1938 General Historical Events

General Historical Events

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January 4

*The British government announced that any partition of Palestine to create a Jewish homeland would have to be postponed.  This announcement provoked terrorist attacks during the ensuing months.

January 21

*Wolfman Jack  (b. Robert Weston Smith, January 21, 1938, Brooklyn, New York - d. July 1, 1995, Belvidere, North Carolina) was born in Brooklyn, New York.  Wolfman Jack was a rock-and-roll radio disc jockey whose gravel-throated voice and wolf howls made him a cult personality on the nighttime airwaves until he was elevated to international fame after appearing in the 1973 film classic American Graffiti.

February 4

*John Baird gave the first demonstration of color television at the Dominion Theatre in London.

February 23

*Oil was discovered in Kuwait.

March 6

*Japanese troops advancing along the Hangchow Railway through Shansi province reached the Yellow River.

March 14

*Hitler annexed Austria to "protect" ten million Germans living outside the Reich's frontiers.  

April 10

*An Austrian plebiscite showed the nearly 100 percent of Austrians desired union with Germany.

September 29

*Britain and France appeased Hitler at Munich by allowing him to take the Sudetenland (in effect part of Czechoslovakia.

*Arab extremists seized Bethlehem and part of Jerusalem.

October 10

*British troops retook Bethlehem.  

October 18

*British troops retook Jerusalem.

October 21

*The Japanese seized Guangzhou.

October 25

*The Japanese took Hankow.

November 7

*Herschel Grynzpan, a 17 year old Polish Jew, assassinated Edouard von Rath, a German official at the Paris embassy.  

November 9

*The Nazis used the November 7 assassination of Edouard von Rath as an excuse for a pogrom, the worst in German history.  In the Kristalnacht riots, Jewish shop windows were smashed, synagogues were looted and up to 30,000 Jews were carried off to concentration camps.  

November 10

*Kemal Ataturk, President of Turkey, died at the age of 57.  The 54 year old Ismet Inonu was elected to succeed Ataturk.

December 18 

*The German chemist Otto Hahn succeeded in splitting the uranium atom, releasing energy.

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*Orson Welles caused widespread panic with his realistic radio broadcast of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds.

*Isak Dinesen wrote and published Out of Africa.

*Thornton Wilder was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his play Our Town.