4 juni

A trip north in the carriage of his pupil and fellow Mason Prince Karl Lichnowsky, by Prague, Dresden and Leipzig to Potsdam and Berlin. The King of Prussia, a cellist, is said to have ordered string quartets; the journey paid little.

She ducked under the rail at Tattenham Corner and was struck by Anmer, King George V’s horse. She died four days later. Whether she meant to die, or to pin a suffragette scarf to the horse, is still argued.

The National Woman’s Party picketed the White House six days a week, with banners asking “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?” They kept on after the US entered the war; from June 1917 police arrested them for “obstructing traffic”.

Satyendra Nath Bose, a young lecturer at Dacca University, sent him a paper deriving Planck’s law by counting light quanta as indistinguishable. Einstein translated it into German himself and extended it to atoms, which cooled enough should fall into a single quantum state. The first Bose–Einstein…

Without oxygen, Norton and Somervell traversed the North Face; Somervell stopped and Norton went on alone into the Great Couloir to about 8,570 metres, less than 300 metres below the summit, before turning back. He was snow-blind that night. No one is known to have gone higher without oxygen until…

Austria qualified, then ceased to exist when Germany annexed it in March, and several of its players turned out for Germany. The Dutch East Indies became the first Asian team; they lost 6–0 to Hungary and went home after one match.

Destroyers, ferries and hundreds of small civilian boats took 338,226 men off the beaches and the harbour mole, a third of them French. Churchill told the Commons on 4 June that “wars are not won by evacuations”, then: “we shall fight on the beaches … we shall never surrender.”

American code-breakers had read enough of Japan’s naval code to know the target and the date. On the morning of 4 June dive bombers from Enterprise and Yorktown set three carriers ablaze in minutes, and a fourth that afternoon. Japan lost four fleet carriers; the Americans lost one.

At the Harnack House, Heisenberg told Armaments Minister Albert Speer that a bomb was possible in principle but could not be built in this war. The physicists asked for only a few hundred thousand marks, and the project stayed a reactor study.

With gales forecast, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel left his headquarters to drive home to Herrlingen for his wife Lucie's birthday on 6 June, meaning to go on to see Hitler about more panzers. German forecasters, with fewer weather stations in the Atlantic, saw no break coming.

At Southwick House, Eisenhower confirmed a 24-hour postponement from 5 to 6 June. Convoys already at sea had to turn back; some of Force U, bound for Utah, were far into the Channel before they were recalled.

The invasion needed a late-rising moon for the paratroops and a low tide at dawn to expose the beach obstacles; only 5, 6 and 7 June offered both that month. A storm blew in over the Channel on the 4th.

Group Captain James Stagg, Eisenhower's chief meteorologist, told the commanders that a cold front would pass and give a short interval of fairer weather from the afternoon of the 5th into the 6th. Rain still lashed the windows as he spoke.

A double-hulled canoe built by the Polynesian Voyaging Society to test Andrew Sharp’s 1956 claim that the islands were found by accidental drift. Navigated without instruments by Mau Piailug of Satawal in Micronesia, it sailed from Honolua Bay on Maui and reached Papeete a month later, where some…

Solidarity campaigned with a poster of Gary Cooper in High Noon, ballot in hand. It won 160 of the 161 Sejm seats open to it and 92 of 100 in the Senate in the first round, and all but one of the rest on 18 June. Of the party’s 35 unopposed “national list” leaders, 33 were crossed out by enough…

While Poles voted, the Chinese army cleared Tiananmen Square after a night of shooting in the streets around it. Four days later East Germany’s parliament praised the crackdown, and all autumn East Germans feared a “Chinese solution” of their own.

At the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio, 154 states signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. It aims to hold greenhouse gases “at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. It came into force on 21 March 1994, and its…