The Press: Stories of the Year

What were the biggest news stories of 1945? On anybody’s list, the biggest was the atom. Looking back over a year that was chockablock with news of history-book size, the press associations last week had no trouble filling their lists with big stories. The U.P.’s top twelve events, picked for their “surprise, significance and headline display”:

¶ Roosevelt’s death, Mussolini’s, Hitler’s, Germany’s surrender, UNO’s birth, Labor’s victory in England, the bomber crash into the Empire State Building, the Potsdam Declaration, the atomic bomb, Japan’s surrender, the war-crimes trial, the U.A.W. strike. Hearst’s I.N.S. “best ten” list added the Pearl Harbor inquiry.

Certainly 1945’s biggest would be remembered long after such lists as 1938’s, which included Douglas Corrigan’s Wrong-Way flight, a man leaping from Manhattan’s Hotel Gotham.