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April 18, 1945

Revisit the news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.

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Headlines from April 18, 1945

Notable Births

1945Bernard Arcand, Canadian anthropologist and author (died 2009)[โ€ ]

Bernard Arcand was a French-Canadian anthropologist, author and communicator. He was for several decades a professor of the anthropology department of Laval University.

Notable Deaths

John Ambrose Fleming

1945John Ambrose Fleming, English physicist and engineer, invented the vacuum tube (born 1849)[โ€ ]

Sir John Ambrose Fleming was a British electrical engineer and physicist. He is known for inventing the vacuum tube, designing the radio transmitter with which the first transatlantic radio transmission was made, and establishing the right-hand rule used in physics.

Ernie Pyle

1945Ernie Pyle, American journalist and soldier (born 1900)[โ€ ]

Ernest Taylor Pyle was an American journalist and war correspondent who is best known for his stories about ordinary American soldiers during World War II. Pyle is also notable for the columns he wrote as a roving human-interest reporter from 1935 through 1941 for the Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate that earned him wide acclaim for his simple accounts of ordinary people across North America. When the United States entered World War II, he lent the same distinctive, folksy style of his human-interest stories to his wartime reports from the European theater (1942โ€“44) and Pacific theater (1945). Pyle won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his newspaper accounts of "dogface" infantry soldiers from a first-person perspective. He was killed by enemy fire on Iejima during the Battle of Okinawa.

Historical Events

Bomber

1945World War II: Over 1,000 bombers attack the small island of Heligoland, Germany.[โ€ ]

A bomber is a military combat aircraft that utilizes air-to-ground weaponry to drop bombs, launch torpedoes, or deploy air-launched cruise missiles.

Italian resistance movement

1945Italian resistance movement: In Turin, despite the harsh repressive measures adopted by Nazi-fascists, a great pre-insurrectional strike begins.[โ€ ]

The Italian Resistance, or simply La Resistenza, consisted of all the Italian resistance groups who fought the occupying forces of Nazi Germany and the fascist collaborationists of the Italian Social Republic during the Second World War in Italy from 1943 to 1945. As a diverse anti-fascist and anti-Nazist movement and organisation, the Resistenza opposed Nazi Germany and its Fascist puppet state regime, the Italian Social Republic, which the Germans created following the Nazi German invasion and military occupation of Italy by the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS from 8 September 1943 until 25 April 1945.