Major world events – Tom's D-List World Camapign

WWII (Aug 23, 1939 – Dec 26, 1939)

Germany, since the early 1920’s had been building up aggression, racism and anti-semitism and with the rise of Adolph Hitler, its unstable, yet charismatic leader, it was only a matter of time until Germany once again looked upon the rest of the world with the covetous glare of a would-be conqueror.
Aug 23 1939 — Germany and Russia sign the Molotov-Ribbontrop Pact, an agreement of mutual non-aggression and mutual assistance, and divide up that region of Europe’s countries as they plan to invade and expand their respective borders. In this plan, Germany was to invade and capture the western third of Poland and Russia was to invade from the East on September 7th and capture the remaining two thirds. Then Russia was to move North and Germany was to move South and their respective occupations were to grow. At least that was the plan.
Sept 1 1939 — Germany invades Poland.
Sept 3 1939 — Adolph Hitler reneges on his agreement as he had always planned on doing and orders his troops to continue to push east and secure all of Poland.
Sept 5 1939 — Germany moves past the previously agreed upon stopping point.
Sept 6 1939 — Joseph Stalin demands an explanation. Hitler, fueled with the bravado of seeing his troops easily steam-roll over Poland tells Stalin that the plan has changed and Germany would next invade Latvia and Lithuania before moving to Scananavia and if Russia did anything to hinder this, they would be next.
Sept 7 1939 — Stalin never believed that Hitler would hold up his end of the bargain, so he launches an expertly prepared smear campaign against Hitler’s Germany. He also puts out a call to arms for Britain, Ireland, France, Scandinavia, Italy and the United States to join together to attack German airbases and help pin in German troops while Russia begins a serious frontal assault and comes to Poland’s aid.
Sept 14 1939 — Britain and Ireland join Russia in attacking German troops.
Sept 28 1939 — France joins Russia.
Sept 29 1939 — Scandinavia joins Russia.
Oct 31 1939 — The U.S. joins Russia.
Nov 18 1939 — Benito Mussolini reluctantly commits Italian forces and joins Russia in attacking German troops.
Dec 13 1939 — German troops are pushed back to their own borders
Dec 14 1939 — Stalin, now seen as the knight in shining armor, spearheading the efforts to save poor Poland and the rest of Europe from the evils of Hitler’s Germany, requests that the other Allied troops hold German troops in place while the USSR invades Germany. Those who were politically savvy at the time knew of the deal that Hitler and Stalin had first brokered and how Hitler reneged on it and they were not surprised by Stalin’s counter-move. Stalin was considered to be a far more stable political figure in power than Hitler was and the majority of world leaders were willing to go along with the Russian lies of ‘saving Poland’. Together, Allied forces kept the decimated German troops held firmly within their home borders as Soviet troops (who outnumbered the Nazis nearly 10 to 1) poured through Poland and into Germany. During this time, Stalin paid close attention to the details of his propaganda campaign and painted a superb picture of heroic Russia saving the Poles from Nazi tyranny. This included radio broadcasts, newspaper articles and most importantly a series of 50 paintings, mass-produced and distributed all over Europe. Each painting in the series depicted some variant of a Russian soldier rescuing a Polish citizen from the clutches of the Nazi war machine.
December 25 1939 — Russia pauses their attacks on Berlin until the 26th, but not because it was Christmas. Religious holidays had been forbidden in Russia since the Russian Revolution of 1917. Instead, they halted aggression for 24 hours so they could continue to play the role of honorable soldier giving their beaten enemy one last chance to take a breath and surrender peacefully.
December 26 1939 — By this time, almost all German troops had been killed, surrendered or fled the country. All that was left to do was to kill Adolph Hitler and his generals who were holed up in a bunker in Berlin. The Bunker was first built in 1934 and was expanded and reinforced in 1938 just in case things went awry with Hitler’s plan and a place to make a final stand was needed. The bunker was designed to withstand multiple bombing runs without breaking a sweat, but Soviet persistence, not to be underestimated, won out in the end. Stalin’s forces evacuated the civilians from the areas surrounding the bunker to a distance of two kilometers. He then sent in a Soviet heavy bomber. Making a glacially slow pass over the bunker in the interest of accuracy, the bomber dropped it’s ordinance; a single 8000 pound Russian LC-7b Bol’shoy Kulak (“Big Fist”) bomb. It was designed to crack open a bunker with ease and it struck directly on top of the one housing Adolph Hitler. The bomb made a respectable crater at ground zero, but it became apparent that the bunker survived. Stalin, unhappy with the results ordered another 99 bombing runs. They were spaced at 30 minute intervals to give time for the wind to clear the dust away giving the bombardiers as clear a targeting solution as possible. A little over two days later, a crater 100 meters deep and nearly 400 meters wide marked the location of Hitler’s final moments.
In the months that followed, Poland and Germany slowly recovered from the ravages of war. The Jews that were gathered and held in concentration camps during the years leading up to the war were freed and returned home. A statue of Joseph Stalin was placed in the central square of Warsaw where he is heralded as the champion of the Poles.
Stalin milked his fame for all it was worth and helped the USSR become a global superpower, second only to the US and he stayed in power until his poor health got the better of him. In the wee hours of March 1, 1953, he suffered a brain hemorrhage due to atherosclerosis that repeatedly caused him to slip into and out of a near comatose state until he finally died on March 5th. The following day, he was the guest of honor at the largest state funeral that Russia had ever seen.

Attack on Pearl Harbor (Dec 7 1941) and the subsequent defeat of Japan (Aug-Sep 1945)

The Japanese Emperor had been steadily expanding his country’s borders, first by invading China, then by moving into other, smaller territories, but on December 7, 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on European colonies in the Pacific and on Pearl Harbor. At first, it was heralded, and rightly so, a major tactical victory for the Japanese. Shortly thereafter it was recognised for what it was — a call to arms for the people of the United States to rise up and lay waste to Japan.
Japan had, months before (and in a few cases, years before), strong-armed other nations into non-aggression treaties with them and had more recently invaded smaller nations within their reach and in so doing, had effectively removed many of the allies that would have come to America’s aid. Great Britain and China were the only major allies to the US at this time and Japan, with their relentless attacks, managed to keep the three Allied nations off balance for nearly 3 and a half years.
During this time, the US struggled with the newest advancements in bomb technology. They had recruited a number of scientists that were forced to work for the former Nazi party, but work on what was code-named the Manhattan Project proceeded at a pace slower than what was anticipated. Work slowed further when several Soviet spies were discovered to have been working all along in the top-secret compound and security had to be completely restructured.
On June 25, 1945, after a session with the Joint Chiefs, President Roosevelt demanded a plan be devised, however radical, to put a halt to the war. On July 2, that plan was put into action. Five different types of ordinance were collected, arranged and in some cases redesigned specifically for enhancing the destructive potential of other ordinance that would be used for this endeavor. They were to be carried by the B-29 Superfortresses, which had gone into production 4 years earlier. It took over three weeks to collect and organize all of the bombs and aircraft, but by August 5, they were ready.
Three thousand, two hundred and eleven B-29’s made up the bulk of the attack force. On August 5, the coordinated attack began. China launched every plane it had in sacrificial move to deplete the Japanese strength in preparation for the US attack. The Chinese outnumbered the Japanese, but the Japanese were better pilots and ultimately, the Chinese lost over 80% of their planes in the distraction maneuver.
A short time before the Chinese launched their planes, half of the US bombers took off in waves from all along the southwest coast of the United States, formed-up mid flight and flew non-stop to Japan. Loaded with ordinance, they dropped their bombs over Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, just about the time when the Japanese fighters were returning from their victory over the Chinese. The Japanese fighters, being low on fuel were not able to engage the American bombers. Over the course of just 6 hours, Hiroshima was peppered with 15000 bombs of varying intensity and design. Explosions and fires erupted all through the region, killing nearly 130,000 people. Once relieved of the weight of their ordinance, the bombers ran their engines on extremely thin mixtures of fuel and made for Hawaii. A day later, on August 7, Nagasaki got the same treatment with even greater destructive results which caused the deaths of nearly 400,000 people.
Some of the US bombers were not able to make it back to friendly air bases. Of the US bomber flights, 541 planes had to be ditched in the ocean. Miraculously, only 145 men lost their lives after bailing out.
The Japanese, now having lost two of their major industrial cities, scrambled for a counter attack. On August 9, China, Great Britain and the US launched the third and final assault. Three mixed groups of US, Chinese and British warships attacked Japan in earnest. The first two prongs of the attack came from the Southwest and from the Notrhwest. Twelve hours later, the third prong entered from the Northeast.
Hundreds of warships converged on the small island nation of Japan and attacked it from various distances. US Battleships, having the greatest range, courtesy of their 24 inch primary batteries were able to shell shoreline gun emplacements very effectively from a distance of over 30 miles and as they closed the distance, they were able to decimate inland cities like Osaka and Tokyo. Chinese warships had especially good anti-aircraft weaponry and British warships were best suited for sustaining the medium and short range attacks on the remaining shoreline emplacements that were not destroyed by US Battleships. Together, they quite literally swept aside the remaining Japanese resistance and leveled every major city.
Japanese Emperor Hirohito, looking out upon the broken back of his nation, grudgingly resigned himself to the task of unconditional surrender to the Allies and made that very announcement on August 15. On September 2nd, 1945, Emperor Hirohito boarded the USS Missouri and took part in the formal ceremony in which he surrendered his sword to General Richard K Sutherland and signed the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, bringing the hostilities of The Japanese War, the world’s longest and bloodiest war to date, to a close.

The most significant events of the last 40+ years

1943 — Meteor storm peppers the globe with meteorites and other particulate matter which carry some kind of extra-terrestrial organism. Worldwide sickness persists for nearly nine days after the fragments hit. After the crisis is over, it is revealed that the organisms couldn’t survive on our planet, not even within a human body as host. Many people of Middle-eastern descent were unaffected for some reason, even in areas where conditions were the worst. World-wide deaths total nearly 800 million.
1945 — As a result of attempting to combat the health issues resulting from the meteor storm, numerous medical advancements come to fruition across the globe including the groundbreaking discovery of DNA. Also — First recorded appearance of a Metahuman. Sarah McCallister of Madison Wisconsin hits puberty and finds that she can change people’s emotional state by singing. Fear and prejudice ruin her early life. She spends the remainder of her childhood being studied by the US government; Their assumption — The meteor storm changed something in her DNA, Their goal — to discover what in her DNA is responsible for her power and duplicate it.
1946 — The United Nations is founded
1947 — Other Metahumans start to appear.
1948 — The World Metahuman Organization is created to help Metahumans deal with the realities of being different.
1949 — McCallister released from US confinement at the order of the UN and after long negotiations and reparations are paid to her, she becomes The Siren, the world’s first superhero. She is 18 years old.
1952 — Massive Cosmic Radiation storm sweeps through the solar system and scrapes one side of the Earth. Nations that are hit the hardest are Asian countries and parts of Russia. Over 500 million people dead. Future cancer rates increase by over 40% in those areas.
1954 — The World Health Organization declares that it will start a series of projects whose goal is to increase human resistance to disease and sickness. To accomplish this, more computing power is needed. The World Health Organization challenges the technology manufacturers of the world to create the third generation of computing hardware.
1955 — IBM unveils it’s breakthrough technology; the Integrated Polymorphic Logic Circuit. Number crunching power rockets forward propelling the world into a new age of computing. The New York Times predicts that IBM will become the world’s first Megacorp.
1956 — With access to more powerful computers, the World Health Organization announces the start of their new initiative: The Human Genome Project.
1957 — President Eisenhower makes his famous “Five year mission” speech in which he declares that the United States needs a challenge worthy of being the most powerful and most important nation on the planet and promises to go where no man has gone before. The United States will land a man on the moon within five years. This inspires the global space race.
1958 — Nasa’s official start of the Apollo Program.
1962 — Apollo 11 moon landing. Colonel Charles “Chuck” Denton, Colonel Arnold Handcock and Captain Daniel Fry land on the moon. Denton makes his historic moonwalk where he claims the moon in the name of the United States, plants the American flag while holding a martini glass and uses his favorite persimmon wood driver to knock a golf ball clear out of sight. In the fifteen years following Apollo 11, there are ten additional moon landings, six by America, three by Russia and one by the Chinese.
1964 –An unsafe drug research facility in Beijing suffers a breach of containment resulting in a large-scale sickness. Flu-like ailment evolves into pneumonia which kills nearly 400 million people across Asia. Those who prove immune to the disease are later found to have rare genetic abnormalities.
1965 — The Human Genome Project is complete.
1966 — World leaders vote the UN in as their highest global authority, the goal being to unite the countries of the world in one common direction for law, health, longevity and prosperity.
1967 — Inspired by the three events in the prior 20 years that caused such widespread deaths, the UN, in conjunction with the World Health Organization announces the first Global Dictate — The Global Miscegenation Act (or GMA). The GMA is introduced as a way to help strengthen the genes of world’s population through aggressive cross-pollination. Part one of the GMA focuses on introducing tax deductions and other cash incentives for those who would have children with someone outside of their traditional gene pool. Part two focuses on providing sperm and egg donations for those who need help facilitating pregnancy. Part three mandates and enforces childbearing in the event of a global catastrophe that leaves the world’s population significantly reduced. To date, GMA part three has only been enacted once; in the fall of 1983.
1969 — Clean Energy becomes popular overnight as advancements in Fusion reactor technology makes electricity more affordable.
1970 — Fusion power on the rise across the globe. Scientific American Magazine predicts that fossil fuels will be obsolete within 25 years.
1971 — Gasoline-electric hybrid engines erupt onto the world stage. Oil consumption drops in earnest. The Middle-East’s now dwindling economy causes tensions to rise dramatically in that region.
1974 — Supervillain The Wireless Wizard hacks into numerous international banks and changes the code to allow electronic deposits of paper money by taking a picture of the front and the back of the bill. Partnering with dozens of criminal organizations, they fraudulently deposited over $80 Trillion in a 72 hour time period. The ‘deposited’ money is then used to buy and sell properties and commodities, effectively laundering the transactions. The economies of America, Europe and Asia take a serious body-blow from this activity. The UN, in order to set right the economies of most of the world, invalidate the Wireless Wizard’s damage by invoking a bureaucratic fiat which voids out all of the world’s physical currency while instituting a virtual, world-wide universal currency named Credits. In the months that follow, almost all of the fraudulent transactions authored by The Wireless Wizard and his associates are uncovered, eventually leaving the global economy stable once more.
1975 — The fourth generation Fusion reactor, the Culverson-Capshaw design is released to the global community. Construction sites for power plants that will produce inexpensive Fusion-based electricity spring up all over the globe.
1976 — The price of oil plummets to an all-time low due to lack of demand and is predicted to continue to decline another 5% per year for another ten years.
1977 — OPEC countries rise up as one and demand a halt to Fusion power across the globe. They are ignored. They attempt political strong-arming. They threaten embargos of other countries’ products. They threaten to invade neighboring countries starting with Israel. The UN firmly states that Fusion power will continue to be developed for the good of the planet. OPEC threatens nuclear missile launch against the United States, Italy and Germany (the three manufacturers of essential Fusion reactor parts). The UN immediately conveines. Twenty-one hours later the UN orders OPEC to stand down or they will take steps in order to keep the peace and in an unprecedented threat of force, 33 of the world’s nations point their ordinance at Saudi Arabia and their OPEC allies. In a childish response, OPEC cuts off petroleum to Israel and executes a series of assaults which destroy Israeli oil reserves.
1978 — Israel starts construction of their Yusef Ariel fusion power plant. OPEC warns them to stop or they will invade. The UN lays down sanctions against the OPEC countries and attempts to diffuse the situation. Talks drag out for months. Israel continues to suffer without any appreciable amount of electrical power.
1979 — The Arab Nuclear exchange (which later came to be known as the 80-minute war). Israel completes the bare minimum level of construction necessary in order to run a brief 10% power test of Yusef Ariel. OPEC demands Israel desists and postures for an attack. UN forces prepare their counter-attack. OPEC demands Israel stop or they will be destroyed. Israel calls their bluff and politely declines. A single missile is then launched at Israel from a troop deployment northwest of Riyadh. The spike of radio chatter that follows confirms that it was one soldier acting alone to fire the missile, but by the time this is discovered, both sides have committed their ordinance. UN troops attempt to shoot down missiles bound for Israel while launching counter-attacks against OPEC forces. Israel is hit with hundreds of conventional warheads and 8 50 Kiloton tactical missiles. OPEC countries are hit with over 22000 conventional warheads and 163 tactical nuclear strikes totaling just under 20 megatons of blast yield, making this the world’s first and only nuclear exchange. October 5th, 1979 goes down in history as the day that Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Qumar and Saudi Arabia are turned into sheets of glass claiming 200 million lives. Yemen, Oman, Cyprus, Lebanon, Egypt and parts of the Sudan are rendered inhospitable for the next 50 years due to fallout and their refugees are relocated to neighboring countries.
1982 — A swarm of mind-controlling locusts, later discovered to originally have been genetically engineered by Supervillain The Evil Overlord, gets loose and successfully takes over the planet. The telepathic bugs excrete an opioid-like chemical to keep the host pliable. While humanity is happy and high the old and the infirm, who are useless to the swarm, are left to die, reducing the world population from 11.6 Billion to 8.4 billion. The rest of the human population is used by the bugs to clear out the bodies, stockpile food resources and build “swarm towers”. A side effect of the swarm taking over the world was that since insects do not overeat nor do they engage in sloth, the locust-controlled human population of the world becomes much more healthy. Almost all physical ailments treatable with diet and exercise disappear when people lose their excess weight.
1983 — Superheroes Mechani-Cal and AndyDroid who avoided the locusts by being in their underground base at the time of the bug invasion, execute their plan to take the world back from the bugs. They capture the Olympian Aphrodite and kill the locust attached to her neck. After 3 weeks of withdrawals from the mind-controlling chemicals the bugs produce, Aphrodite recovers enough to assist them with their plan. Together, they capture the Olympian Hermes and repeat the withdrawal process on her. The four then break in to Mount Olympus and while three of them hold off the rest of the remaining mind-controlled Olympians at a choke point, Aphrodite enters Evidence Lockup, uses a confiscated mind-control machine and makes all of the people in the United States rip the locusts from their necks and kill them. This results in mass chemical-dependency withdrawal, which Aphrodite must mitigate via the mind-control machine. Once the remaining Olympians are incapacitated, Mechani-Cal and AndyDroid boost the signal of the mind-control Machine so Aphrodite can free the rest of the world. It takes five months to fully rid the earth of the mind-controlling bugs. Some people cannot physically handle the shock of being stripped of the opioid chemicals cold turkey and die. Some have developed such an addiction to the chemicals that they suicide rather than go through heavy withdrawal and persistent post-addiction cravings. World population drops to 5.7 Billion. Since over 50% of the world’s population has died in the preceding 8 months, The Global Miscegenation Act Part Three is invoked and people all over the globe start working on getting pregnant. Drug rehab clinics and support groups spring up in record numbers.

1984 — In the swamps of Louisiana, the previously unknown Supervillain TyranaSorcerer-Rex comes out of a 65-million-year-old hibernation and attempts to – wait for it – take over the planet. His lizard magic erupts all over the United States and Mexico changing people into prehistoric reptiles. The Gulf Coast Guardians Superhero team resists the effects of the magic just long enough to launch every weapon they have at the magic-using kaiju and just barely manage to kill it. Once it’s dead, people who were changed into lizards revert back to being human, but some were unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, like travelling in airplanes, driving cars on the highway and lying on operating tables. Death totals are near 12 million.
1985 — Junior Superhero The Sidewalk Surfer chases Supervillain The Cartoonist to an alternate Earth and successfully returns with her prisoner. The Cartoonist is incarcerated in The Pit; a supermax prison for powered villains.
1986 — Present day. Currently, the global metahuman population is 583. Sixty-seven of those are here in North America. Also this year, the largest spike in parental support groups ever recorded occurs as three billion toddlers collectively enter their Terrible Two’s.