1947

1947 in other calendars
Gregorian calendar	1947; MCMXLVII
Ab urbe condita	2700
Armenian calendar	1396; ԹՎ ՌՅՂԶ
Assyrian calendar	6697
Bahá'í calendar	103–104
Bengali calendar	1354
Berber calendar	2897
British Regnal year	11 Geo. 6 – 12 Geo. 6
Buddhist calendar	2491
Burmese calendar	1309
Byzantine calendar	7455–7456
Chinese calendar	丙戌年十二月初十日; (4583/4643-12-10) — to — 丁亥年十一月二十日; (4584/4644-11-20)
Coptic calendar	1663–1664
Ethiopian calendar	1939–1940
Hebrew calendar	5707–5708
Hindu calendars
- Vikram Samvat	2003–2004
- Shaka Samvat	1869–1870
- Kali Yuga	5048–5049
Holocene calendar	11947
Igbo calendar
- Ǹrí Ìgbò	947–948
Iranian calendar	1325–1326
Islamic calendar	1366–1367
Japanese calendar	Shōwa 22; (昭和22年)
Juche calendar	36
Julian calendar	Gregorian minus 13 days
Korean calendar	4280
Minguo calendar	ROC 36; 民國36年
Thai solar calendar	2490
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Millennium:	2nd millennium
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Decades:	1910s 1920s 1930s – 1940s – 1950s 1960s 1970s
Years:	1944 1945 1946 – 1947 – 1948 1949 1950

This article is about the year 1947.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: 1947

Year 1947 (MCMXLVII) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar.

January 1: Nigeria gains autonomy.

Events [edit]

January and February 1947 are remembered for the worst snowfalls in the UK in the 20th century, with extensive disruption of travel.^[1] Given the low ratio of private vehicle ownership at the time this is mainly remembered in terms of the effects on the railway networks.^[2]^[3]

January [edit]

January 1
- British coal mines are nationalized.
- Nigeria gains limited autonomy.
- The Canadian Citizenship Act comes into effect.
January 3 – Proceedings of the U.S. Congress are televised for the first time.
January 10 – The United Nations takes control of the free city of Trieste.
January 15 – Elizabeth Short, an aspiring actress nicknamed the "Black Dahlia", is found brutally murdered in a vacant lot in Los Angeles. The case remains unsolved to this day.
January 16 – Vincent Auriol is inaugurated as president of France.
January 19 – A shipwreck near Athens, Greece kills 392.
January 24 – Dimitrios Maximos founds a monarchist government in Athens.
January 25 – A Philippine plane crashes in Hong Kong, with $5 million worth of gold and money.
January 30–February 8 – A heavy blizzard in Canada buries towns from Winnipeg, Manitoba, to Calgary, Alberta.
January 31 – The Communists take power in Poland.

February [edit]

February 3
- The lowest air temperature in North America (-63 degrees Celsius) is recorded in Snag, Yukon Territory.
- Percival Prattis becomes the first African-American news correspondent allowed in the United States House of Representatives and Senate press galleries.
February 5
- Bolesław Bierut becomes the President of Poland.
- The Government of the United Kingdom announces the £25 million Tanganyika groundnut scheme for cultivation of peanuts in the Tanganyika Territory.^[4]
February 6 – South Pacific Commission (SPC) founded.
February 8 – A dance hall fire in Berlin, Germany, kills over 80 people.
February 10 – In Paris, France, peace treaties are signed between the World War II Allies and Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Finland. Italy cedes most of Istria to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
February 12
- A meteor creates an impact crater in Sikhote-Alin, in the Soviet Union.
- Christian Dior introduces The "New Look" in women's fashion, in Paris.
- The Panglong Agreement was reached between the Burmese government under Aung San and the Shan, Kachin, and Chin peoples on 12 February 1947.U Aung Zan Wai, Pe Khin, Major Aung, Sir Maung Gyi and Dr. Sein Mya Maung and Myoma U Than Kywe were among the negotiators of the historical Panglong Conference negotiated with Burmese leader General Aung San and other ethnic leaders in 1947 in Burma .
February 17 – Cold War: The Voice of America begins to transmit radio broadcasts into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
February 20
- An explosion at the O'Connor Electro-Plating Company in Los Angeles, California, leaves 17 dead, 100 buildings damaged, and a 22-foot-deep (6.7 m) crater in the ground.
- U.S. Army Ordnance Corps Hermes program V-2 rocket Blossom I launched into space carrying plant material and fruitflies, the first animals to enter space.
February 21 – In New York City, Edwin Land demonstrates the first "instant camera", his Polaroid Land Camera, to a meeting of the Optical Society of America.
February 22 – Tom and Jerry cartoon Cat Fishin', is released.
February 23 – The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is founded.
February 25
- John C. Hennessy, Jr., brings the first Volkswagen Beetle to the United States. He purchased the 1946 VW from the U.S. Army Post Exchange in Frankfurt, Germany, while serving in the U.S. Army. The Beetle was shipped from Bremerhaven, arriving in New York this day.^[5]
- The state of Prussia officially ceases to exist.
- The worst-ever train crash in Japan kills 184 people.
February 28
- The United States grants France a military base in Casablanca.
- In Taiwan, civil disorder is put down with large loss of civilian lives.

March [edit]

March 1
- The International Monetary Fund begins to operate.
- Wernher von Braun marries his first cousin, the 18-year-old Maria von Quirstorp.
March 4 – Treaty of Dunkirk (coming into effect 8 September) signed between the United Kingdom and France providing for mutual assistance in the event of attack.
March 9 – Carrie Chapman Catt dies in New Rochelle.
March 12 – The Truman Doctrine is proclaimed to help stem the spread of Communism.
March 14 – Thames flood and other widespread flooding as the exceptionally harsh British winter of 1946–1947 ends in a thaw.^[6]^[7]
March 15 – Hindus and Muslims clash in Punjab.
March 19 – The 19th Academy Awards ceremony is held. The movie Best Years of Our Lives wins the Academy Award for Best Picture, along with several other Academy Awards.
March 25 – A coal mine explosion in Centralia, Illinois, kills 111 miners.
March 28 – A World War II Japanese booby trap explodes on Corregidor island, killing 28 people.
March 29 – A rebellion against French rule erupts in Madagascar.
March 31 – The leaders of the Kurdish People's Republic of Mahabad, the second Kurdish state in the history of Iran, are hanged at the Chuwarchira Square in Mahabad after that country had been overrun by the Iranian army.

April [edit]

April 1
- Jackie Robinson, the first African American in Major League Baseball since the 1880s, signs a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
- King George II of Greece is succeeded by his brother King Paul I.
April 4 – International Civil Aviation Organization begins operations.
April 9 – Multiple tornadoes strike Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas killing 181 and injuring 970.
April 15 – Jackie Robinson becomes the first African American to play Major League Baseball since the 1880s.
April 16
- Texas City Disaster: The ammonium nitrate cargo of French-registered Liberty ship SS Grandcamp explodes in Texas City, Texas, killing at least 581, including all but one member of the city fire department, injuring at least 5,000 and destroying 20 city blocks. Of the dead, remains of 113 are never found and 63 are unidentifiable.
- American financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch describes the post–World War II tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States as a "Cold War".
April 18 – The British Royal Navy detonates 6,800 tons of explosives in an attempt to demolish the fortified island of Heligoland, Germany, thus creating one of the largest man-made non-nuclear explosions in history.
April 26 – Academy-Award winning Tom and Jerry cartoon, The Cat Concerto, is released to theatres.

May [edit]

May 1 – Portella della Ginestra massacre: The Salvatore Giuliano gang of Sicilian separatists opens fire on a labour day parade at Portella della Ginestra, Sicily, killing 11 people and wounding 27.
May 2 – The movie Miracle on 34th Street, a Christmastime classic, is first shown in theaters.
May 3 – The new post-war Japanese constitution goes into effect.
May 12 – The animated cartoon film Rabbit Transit, directed by Friz Freleng, is released.
May 22
- The Cold War begins: In an effort to fight the spread of Communism, President Harry S. Truman signs an Act of Congress that implements the Truman Doctrine. This Act grants $400 million in military and economic aid to Turkey and Greece.
- David Lean's film Great Expectations, based on the novel by Charles Dickens, opens in the United States. Critics call it the finest film ever made from a Charles Dickens novel.
May 25 – An airliner of the Flugfelag Íslands crashes into a mountainside, killing 25 people.

June [edit]

Marshall Plan.

June 5 – U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall outlines the Marshall Plan for American reconstruction and relief aid to Europe.
June 7 – The Royal Romanian Army founded, the-now most successful Romanian football club, Steaua București, as A.S.A. București.^[8]
June 10 – SAAB produces its first automobile.
June 11–15 – First Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod is held in Wales.^[9]
June 15 – The Portuguese government orders 11 military officers and 19 university professors who were accused of revolutionary activity to resign.
June 21
- Seaman Harold Dahl claims to have seen six UFOs near Maury Island in Puget Sound, Washington. On the next morning, Dahl reports the first modern so-called "Men in Black" encounter.
- The Canadian Parliament votes unanimously to pass several laws regarding displaced foreign refugees.
June 23 – The United States Senate follows the House of Representatives in overriding President Harry S. Truman's veto of the Taft-Hartley Act.
June 24 – Kenneth Arnold makes the first widely reported UFO sighting near Mount Rainier, Washington.

July [edit]

July 7 – A supposedly downed extraterrestrial spacecraft is reportedly found in the Roswell UFO incident, near Roswell, New Mexico, which was written about by Stanton T. Friedman.
July 10 – Princess Elizabeth announces her engagement to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten.
July 11 – The Exodus leaves France for Palestine, with 4,500 Jewish Holocaust survivor refugees on board.
July 17 – The Indian passenger ship Ramdas is capsized by a cyclone at Mumbai, India, with 625 people killed.
July 18
- Following wide media and UNSCOP coverage, The Exodus is captured by British troops and refused entry into Palestine at the port of Haifa.
- President Harry S. Truman signs the Presidential Succession Act into law, which places the Speaker of the House and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate next in the line of succession after the Vice President.
July 26 – Cold War: U.S. President Harry S. Truman signs the National Security Act of 1947 into law, creating the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Council.
July 29 – After being shut down on November 9, 1946, for a refurbishment, the ENIAC computer, the world's first electronic digital computer, is turned back on again. It next remains in continuous operation until October 2, 1955.

August [edit]

Flag of the newly independent Pakistan

Flag of the newly independent India

August 5 – The Netherlands stops all political actions in Indonesia.
August 7
- Thor Heyerdahl's balsa wood raft, the Kon-Tiki, smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands after a 101 day, 4,300 mile, voyage across the Eastern Pacific Ocean, proving that pre-historic peoples could hypothetically have traveled to the Central Pacific islands from South America.
- The Bombay Municipal Corporation formally takes over the Bombay Electric Supply and Transport (BEST).
August 14
- The Muslim majority region formed by the Partition of India gain independence from the British Empire and adopts the name Pakistan. While the transition is officially at midnight on this day, Pakistan celebrates its independence on August 14, compared with India on the 15th, because the Pakistan Standard Time is 30 minutes behind the standard time of India.
- Muhammad Ali Jinnah becomes the first Governor General of Pakistan. Liaqat Ali Khan takes office as the first Prime Minister of Pakistan
August 15
- The greater Indian subcontinent with a mixed population of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Jews, etc. formed by the Partition of India gain independence from the British Empire and retains the name India.
- Louis Mountbatten becomes the first Governor General of India. Jawaharlal Nehru takes office as the first Prime Minister of India.
August 16 – In Greece, General Markos Vafiadis takes over the government.
August 23 – The Prime Minister of Greece, Dimitrios Maximos, resigns.
August 27 – The French government lowers the daily bread ration to 200 grams, causing riots in Verdun and in Le Mans.
August 30 – A fire at a movie theater in Rueil, a suburb of Paris, France kills 87 people.
August 31 – The communists seize power in Hungary.

September [edit]

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), officially born September 18, 1947

lodged in a relay is found to be the cause of a malfunction in the Harvard Mark II electromechanical computer, logged as "First actual case of bug being found."^[10]^[11]

September 13 – Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru suggests the exchange of four million Hindus and Muslims between India and Pakistan.
September 17–September 21 – The 1947 Fort Lauderdale Hurricane in southeastern Florida, and also in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana causes widespread damage and kills 51 people.
September 18
- National Security Act of 1947 becomes effective on this day creating the United States Air Force, National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency.
- War Department becomes the Department of the Army, a branch of the new Department of Defense.
September 22 – Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers' Parties (Communist Information Bureau) ("Cominform") is founded.
September 30 – Pakistan and Yemen join the United Nations.

October [edit]

October – First recorded use of the word computer in its modern sense, referring to an electronic digital machine.^[12]
October 5 – President Harry S. Truman delivers the first televised White House address speaking on the world food crises.
October 14 – The United States Air Force test pilot, Captain Chuck Yeager, flies a Bell X-1 rocket plane faster than the speed of sound, the first time it has been accomplished
October 20 – A war begins in Kashmir, along the border between India and Pakistan, leading to the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947 in the following year. Also, Pakistan established diplomatic relations with the United States of America.
October 24 – The first Azad Kashmir Government is established by the Freedom Fighters within Pakistan, headed by Sardar Muhammad Ibrahim Khan as its first President supported by the government of Pakistan.
October 30 – The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the foundation of the World Trade Organization (WTO), is established.

November [edit]

November 2
- In Long Beach, California, the designer and airplane pilot Howard Hughes carries out the one and only flight of the Hughes H - 1 Hercules seaplane, the largest fixed-wing aircraft ever built and flown. This flight only lasted eight minutes.
- An earthquake in the Chilean Andes kills 233 people.
November 6 – The program Meet the Press makes its television debut on the NBC-TV network in the United States.
November 9 – Junagadh is invaded by the Indian army.
November 10 – The arrest of four steel workers in Marseille begins a French communist riot that also spreads to Paris.
November 15
- International Telecommunication Union becomes a specialized agency of the United Nations.
- Universal Postal Union (UPU) becomes a specialized agency of the United Nations (effective 1 July 1948).
November 16
- In Brussels, 15,000 people demonstrate against the relatively short prison sentences of Belgian Nazi criminals.
- Great Britain began withdrawing its troops from Palestine.
November 18 – The Ballantyne's Department Store fire in Christchurch, New Zealand, kills 41 people.
November 20
- The Princess Elizabeth (later Elizabeth II), the daughter of George VI, marries The Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey in London, United Kingdom.
- Paul Ramadier resigns as the Prime Minister of France. He is succeeded by Robert Schuman, who calls 80,000 army reservists to quell rioting miners in France.
November 21 – The United Nations Conference on Trade and Employment begins in Havana, Cuba. This conference ends in 1948, when its members finish the Havana Charter.
November 24 – Red Scare: The U.S. House of Representatives votes 346 – 17 to approve citations of Contempt of Congress against the so-called Hollywood 10, after the ten men refuse to co-operate with the House Un-American Activities Committee concerning allegations of communist influences in the movie business. (The ten men are blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios on the following day.)
November 25 – The Parliament of New Zealand ratifies the Statute of Westminster, and thus becomes independent of legislative control by the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
November 27 – In Paris, France, police occupy the editorial offices of the communist newspapers.
November 29 – The United Nations General Assembly votes to partition Palestine between Arab and Jewish regions, which results in the creation of the State of Israel.

December [edit]

December 3
- French communist strikers derail the Paris-Tourcoing express train because of false rumors that it was transporting soldiers. 21 people are killed.
- The Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Marlon Brando in his first great role, opens at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway. Jessica Tandy also stars as Blanche Du Bois.[1]
December 4 – The French Interior Minister, Jules S. Moch, takes emergency measures against his country's rioters after six days of violent arguments in the National Assembly.
December 6 – Arturo Toscanini conducts a concert performance of the first half of Giuseppe Verdi's opera Otello, which was based on William Shakespeare's play Othello, for a broadcast on NBC Radio. The second half of the opera is broadcast a week later.[2]
December 9 – French labor unions call off the general strike and re-commence negotiations with the French government.
December 12 – The Iranian Royal Army takes back power in the Azerbaijan province.
December 21 - 400,000 slaughtered during mass migration of Hindus and Muslims into the new states India and Pakistan.
December 22
- The Italian Constituent Assembly votes to accept the new Constitution of Italy.
- The first practical electronic transistor is demonstrated by Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley of the United States.
December 30 – King Michael of Romania abdicates.

Date unknown [edit]

The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is introduced.
The House Un-American Activities Committee begins its investigations into communism in Hollywood.
Cambridge University begins to admit women as full students.
Mikhail Kalashnikov's AK-47 assault rifle is accepted as the standard small arm of the Soviet military.
Raytheon produces the first commercial microwave oven.
Women's suffrage is granted in Argentina.
In a cave in and around the Wadi Qumran (near the ruins of the ancient settlement of Khirbet Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea), several tall pottery jars containing leather scrolls are discovered, which later become known as the Dead Sea scrolls.^[13]
By the discovery of promethium in the products of nuclear fission, the last remaining gap of the periodic table is closed.

In fiction [edit]

The song Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band mentions Sgt. Pepper teaching the band to play "20 years ago today". This would place the event somewhere between February 1 and June 1 of 1947.