29 april

At a public session the crowd would not settle until the two old men embraced. John Adams, watching, wrote that the cry went round the kingdom that it was charming to see Solon and Sophocles embrace.

The Belgian Camille Jenatzy drove his torpedo-shaped electric car to 105.88 kilometres an hour, the first road vehicle past 100. Electric cars were then serious rivals: quiet, clean and with no crank to swing.

Beaten back from Baghdad at Ctesiphon, General Townshend’s division dug in at Kut and was besieged for 147 days. Relief attempts failed, and about 13,000 British and Indian soldiers surrendered. Thousands of them died in captivity.

Germany’s “uranium club” first met at the Reich Education Ministry in April 1939; the Army Ordnance Office took it over when the war began. Its physicists, Heisenberg among them, built reactors with heavy water as moderator, but never a self-sustaining chain reaction and never a bomb programme.

A long, relaxed blues for Prestige, recorded in Van Gelder’s front room, with J. J. Johnson, Lucky Thompson and Horace Silver. It is often taken as the start of hard bop, and the start of Davis’s recovery from heroin.

South Vietnamese and then American troops crossed into Cambodia to destroy North Vietnamese bases and find the Front’s headquarters, which was never found. Nixon announced it on television on 30 April; American ground troops were out by 30 June, under a deadline he had set himself.

With the runways shelled, the evacuation went by helicopter, to ships of the Seventh Fleet offshore. Armed Forces Radio played “White Christmas” as the signal. Before the last Marines left, helicopters had carried out 1,373 Americans and 5,595 Vietnamese and others; tens of thousands more fled by…

At about 14:30 Hubert van Es of UPI photographed people climbing a ladder to an Air America helicopter on a rooftop. The picture is usually captioned as the embassy; it was an apartment building used by the CIA, half a kilometre away.

Marine CH-53s from the carriers set down at the Defense Attaché Office next to the air base, where thousands of evacuees had been gathered.

Graham Martin, who had resisted evacuating for weeks, was ordered out by President Ford and lifted off the embassy roof on the helicopter Lady Ace 09.

Eleven Marines of the embassy guard, the last Americans in Saigon, flew off the roof. Below them about 420 Vietnamese and South Koreans who had been promised a place were left behind in the compound.

Special votes on the 26th, then two days for everyone, with a third in parts of the country where ballots ran short. About 19.7 million votes were cast, many after hours in the queue. Inkatha joined a week before, too late for the printers: its name went on the ballot as a sticker. The ANC won…