100 Documents That Changed the World

by Scott Christianson

  Nevertheless, Edward refused to break off the relationship, forcing the crisis to its climax.

  On the morning of 10 December 1936, Edward assembled with his brothers in the drawing room of his country house in Surrey. Sitting at his desk, he signed seven copies of an Instrument of Abdication that lawyers had provided. The document stated: ‘I, Edward the Eighth, of Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, King, Emperor of India, do hereby declare My irrevocable determination to renounce the Throne for Myself and for My descendants, and My desire that effect should be given to this Instrument of Abdication immediately.’ As his brothers signed as witnesses, ‘the room was filled with a dignified dull murmur,’ he later recalled.

  The following day, King Edward VIII publicly announced his decision to a worldwide radio audience and Parliament formally acted on the matter. By giving his royal assent to Parliament’s abdication act, he relinquished the throne to his younger brother, George VI. George’s first act as king was to give his brother the title of His Royal Highness the Duke of Windsor.

  The Duke and Simpson were married in France on 3 June 1937 and lived in Paris. During World War II, Edward served as governor of the Bahamas. But the couple’s pro-Nazi sympathies provided further embarrassment. Edward was heard to say, ‘After the war is over and Hitler will crush the Americans ... we’ll take over.’ Thirty years after the abdication he told the New York Daily News, ‘it was in Britain’s interest and in Europe’s too, that Germany be encouraged to strike east and smash Communism forever.’

  Copies of the abdication instrument are kept in Britain’s National Archives.

  The Instrument of Abdication, signed by Edward VIII and his three brothers. The document was signed at Fort Belvedere, Edward’s house in Windsor Great Park, Surrey.

  The specially commissioned cover design by Eric Fraser featured the Alexandra Palace transmitter. The opening article explained how ‘engineers and programme builders have been busy for many months grappling with this fascinating new development by which sights as well as sounds can be broadcast.’

  Television Listings

  (1936)

  Once the BBC had introduced its audience to the ‘magic of television’, the network began offering its potential viewers a brief weekly schedule of programmes, which it published as a supplement to The Radio Times. The only catch was that you had to live within 25 miles of the sole transmitter to receive a signal.

  After several years of faltering and flickering experiments with the new medium of television, in 1936 the British Broadcasting Corporation built the first television station at Alexandra Palace (‘Ally Pally’), and BBC programme planners were ordered to develop the first TV programming in just nine days. The opening show, ‘Here’s Looking at You’, went on the air live on 26 August 1936, with announcer Leslie Mitchell saying, ‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It is with great pleasure that I introduce you to the magic of television...’

  After intermittent tests and broadcasts, the first regular television service was scheduled to begin on 2 November. The initial service alternated on a weekly basis between Baird’s 240-line intermediate film system and Marconi-EMI’s 405-line all-electronic system. Two blocks of programmes were broadcast every day, except Sunday, between 3 or 4 PM and 9 or 10 PM.

  After introducing the concept of TV broadcasts in its ‘Television Number’ of 23 October 1936, the BBC quickly put together a supplement to its regular Radio Times magazine, starting on 30 October, to reveal the opening lineup for the upcoming week. The weekly TV listings ran from Monday through Saturday as there was no Sunday broadcast.

  The first advertised programmes included such scintillating features as the weather, musical numbers, household demonstrations of interest to women, such as ‘Mrs. Daisy Pain will give some tips about ironing’, and a cabaret quarter of an hour in which Bubbles Stewart would do ‘impressions of film stars’. John Piper was slated to provide commentary about exhibitions currently on display at galleries in London, and there would also be a brief performance by ‘The Whistling Guard’.

  At 3 PM on 2 November 1936, the world’s first regular service began transmitting as scheduled. There may have been only 100 to 500 television sets in Britain capable of receiving the broadcast, and all viewers had to reside within 25 miles of the Ally Pally transmitter. The huge and expensive TV machine made television viewing a novel luxury reserved for the rich, and the convention at that time was for viewers to dress up as if they were attending a stage play.

  Three years later, the head of BBC Television, Gerald Cock, said he viewed television as ‘essentially a medium for topicalities.’ He added that, ‘Excerpts from plays during their normal runs, televised from the studio or direct from the stage, with perhaps a complete play at the end of its run, would have attractive possibilities as part of a review of the nation’s entertainment activities. But, in my view television is from its very nature more suitable for the dissemination of all kinds of information than for entertainment.’

  Early issues of the first Radio Times television listings are now a hot collector’s item.

  The ‘Television Number’ of The Radio Times promised its readers that ‘the next few months will be full of interest ... You will be watching the beginnings of a new art.’

  Munich Agreement

  (1938)

  After signing the Munich Agreement with Germany, Italy and France, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waves a copy of the document for all to see, claiming that it will ensure ‘peace for our time’ – not knowing that Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler remains bent on conquest.

  Twenty years after the end of the Great War, Germany was again threatening to unleash the dogs of war. This time the disputed territory was the Sudetenland, a predominantly German-speaking area of Czechoslovakia, which the fascist ruler Hitler was threatening to seize by force if he didn’t get his way.

  Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, was determined to avert war, which he knew would be inevitable if Hitler invaded the sovereign nation that had been created in the aftermath of World War I. So he asked Hitler for a personal meeting and flew to meet the Führer at his Bavarian mountaintop retreat at Berchtesgaden outside Munich. The pair discussed the matter for three hours, then Chamberlain flew home to meet with his cabinet, then raced back to Germany for further negotiations in a desperate bid to avert war.

  On 29 September 1938, Chamberlain met in Munich with Hitler, Italy’s Benito Mussolini and Edouard Daladier of France. Representatives of Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union were excluded. The four powers agreed on the immediate cession of the Sudetenland to Germany if Hitler agreed not to make any further territorial demands. The meeting ended at 1:30 AM with the four heads of state signing the Munich Agreement.

  Chamberlain believed he had won a great victory. As soon as he got off the plane from Germany, a jubilant Prime Minister was met by a cheering crowd at the Heston Aerodrome. Chamberlain waved a copy of the newly signed Munich agreement in the air as proof of his diplomatic achievement, calling it the first step toward a lasting peace. ‘This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler,’ he crowed, ‘and here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine.’

  Chamberlain was feted at Buckingham Palace and the newspapers sang his praises. But Winston Churchill denounced the pact as ‘a total and unmitigated defeat’, and elements of the German military, realizing what was in store, secretly plotted a possible coup to prevent Hitler’s increasingly bellicose designs.

  Sudetenland was of immense strategic importance to the Czechs and they regarded the agreement as a betrayal by the United Kingdom and France. However, Czechoslovakia was no match against Germany’s military might, so its government reluctantly consented to abide by the terms of the pact.

  Seven months later on 15 March to Chamberlain’s horror, German tanks rolled into the rest of Czechoslovakia, signalling Hitler’s first breach of the Munich Agreement. The Prime Minister�
�s actions went down as the greatest example of failed ‘appeasement’ in modern history.

  An original copy of the Munich document, bearing the signatures of the four leaders, is held in Britain’s National Archives.

  The Munich Agreement and the accompanying letter that were supposed to ‘assure the peace of Europe’. Only seven months later, German tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, signalling Hitler’s first breach of the agreement. Winston Churchill denounced the pact as ‘a total and unmitigated defeat’.

  Chamberlain jubilantly waves a copy of the signed Munich Agreement on his arrival at Heston Aerodrome, on 30 September 1938.

  The Nazi–Soviet Pact was signed by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov on 23 August 1939. The non-aggression treaty was meant to guarantee that neither side would ally itself to, or aid, an enemy of the other side.

  The Hitler–Stalin Non-Aggression Pact

  (1939)

  The world is shocked again by a non-aggression pact between two diametrically opposed tyrants, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, who appear to have put aside their mutual hatred for the sake of their own immediate expansionist interests. Secret protocols of the document will later emerge that are even more damning.

  On 23 August 1939, Nazis and communists publicly shook hands in Moscow as leaders of Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression treaty guaranteeing that neither side would ally itself to, or aid, an enemy of the other side. Hailed by its two principal negotiators, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, the document was also signed by Stalin, who even had himself photographed in smiling agreement with von Ribbentrop. The press also reported that Stalin had recently fired his Jewish foreign minister, Maksim Litvinov, to curry favour with Hitler.

  Soviets and Nazis alike were flabbergasted by the rapprochement. But statesmen throughout Europe were even more alarmed because the treaty set in motion a chain of actions and reactions that quickly plunged them into another world war, for a week later Germany invaded Poland from the west, and 16 days after that, Soviet troops stormed in from the east, dividing the country like two wolves sharing a carcass.

  The concatenation of falling dominos swept all the way to England, where Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement was suddenly obliterated. Germany invaded Western Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Denmark, Yugoslavia, Greece and Norway in rapid succession. The Soviets annexed Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and parts of Romania. More than a million people perished.

  The Hitler–Stalin Pact evaporated when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union at 3:15 AM on 22 June 1941 in Operation Barbarossa, setting in motion an even deadlier conflict that would ultimately cost tens of millions of lives.

  Upon Germany’s defeat, in May 1945 a captive German clerk handed over to the American military canisters containing a microfilm copy of the Nazi–Soviet Pact that von Ribbentrop had kept aside for safekeeping. It included a copy of a secret protocol related to the agreement – one that both powers had always concealed.

  The secret text divided Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland into German and Soviet ‘spheres of influence’, that anticipated potential ‘territorial and political rearrangements’ of those countries, thus indicating that both Stalin and Hitler were aware in advance of each other’s expansionist intent. In other words, they had countenanced each other’s future aggression.

  In 1946 the treaty was published for the first time by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Manchester Guardian. Copies were later reprinted in various scholarly works. The Soviet copy of the original document was finally declassified in 1992 and published in a Russian scientific journal in 1993.

  A cartoon by David Low from the London Evening Standard (20 September 1939), satirizing the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Poland is represented by the prostrate figure.

  Declaration of War Against Japan

  (1941)

  In the wake of Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt crafts one of the most effective speeches in American history, declaring, ‘December 7, 1941 – a date that will live in infamy… The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation.’

  On the afternoon of Sunday 7 December 1941, President Roosevelt was interrupted by a telephone call from the Secretary of War, informing him that the Empire of Japan had attacked America’s Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor Naval Base in Hawaii.

  Roosevelt immediately gathered the Vice President, members of his cabinet and other close advisers in the same room where Lincoln had convened his advisers after Fort Sumter. He also telephoned British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and began weighing his options. After assigning his speechwriters to work on a radio address he would give that night to the American people, FDR dictated a direct emotional appeal to Congress, which his secretary, Grace Tully, typed and copied. Although brief and direct, the approach carried echoes of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

  The next day Roosevelt revised the draft with new military information and went over the remarks for style and content, making handwritten changes in pencil.

  That afternoon the President addressed Congress to obtain a Declaration of War Against Japan. He began his address with the words: ‘Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a date that will live in infamy – the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.’ The solemn speech lasted only seven minutes.

  As soon as it was over, the Senate voted, with all 88 members in favour. The House of Representatives approved the war declaration by 388 to 1, with the only exception being Rep. Jeannette Rankin (Republican–Montana), who had also voted against America’s entry into World War I. Congress took only 33 minutes to pass the resolution and FDR signed it at 4:10 PM.

  The domestic response was resoundingly positive. Three days later, on 11 December, Japan’s allies, Germany and Italy, declared war on the United States, bringing America into World War II.

  Roosevelt’s speech was a rallying cry. But after leaving the podium that day, his three-page typed speech with his handwritten changes was missing, prompting the President to ask his son, James, ‘Where is the speech?’ His son replied, ‘I don’t know.’ Efforts to find it proved futile for decades, until finally, in 1984, Dr. Susan Cooper, a curator for the National Archives in Washington, came across the document in papers of the Senate for 1941. Today it is held at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York.

  Roosevelt signs the Declaration of War Against Japan on 8 December 1941.

  The draft speech, with handwritten changes in pencil.

  ‘We’re cookin!’ The notebook that recorded the dawning of the atomic age. Physicists at the University of Chicago performed the world’s first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction capable of harnessing the vast energy released by atomic fission.

  Manhattan Project Notebook

  (1942)

  Columns of pencilled mathematical notations along with a cryptic comment – jotted at an underground squash court beneath an old football stadium at the University of Chicago – provide graphic eyewitness testimony to World War II’s most secretive project and the dawn of the nuclear age.

  On 2 December 1942, less than a year after Pearl Harbor, a group of men with clipboards and notebooks gathered around a strange-looking brick-like structure about 24 square feet that towered from floor to ceiling in a corner of the concrete womb beneath Stagg Field. Their leader, Enrico Fermi (1901–54), a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, had carefully constructed the stacked rows, known as Chicago Pile-1, with 40,000 blocks of graphite and 19,000 pieces of uranium metal and uranium oxide fuel uranium set within cadmium-covered wooden timbers.

  Fermi conducted his experiment at 3:25 PM, hoping to start and stop the world’s
first nuclear chain reaction, harnessing the power of the atom. Consistent with his calculations, the cadmium-covered boards served as the reactor control rods, regulating the nuclear reaction to keep it from burning out of control and wreaking havoc in the middle of densely populated Chicago.

  Upon checking all of the readings, and duly recording the data, Fermi and his colleagues pronounced the experiment a success, with one of the engineers writing in his spiral notebook, ‘We’re cookin!’

  Afterwards the team celebrated with a glass of Chianti and each one signed his name on the bottle’s straw wrapper as a memento of their historic achievement – the world’s first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction capable of harnessing the vast energy released by atomic fission. Although the reaction they had created that day was too weak (only 0.5 watts) to power even a single light bulb, everyone present knew that the world would never be the same again. But none of them could breathe a word of it to anyone for years, because this was a crucial element of America’s super-secret Manhattan Project, the massive enterprise to build an atomic bomb.

  The prospect of making bigger and more dangerous nuclear reactions prompted Fermi to move his experimental station from Chicago to a more remote site in Argonne Woods. Other project activities were also carried out at Los Alamos, New Mexico; Hanford, Washington; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and other locations.