1937
Japan invades China at Marco Polo Bridge
A small firefight outside Beijing between Japanese and Chinese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge escalated within days into full-scale war across the Chinese mainland. Shanghai fell after months of brutal urban combat, then Nanjing, where Japanese soldiers committed atrocities that would haunt East Asian memory for generations. The Pacific war had begun, though most Europeans did not yet notice.
Guernica bombed
On market day, German Condor Legion planes flying for Franco dropped high explosive and incendiaries on the Basque town of Guernica, machine-gunning those who ran. A few hundred civilians died and a modern horror was born: the deliberate aerial bombing of a town to break civilian morale. Picasso painted it within months.
Hindenburg burns at Lakehurst
The great German zeppelin, at the end of an Atlantic crossing, suddenly caught fire as it moored in New Jersey. Thirty-six died. A radio reporter sobbed, Oh, the humanity, into his microphone. In thirty-two seconds the airship age ended and its successor, the commercial airliner, prepared to take over the skies.
Amelia Earhart vanishes
On the last leg of her attempt to fly around the world, Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific trying to find tiny Howland Island. The US Navy searched for two weeks. No wreckage was definitively found. One of the century's most famous women had dissolved into the ocean at forty.
Rape of Nanjing
After capturing the Chinese capital, Japanese soldiers embarked on six weeks of mass murder, rape, and looting. Perhaps two hundred thousand Chinese civilians died. John Rabe, a German businessman and Nazi Party member, set up a safety zone that saved thousands. The atrocity haunted Sino-Japanese relations for the rest of the century.
Golden Gate Bridge opens
After four years of construction across a treacherous strait, the longest suspension bridge in the world opened to pedestrian traffic at six in the morning. Two hundred thousand people crossed on foot the first day. The red-orange bridge became, within a decade, one of the most photographed human objects on earth.