German U-boats begin a massive attack on Allied ships along the east coast. From January to June, more than seventy ships are sunk off the coast of North Carolina.

January 20

At the Wannsee Conference outside Berlin, Nazi officials plan the “Final Solution” of the Jews in Europe.

February 23

A Japanese submarine fires on an oil refinery near Santa Barbara, California.

The explosion of an army munitions truck near Selma in Johnston County kills seven people and destroys or damages two-thirds of the town’s residential and business structures.

March 18

The War Relocation Board is established. It will hold more than 120,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps.

April 10

The Bataan Death March begins, resulting in the deaths of many Allied prisoners of war. 

American bombers from the aircraft carrier Hornet led by Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle launch a surprise attack on Tokyo. Greensboro native Technical Sergeant Edwin “Red” Vance Bain Jr. serves as a tail gunner on aircraft no. 14 in the famous raid. He survives the mission but later dies in a 1943 Allied bombing attack over Rome.

May 6

United States forces in the Philippines surrender.

With the surrender of Corregidor, army nurse Evelyn B. Whitlow of Leasburg in Caswell County becomes a prisoner of war and is interned in a Japanese POW camp in the Philippines. She and her fellow nurses, known as the Angels of Bataan and Corregidor, remain imprisoned until 1945. 

The Coast Guard ship Icarus sinks German U-boat 352 off Cape Lookout. More than thirty German sailors are rescued and taken as POWs.

German U-boat 558 sinks the HMS Bedfordshire between Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout. The bodies of four British seamen are buried on Ocracoke at a site that later becomes an official British cemetery. 

June 7

Japanese forces invade the Aleutian Islands in Alaska.

August 7

General Bernard Montgomery assumes command of the British Eighth Army in North Africa.

August 7

The U.S. Marines land on Tulagi and Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.

September 13

Germany begins its attack on Stalingrad, Russia.

The USS North Carolina is damaged during a torpedo attack off Guadalcanal.

British forces defeat the German Afrika Korps at El Alamein. With increasing Axis defeats, German and Italian POWs are shipped across the Atlantic to internment camps in the United States. In North Carolina POWS are interned at Camp Davis (Pender and Onslow Counties), Camp Butner (Durham, Granville, and Person Counties), Fort Bragg (Cumberland, Hoke, Moore, and Harnett Counties), Camp MacKall (Richmond and Scotland Counties), Camp Sutton (Union County), Wilmington (New Hanover County), and Williamston (Martin County).

November 8

Allied forces including the United States invade North Africa in Operation Torch.

The United States Marine Corps war dog program is created at Camp Lejeune. The first trained dogs arrive in the Pacific on July 11, 1943, and later see service on Bougainville, Guam, Peleliu, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa and in occupied Japan.

December 2

Enrico Fermi creates the world’s first nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago.