1943 History, Facts, and Trivia

Quick Facts from 1943

World-Changing Event: The Battle of Stalingrad ended on February 2, 1943, with the surrender of the German 6th Army — the decisive turning point of World War II on the Eastern Front and the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany
Food-Changing Event: Nachos were invented around 1943 by Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya at the Victory Club in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico, for a group of American military wives who arrived after the kitchen had closed. He improvised with what was available: tortilla chips, cheese, and jalapeños. The world has not looked back.
Influential Songs: Paper Doll by The Mills Brothers, Oh! What a Beautiful Mornin’ from Oklahoma!, and White Christmas by Bing Crosby
Must-See Movies: The Ox-Bow Incident, Shadow of a Doubt, Lassie Come Home, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Cabin in the Sky, and The Song of Bernadette
The Most Famous Person in America: Betty Grable
Notable Books: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, and The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
12 quart-sized Mason jars: 98 cents; war bonds: $18.75 (redeemable for $25 in 10 years); a can of Campbell’s soup: 12 cents
U.S. Life Expectancy: Males 62.4 years; Females 64.4 years
Chinese Zodiac: Year of the Goat, associated with creativity, gentleness, and a capacity for endurance — qualities Americans needed considerably
The Conversation: Did you hear Oklahoma! yet? And what do you think they’ll do about Italy?

Top Ten Baby Names of 1943

Girls: Mary, Barbara, Patricia, Linda, Carol
Boys: James, Robert, John, William, Richard

The Stars

Ingrid Bergman, Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, Lena Horne, Veronica Lake, Hedy Lamarr, Carole Landis, Brenda Marshall, Jane Russell, Alexis Smith, Gene Tierney, Lana Turner

Betty Grable’s legs were insured by Lloyd’s of London for $1 million in a publicity arrangement that made her the most reproduced pin-up image of the war. Her poster was estimated to be on the wall of more military barracks than any other image in history.

The Quotes

“Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” — Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943. Watson’s prognostication has not aged especially well.

Time Magazine’s Man of the Year

George Marshall, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff who organized and directed the Allied military effort, is recognized as the organizational architect of American victory in World War II. He later designed the Marshall Plan for European postwar reconstruction and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.

Miss America

Jean Bartel, Los Angeles, CA

We Lost in 1943

Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American inventor and electrical engineer whose contributions to the development of alternating current, radio transmission, and dozens of other fields were foundational to modern electrical technology, died January 7, 1943, at age 86, alone in Room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan. He died nearly penniless. The FBI seized his papers and personal effects immediately after his death. Many were eventually transferred to the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade. His contribution to modern civilization is incalculable and was significantly underrecognized during his lifetime.

Sergei Rachmaninoff, the Russian composer and pianist whose Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Piano Concerto No. 2, and other works remain among the most performed in the classical repertoire, died March 28, 1943, at age 69, in Beverly Hills, from melanoma. He had fled Russia after the 1917 revolution and had spent his last years in the United States.

Born in 1943

George Harrison — February 25, 1943, in Liverpool, England. The lead guitarist of The Beatles.

Mick Jagger — July 26, 1943, in Dartford, England. He and Keith Richards would form the Rolling Stones in 1962.

Robert De Niro — August 17, 1943, in New York City.

Jim Croce — January 10, 1943, in Philadelphia. He died in a plane crash in September 1973 at age 30.

Catherine Deneuve — October 22, 1943, in Paris.

America in 1943 — The Context

Franklin D. Roosevelt was in his third term, governing a country fully mobilized for war. Unemployment had effectively reached zero — factories and shipyards were running around the clock and every available worker was employed. Women had entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers: six million women worked in defense industry jobs previously closed to them. The image of Rosie the Riveter, painted by Norman Rockwell for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post in May 1943, captured the reality of the time.

Rationing covered gasoline, meat, butter, cheese, shoes, canned food, and cooking oils. Victory gardens grew an estimated 40% of the country’s vegetables. Sliced bread was temporarily banned as a conservation measure. War bonds were sold at movie theaters, schools, and shops. The Times Square New Year’s Eve ball went dark for the second consecutive year due to wartime blackout requirements.

The Great Depression officially ended on December 4, 1943, when Roosevelt closed the Works Progress Administration — its mission now obsolete because the war had eliminated unemployment. The economic transformation that the New Deal had only partially achieved, the war accomplished completely.

The Battle of Stalingrad

The German 6th Army’s surrender at Stalingrad on February 2, 1943, ended the most catastrophic military defeat in German history and the bloodiest single battle in human history. More than two million soldiers and civilians died during the siege, which lasted from August 1942 through February 1943. German Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrendered against Hitler’s explicit orders. He was the first German field marshal ever to be captured.

The battle’s outcome destroyed the myth of German military invincibility and gave the Soviet Red Army the strategic initiative on the Eastern Front. From Stalingrad forward, Germany fought a war of retreat. Hitler never visited the front again.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

On April 19, 1943, Jewish fighters inside the Warsaw Ghetto, approximately 700 poorly armed men and women of the Jewish Combat Organization and the Jewish Military Union, launched an armed uprising against the German forces who had come to liquidate the remaining residents of the ghetto. The fighters held off the German forces for 27 days, longer than some entire European countries had resisted the German military, before the ghetto was completely destroyed.

The uprising was the largest single act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. The commander of the Jewish Combat Organization, Mordecai Anielewicz, died in the fighting. An estimated 13,000 ghetto residents were killed during the uprising. The remaining survivors were deported to extermination camps.

The Allied Turning Point

The Allied invasion of Sicily — Operation Husky — began July 10, 1943, with approximately 160,000 Allied troops landing in the largest amphibious operation in history to that point, exceeding D-Day in scale. The campaign concluded on August 17. Italy was next.

Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, was arrested on July 25, 1943, by order of the Italian King, following a vote of no confidence by the Fascist Grand Council. He had ruled Italy since 1922. Italy signed an armistice with the Allies on September 8, 1943, and German forces immediately occupied the northern part of the country. Allied forces began fighting their way up the Italian peninsula.

The Battle of Kursk, fought July 5-23, 1943, in the Soviet Union, was the largest tank battle in military history, involving approximately 6,000 tanks, 4,000 aircraft, and two million soldiers across a 3,600-square-mile front. The Soviets repelled the last major German offensive on the Eastern Front and began their sustained westward advance that would not end until Berlin.

Pop Culture Facts and History

Oklahoma! opened on Broadway on March 31, 1943, at the St. James Theatre, with music by Richard Rodgers and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. It ran for 2,212 performances. It was the first great integrated American musical — the first in which the songs, dances, and story were conceived together as a unified whole rather than assembled separately. Its choreography, by Agnes de Mille, which incorporated ballet vocabulary into theatrical dance, permanently changed American musical staging. The opening number — a lone cowboy voice singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'” with no introduction — was considered a radical departure from conventional musical theater practice. It was a radical departure that worked.

Casablanca had been released in November 1942 and was still dominating theaters in early 1943. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 15th Academy Awards on March 4, 1943. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman were at their most magnetic. The film was made under wartime conditions with an unfinished script — the actors reportedly did not know until the last days of filming which character Ilsa would choose. The final scene was written on the day it was filmed.

Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post on May 29, 1943 — a strapping, overalled, muscled woman holding a riveting gun across her lap with a sandwich at her side and Mein Kampf under her foot. It became the defining image of American women’s wartime industrial contribution. The song Rosie the Riveter had already been recorded in January 1943. The intersection of song and image produced one of the most enduring icons in American cultural history.

The Manhattan Project’s weapons design laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico — Project Y, directed by J. Robert Oppenheimer — began operations on January 1, 1943. The laboratory’s mission: design and build an atomic bomb before Germany did. Approximately 3,000 personnel and their families eventually lived at Los Alamos under conditions of strict secrecy. The town did not officially exist. Mail was addressed to “P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe.”

Penicillin was mass-produced for the first time in 1943, following Alexander Fleming’s discovery of its antibiotic properties in 1928 and the isolation of usable quantities by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain in 1940. American pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, developed fermentation methods that dramatically scaled production. By D-Day in June 1944, enough penicillin was available to treat all Allied casualties who needed it. Deaths from infected wounds, which had accounted for a substantial proportion of military mortality in World War I, dropped dramatically.

The ENIAC computer was contracted by the U.S. Army to the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering in May 1943. The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer was designed to calculate artillery firing tables. It was completed in 1945, at which point it was the world’s first general-purpose electronic digital computer. It weighed 30 tons, occupied 1,800 square feet, and contained 17,468 vacuum tubes.

Scuba diving was born in 1943 when French naval officer Jacques-Yves Cousteau and engineer Émile Gagnan developed the Aqua-Lung, a demand regulator that provided air to a diver at ambient pressure, allowing free movement underwater without a surface air supply. Cousteau and Gagnan patented the device in 1943. Commercial production and marketing began after the war. The device opened the ocean floor to human exploration on a scale previously impossible.

Deep-dish pizza was created in 1943 when Ike Sewell and Ric Riccardo opened Pizzeria Uno in Chicago, introducing a thick-crusted, heavily topped pizza baked in a deep pan. It was distinct from the thinner Italian-American pizzas then common in New York and elsewhere. Chicago deep-dish has been a matter of passionate regional pride and national argument ever since.

The Zoot Suit Riots erupted in Los Angeles from June 3-8, 1943, when large groups of off-duty sailors and soldiers attacked Mexican-American teenagers wearing zoot suits — the wide-shouldered, high-waisted, baggy-trousered outfits that had become a symbol of Latino youth culture and a visible statement of identity. The attackers stripped the suits from their wearers and beat them. Police arrested the victims. The riots highlighted the racial tensions of the wartime home front and the degree to which Mexican Americans remained outside the shared national narrative of wartime sacrifice. Eleanor Roosevelt described the riots as “race riots.” The Los Angeles Times described them as boys behaving like boys.

The Detroit Race Riot of June 20-22, 1943, was one of the most violent racial clashes in American history, killing 34 people — 25 of them Black — and injuring hundreds. It was triggered by competition for wartime housing and jobs and by the provocations of white workers who struck rather than accept Black coworkers promoted alongside them at Ford and other plants. Federal troops were eventually deployed to restore order.

Leonard Bernstein made his conducting debut with the New York Philharmonic on November 14, 1943, substituting at the last minute for ailing principal conductor Bruno Walter. He was 25 years old. The performance received front-page coverage in The New York Times — exceptionally rare for a classical music debut. Bernstein had conducted without any rehearsal with the orchestra. He went on to become one of the most celebrated conductors and composers in American musical history.

Congressman Andrew May of Kentucky, a member of the House Military Affairs Committee, disclosed at a press conference in June 1943 that Japanese depth charges were detonating too shallow to sink American submarines. The remarks were widely reported in American newspapers. Japanese military forces read the reports, adjusted their depth charge settings, and subsequently sank an estimated 800 American sailors. May was later investigated and convicted of bribery in an unrelated matter.

The Four Chaplains — Methodist minister George Fox, Reform Rabbi Alexander Goode, Roman Catholic priest John Washington, and Reformed Church minister Clark Poling — were among the 672 people who died when the U.S. Army Transport Dorchester was torpedoed in the North Atlantic on February 3, 1943. When life jackets ran out, the four chaplains gave theirs to soldiers. They were last seen standing arm in arm on the sinking deck, praying. It was one of the most celebrated acts of selfless heroism of the war.

PT-109, the patrol torpedo boat commanded by Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, was rammed and sunk by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri in the Solomon Islands on August 2, 1943. Two crew members were killed. Kennedy, who had a pre-existing back injury, towed a badly burned crew member three miles to an island by holding the man’s life jacket strap in his teeth for five hours. He was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal and a Purple Heart. The story of PT-109 became a central part of his political identity when he ran for president in 1960.

Kryptonite was invented in 1943 as a plot device in the Superman radio serial, specifically to allow Bud Collyer, the voice of Superman, to take occasional time off. Producers created a substance capable of incapacitating Superman, allowing other cast members to carry the episodes while Collyer rested. Kryptonite was later incorporated into the comic books and has remained Superman’s primary vulnerability ever since. Its origin was purely logistical.

The first person ever formally diagnosed with autism was Donald Triplett of Forest, Mississippi, in 1943, when psychiatrist Leo Kanner published his landmark paper describing eleven children with a previously unrecognized developmental condition he called “early infantile autism.” Triplett, Kanner’s Case 1, had been brought to Johns Hopkins at age 5. He went on to graduate from college, work as a bank teller, travel the world, and play golf into his 80s. He died in 2023 at age 87.

The Conical Bra was designed for Jane Russell in the 1943 film The Outlaw by Howard Hughes, who was dissatisfied with how conventional brassières looked on camera. Hughes designed the bra himself. Russell later said she never actually wore it. Hughes had designed a garment that its intended wearer declined to use, apparently without his knowledge. The bra now resides in the Smithsonian.

Bea Arthur, who later played Dorothy Zbornak on The Golden Girls, was a U.S. Marine from 1943 to 1945, reaching the rank of staff sergeant before receiving an honorable discharge. She served as a typist and truck driver. She was one of the first women to enlist in the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve.

The Pentagon was completed on January 15, 1943, in Arlington, Virginia, after 16 months of construction. At 6.5 million square feet, it was the largest office building in the world. It contained 17.5 miles of corridors and 3.7 million square feet of office space, and was designed so that any two points in the building were reachable within 7 minutes. Construction workers had been so numerous during peak construction that a McDonald ‘s-sized hot dog stand inside the building reportedly sold 1,800 lunches a day.

Payroll withholding tax was introduced in the United States on July 1, 1943, as a system under which employers deduct income taxes from workers’ paychecks before the money reaches the employee. Before 1943, taxpayers paid their annual tax bill in a lump sum. The withholding system was introduced as a wartime revenue measure and was so convenient for the government that it has remained the standard method of income tax collection ever since.

The Great Depression officially ended on December 4, 1943, when Roosevelt shut down the Works Progress Administration, whose mission of providing employment during the Depression had been rendered obsolete by wartime full employment.

The RMS Queen Mary carried 16,683 American troops from New York to Great Britain on a single crossing — still the record for the most passengers ever transported on a single vessel.

World War II News

Stalin’s son, Yakov Dzhugashvili, had been captured by the Germans in 1941. In 1943, the Germans proposed trading him for German Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, who had been captured at Stalingrad. Stalin’s response was: “I will not trade a marshal for a lieutenant.” His son died in German captivity in April 1943, under disputed circumstances.

The Bengal Famine of 1943 killed an estimated two to three million people in British-controlled India. The famine resulted from a combination of factors, including the disruption of rice imports from Japanese-occupied Burma, military food requisitioning, a cyclone, and British colonial policies that prioritized exports and military provisioning over local food needs. Winston Churchill’s wartime government has been criticized by historians for decisions that worsened the famine. Churchill’s own recorded comments about the famine were not sympathetic to its victims.

Nobel Prize Winners

Physics — Otto Stern for his contribution to the development of the molecular ray method and his discovery of the magnetic moment of the proton
Chemistry — George de Hevesy for his work on the use of isotopes as tracers in the study of chemical processes; tracer techniques became fundamental to biochemistry, medicine, and environmental science
Medicine — Carl Peter Henrik Dam and Edward Adelbert Doisy; Dam for his discovery of vitamin K; Doisy for his discovery of the chemical nature of vitamin K; both prizes had been delayed from 1943 due to the war
Literature — not awarded in 1943
Peace — not awarded in 1943

Broadway in 1943

Oklahoma! opened March 31, 1943, at the St. James Theatre, and ran 2,212 performances. It was the first Rodgers and Hammerstein collaboration, the first fully integrated American musical, and the first to run more than 2,000 performances. It changed the form permanently.

The Voice of the Turtle opened December 8, 1943, at the Morosco Theatre. A three-character romantic comedy set against the backdrop of wartime New York, it ran 1,557 performances.

Top Movies of 1943

This Is the Army
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The Song of Bernadette
Stage Door Canteen
Star-Spangled Rhythm
Casablanca
Cabin in the Sky
The Outlaw
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man
Lassie Come Home

Casablanca won Best Picture at the March 1943 ceremony. Its 1942 release and 1943 Oscar win made it the dominant cinematic presence of the period. Shadow of a Doubt, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, was considered by Hitchcock himself to be his personal favorite of his films.

Popular and Best-Selling Books of 1943

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn — Betty Smith
The Apostle — Sholem Asch
The Fountainhead — Ayn Rand
The Human Comedy — William Saroyan
The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Mrs. Parkington — Louis Bromfield
The Robe — Lloyd C. Douglas
The Valley of Decision — Marcia Davenport

The Little Prince was published in New York on April 6, 1943, in both English and French editions simultaneously; Saint-Exupéry had written it there while in exile, unable to return to his occupied homeland. He died in July 1944 when his reconnaissance plane disappeared over the Mediterranean. The Little Prince has since been translated into over 300 languages and dialects and is the most translated book in French.

The Fountainhead was rejected by twelve publishers before Bobbs-Merrill accepted it. It sold modestly at first, then became a perennial bestseller through word of mouth. It has never gone out of print.

Biggest Pop Artists of 1943

The Mills Brothers, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Harry James, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Dinah Shore, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimmy Dorsey, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, Count Basie

Frank Sinatra had left the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra in 1942 and was becoming a solo phenomenon in 1943. His appearances at the Paramount Theatre in New York caused reactions among teenage girls — shrieking, fainting, torn clothing — that had never previously been associated with a musical performer and that prefigured Beatlemania by twenty years. The FBI received a letter in August 1943 alleging that Sinatra’s popularity was being used to “prepare the masses to accept a new Hitler.” Hoover placed Sinatra under surveillance. It continued for forty years.

Sports Champions of 1943

World Series: New York Yankees defeated the St. Louis Cardinals 4-1; the wartime Yankees roster was somewhat depleted by military service, but they managed
NFL Champions: Chicago Bears defeated the Washington Redskins 41-21; the wartime NFL had merged the Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles into the “Steagles” due to player shortages
Stanley Cup: Detroit Red Wings defeated the Boston Bruins 4-0
U.S. Open Golf: not held due to World War II
U.S. Open Tennis: Men/Women: Lt. Joseph R. Hunt / Pauline Betz; Hunt was the only active service member to win the U.S. Open; he was killed in a naval air training accident in February 1945
Wimbledon: not held due to World War II
NCAA Football Champions: Notre Dame
NCAA Basketball Champions: Wyoming
Kentucky Derby: Count Fleet — won the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, and Belmont Stakes to complete the Triple Crown, the third Triple Crown winner in five years
Boston Marathon: Gerard Cote, 2:28:25

Sports Highlight: Count Fleet’s 1943 Triple Crown was completed at the Belmont Stakes with a 25-length victory — the largest margin in Belmont history at that point. He is considered one of the greatest racehorses of the 20th century. The Steagles — the merged Philadelphia Eagles/Pittsburgh Steelers franchise- finished 5-4-1 in 1943. Both franchises resumed independent operations in 1944.

FAQs: 1943 History, Facts, and Trivia

Q: What was the significance of the Battle of Stalingrad?
A: The German 6th Army’s surrender on February 2, 1943, ended the bloodiest single battle in human history and marked the decisive turning point of World War II. It destroyed Germany’s capacity for strategic offensive operations on the Eastern Front and began the Soviet advance that ended at Berlin.

Q: What was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising?
A: Beginning April 19, 1943, approximately 700 poorly armed Jewish fighters inside the Warsaw Ghetto held off the German liquidation forces for 27 days — the largest act of Jewish armed resistance during the Holocaust. The ghetto was subsequently destroyed, and most of its surviving residents were deported to extermination camps.

Q: Why was Oklahoma! historically significant?
A: It was the first fully integrated American musical — the first in which songs, story, dance, and staging were conceived as unified elements rather than assembled separately. Agnes de Mille’s choreography brought ballet vocabulary to Broadway dance. It established the template for the American musical as an art form.

Q: What was Kryptonite’s actual origin?
A: A 1943 plot device in the Superman radio serial, created so that voice actor Bud Collyer could take time off. A substance that could incapacitate Superman allowed other cast members to carry on episodes without him. It was subsequently incorporated into the comic books and has remained Superman’s signature vulnerability ever since.

Q: What happened to PT-109 and JFK?
A: Lieutenant Kennedy’s patrol torpedo boat was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer in the Solomon Islands on August 2, 1943. Kennedy towed a badly burned crew member to safety by holding his life jacket strap in his teeth for five hours. He received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal and a Purple Heart. The story became central to his presidential campaign in 1960.

Q: When was autism first diagnosed?
A: Psychiatrist Leo Kanner formally described the condition in a 1943 paper based on eleven children, including Donald Triplett of Mississippi, as “Case 1.” Triplett lived until 2023, reaching age 87. He was the first documented case of autism in history.

Q: What were the Steagles?
A: The combined Pittsburgh Steelers/Philadelphia Eagles NFL franchise of 1943 was necessitated by player shortages as rosters were depleted by military service. They finished 5-4-1. Both teams returned to independent operation in 1944.

Q: What did the FBI think about Frank Sinatra?
A: In August 1943, J. Edgar Hoover received a letter claiming Sinatra’s popularity was being used to prepare Americans to accept a fascist leader. Hoover placed Sinatra under FBI surveillance. The surveillance continued for approximately 40 years.

More 1943 Facts & History Resources:

Most Popular Baby Names (BabyCenter.com)
Popular and Notable Books (popculture.us)
Broadway Shows that Opened in 1943
1943 Calendar, courtesy of Time and Date.com
Fact Monster
Forties Nostalgia
1940s, Infoplease.com World History
1943 in Movies (according to IMDB)
Retrowaste Vintage Culture
1940s Slang
Wikipedia 1943
WW II Timeline: 1943