on this day the United States and Great Britain jointly initiated a crash atomic weapons development program meant to counter the German-Italian A-bomb effort.

Part SixDubbed "the Manhattan Project" because its main U.S. offices were initially housed in a Manhattan U.S. Army Corps of Engineers building, the Anglo-American program's main goal was to produce a working atom bomb before the Axis powers did; one of its key additional purposes was to harness atomic energy as a power source for the heat ray batteries being constructed along the U.S. and British coasts.

One of the first scientists recruited for the Manhattan Project was a UCLA graduate student named Clayton Forrester (pictured). As the nuclear race between the West and the Axis accelerated, Dr. Forrester became one of the most important scientific figures in America; by the time war finally broke out between the Western alliance and the Axis nations Forrester was the de facto number two man on the project's scientific team. After the Third Reich collapsed and the anti-monarchist uprising on Mars was crushed, he became a physics professor at Harvard and continued his research on atomic energy. Dr. Forrester would go on to win the 1953 Nobel Physics Prize.

on this day Princeton University astronomy professor Richard Pearson, one of the first Western scientists to make contact with the Martians following the landing at Grover's Mill, was seriously injured at his office in what was initially thought to have been a failed robbery but later determined to have been an assassination attempt by Gestapo agents who had recently infiltrated the Princeton campus.

Part SevenKnowing the value of Professor Pearson's work in relation to the larger human effort to understand Martian culture and technology, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover personally took charge of the Pearson case and instructed the FBI's New York City field office to make the Gestapo agents' capture its top priority.