1945

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• At the Yalta Conference of 4-11 February, Churchill, Stalin and the ailing Roosevelt discuss the postwar settlement of Germany. Stalin achieves far more than the other two.

• From 13-15 February, the Allies bomb Dresden in eastern Germany, killing at least 60,000 civilians in a fire storm and destroying the city's historic centre.

• On 20 March, British and Indian troops enter Mandalay in Burma.

• On 12 April, US president Franklin Roosevelt dies, age 63. He is succeeded by the vice president Harry Truman.

• On 28 April, Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci are captured and shot by Italian partisans near Milan.

• On 30 April, Adolf Hitler marries his lover Eva Braun and both commit suicide in a Berlin bunker as Soviet troops approach.

• On 7 May, Germany surrenders. The country is divided into Soviet, American, British and French occupation zones. Berlin, within the Soviet zone, is also divided in the same way.

• On 26 June, the United Nations Charter is signed by 51 nations in San Francisco.

• On 26 July in Britain, a Labour landslide in the general election ousts Winston Churchill as prime minister. Instead Clement Attlee forms a government.

• On 6 and 9 August, US aircraft drop atomic bombs on, respectively, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the order of Emperor Hirohito, Japan surrenders on 2 September, ending World War II.

• From 20 November, the International Military Tribunal, sitting at Nuremberg, tries crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the European Theatre of Operations (ETO). It rules that 'obeying orders' is an insufficient defence for having committed such acts. The tribunal delivers its verdicts on 1 October 1946, including death sentences for Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hermann Goering, Martin Bormann and nine other leading Nazis.

• British writer George Orwell publishes Animal Farm, his satire on the Russian Revolution.

• Notable films include Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, Roberto Rossellini's Roma, citta aperta (Rome, Open City) and David Lean's Brief Encounter.

• Beebop becomes a popular musical form.

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