Date in year · 1944 · The 1940s

October 21, 1944

On October 21, 1944, world War II: The first kamikaze attack damages HMAS Australia as the Battle of Leyte Gulf begins. Kathy Acker, Philip Jackson, James Heckman would arrive in the same year.

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1944

1940s

Around 1944

The year in brief

1944 (MCMXLIV) was a leap year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1944th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 944th year of the 2nd millennium, the 44th year of the 20th century, and the 5th year of the 1940s decade.

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What happened

On October 21, 1944

  1. 1944 World War II: The first kamikaze attack damages HMAS Australia as the Battle of Leyte Gulf begins.

    County-class Royal Australian Navy cruiser

    HMAS Australia (I84/D84/C01) was a County-class heavy cruiser of the Royal Australian Navy (RAN). One of two Kent-subclass ships ordered for the RAN in 1924, Australia was laid down in Scotland in 1925, and entered service in 1928. Apart from an exchange deployment to the Mediterranean from 1934 to 1936, during which she became involved in the planned British response to the Abyssinia Crisis, Australia operated in local and South-West Pacific waters until World War II began.

  2. 1944 World War II: The Nemmersdorf massacre against German civilians takes place.

    1944 World War II incident

    The Nemmersdorf massacre was a civilian massacre perpetrated by Red Army soldiers in the late stages of World War II. Nemmersdorf was one of the first prewar ethnic German settlements to fall to the advancing Red Army during the war. On 21 October 1944, Soviet soldiers killed many German civilians as well as French and Belgian POWs.

  3. 1944 World War II: The city of Aachen falls to American forces after three weeks of fighting, the first German city to fall to the Allies.

    Battle on the Western Front of World War II

    The Battle of Aachen was a battle of World War II, fought by American and German forces in and around Aachen, Germany, between 12 September and 21 October 1944. The city had been incorporated into the Siegfried Line, the main defensive network on Germany's western border; the Allies had hoped to capture it quickly and advance into the industrialized Ruhr basin. Although most of Aachen's civilian population was evacuated before the battle began, much of the city was destroyed and both sides suffered heavy losses.

Elsewhere that year

Other moments from 1944

The class of 1944

Others born in 1944

Kathy Acker 1944– American author and poet (died 1997)
Philip Jackson 1944– Scottish sculptor and photographer
James Heckman 1944– American economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
Bernie Worrell 1944– American keyboard player and songwriter (died 2016)
Monty Alexander 1944– Jamaican jazz pianist
Phillip Allen Sharp 1944– American molecular biologist; 1993 Nobel Prize laureate (Physiology or Medicine)

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