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File:1940s decade montage.png|Above title bar: events during World War II (1939-1945):

• From left to right: Troops in an LCVP landing craft approaching Omaha Beach on D-Day;
• Adolf Hitler visits Paris, soon after the Battle of France;
• The Holocaust occurs as Nazi Germany carries out a programme of systematic state-sponsored genocide, during which approximately six million European Jews are killed;
• The Japanese attack on the American naval base of Pearl Harbor launches the United States into the war;
• An Observer Corps spotter scans the skies of London during the Battle of Britain and The Blitz;
• The creation of the Manhattan Project leads to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first uses of nuclear weapons, which kill over a quarter million people and lead to the Japanese surrender;
• Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signs the Instrument of Surrender on behalf of the Japanese Government, on board , effectively ending the war.

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  Below title bar: events after World War II: From left to right:
• The Declaration of the State of Israel in 1948;
• The Nuremberg trials are held after the war, in which the prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the defeated Nazi Germany are prosecuted;
• After the war, the United States carries out the Marshall Plan, which aims at rebuilding Western Europe;
• ENIAC, the world's first general-purpose electronic computer.

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