Imperial Japan.

July 3
Units of the British Mediterranean Fleet destroys French fleet anchored in Oran, North Africa to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. Loose Lips Sink Ships: German spies are rumored to be everywhere in Britain (above right).

July 3
Bud Abbott and Lou Costello debut on NBC radio.

July 27
An anonymous screwball rabbit co-stars in Warner Brothers' animated cartoon "A Wild Hare" opposite Elmer Fudd. This wascally wabbit, outfoxing hunters for two years, finally gets a screen credit as Bugs Bunny in 1941's "Elmer's Pet Rabbit."
 
August 8
Battle of Britain begins. Struggle for air supremacy fought high above southern England between the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe ends in November with a British victory. Of the RAF airmen who drove off the Nazis, Churchill later declares in a speech in the House of Commons, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

September 7 1940 through May 1941
Though soundly defeated in the Battle of Britain, Hitler’s Luftwaffe moves on to another plan. The Blitz is the name given to wholesale bombing raids on major British cities, principally London, in an effort to destroy civilian morale and force either a surrender or truce. Nearly nightly raids occur over populated areas and incendiary bombs ignite warehouses and homes, lighting the way for following bombers, who drop high explosives in an indiscriminant manner. By May of 1941, over 43,000 will be killed across Britain and 1,400,000 people will be made homeless. Large numbers of children will be evacuated to the countryside. Coventry and Plymouth are also particularly badly bombed and most of Britain’s cities will also be attacked, including Manchester, Glasgow, and Liverpool.
 

 German planes
 making a bombing run.



  
   London fire fighters extinguish flames following
   an air raid during The Blitz. More than 43,000
   British men, women and children will perish.
September 16
Selective Service Act passed by Congress. First peacetime draft for military service.

October 9
John Winston Lennon is born in Liverpool, England (right, at fours years of age).

November 5
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is reelected; the first president to be elected three times.

ALSO IN 1940:

Walt Disney’s "Fantasia" opens in theatres. The breakthrough animated film features an eight-track streophonic classical music soundtrack, and is notable for an appearance by famed conductor Leopold Stokowski. Arguably the most famous scene in the film is a day dreaming Mickey Mouse battling an invincible and never-ending parade of anthropomorphic mops, buckets, and water in his title role of The Sorceror’s Apprentice.

The first automatic dishwasher is manufactured in the US.

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