* 1939 – 1945, the Second Battle of the Atlantic.

Subsequent formalizations were framed as attempts to define " effective calculability " or " effective method "; those formalizations included the Gödel – Herbrand – Kleene recursive functions of 1930, 1934 and 1935, Alonzo Church's lambda calculus of 1936, Emil Post's " Formulation 1 " of 1936, and Alan Turing's Turing machines of 1936 – 7 and 1939.

* 1890 – Anthony Fokker, Dutch aviation engineer ( d. 1939 )

* 1939 – André Ouellet, French-Canadian politician

* 1852 – Ferdinand von Lindemann, German mathematician ( d. 1939 )

* 1939 – Alan Ayckbourn, English writer

* 1939 – Johnny Raper, Australian rugby league footballer

* 1939 – The 1939-40 New York World's Fair opens.

* 1939 – NBC inaugurates its regularly scheduled television service in New York City, broadcasting President Franklin D. Roosevelt's N. Y. World's Fair opening day ceremonial address.

* 1939 – First flight of the turbojet-powered Heinkel He 178, the world's first jet aircraft.

* 1939 – William Least Heat-Moon, American author

* 1939 – Edward Patten, American singer-songwriter and producer ( Gladys Knight & the Pips ) ( d. 2005 )

* 1939 – Bulle Ogier, French actress

* 1939 – Romano Prodi, Italian politician and statesman

* 1939 – Hércules Brito Ruas, Brazilian footballer

* 1939 – Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd write a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, urging him to begin the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon.

* 1939 – Benjamin Barber, American theorist

* 1939 – Wes Craven, American director

* 1939 – John W. Snow, American politician, 73rd United States Secretary of the Treasury

* 1984 – Marvin Gaye, American singer ( The Moonglows ) ( b. 1939 )

* 2001 – Trinh Cong Son, Vietnamese composer ( b. 1939 )

Eastern European theorists include Pyotr Stolypin ( 1862 – 1911 ) and Alexander Chayanov ( 1888 – 1939 ) in Russia ; Adolph Wagner ( 1835 – 1917 ), and Karl Oldenberg in Germany, and Bolesław Limanowski ( 1835 – 1935 ) in Poland.

Rural flight from the Great Plains has been depicted in literature, such as John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath ( 1939 ), in which a family from the Great Plains migrates to California during the Dust Bowl period of the 1930s.

The Grapes of Wrath is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939.

The work of independent artists, such as American novelist John Steinbeck's novels Of Mice and Men ( 1937 ) and The Grapes of Wrath ( 1939 ), and the music of folk singer Woody Guthrie, was also influenced by the crises of the Dust Bowl and the Depression.

It was photographed by Gregg Toland, later famed for his cinematography on films such as Citizen Kane ( 1941 ) and The Grapes of Wrath ( 1939 ).

John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath won the Pulitzer Prize for its controversial characterization of the Okie lifestyle and journey to California.

The wide-shouldered 6 ' 2 " Bond appears in more of the films on both the original and the tenth anniversary edition of the American Film Institute's 100 Years ... 100 Movies lists than any other actor, albeit always as a supporting player: It Happened One Night ( 1934 ), Bringing Up Baby ( 1938 ), Gone with the Wind ( 1939 ), The Grapes of Wrath ( 1940 ), The Maltese Falcon ( 1941 ), It's a Wonderful Life ( 1946 ) and The Searchers ( 1956 ).

Arrowsmith ( 1931 / 32 ), Lady for a Day ( 1933 ), It Happened One Night ( 1934 ), You Can't Take It with You ( 1938 ), Gone with the Wind ( 1939 ), The Grapes of Wrath ( 1940 ), The Maltese Falcon ( 1941 ), Sergeant York ( 1941 ), It's a Wonderful Life ( 1946 ), The Quiet Man ( 1952 ) and Mister Roberts ( 1955 ).

* 1939: John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath

In John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, the character Ma Joad refers several times to Pretty Boy Floyd as a young man driven to a tragic fate by the Great Depression.

Charley Ellsworth Grapewin ( December 20, 1869 – February 2, 1956 ) was an American vaudeville performer and a stage and film actor, who portrayed Uncle Henry in MGM's The Wizard of Oz ( 1939 ) and Grandpa Joad in the film The Grapes of Wrath ( 1940 ).

Their plight gained national attention through the 1939 novel and film The Grapes of Wrath.

* Tom Joad, a fictional character from the 1939 John Steinbeck novel The Grapes of Wrath and the 1940 movie of the same name

* The Grapes of Wrath, a 1939 novel by John Steinbeck

Symbolically, Marian Anderson ( a noted opera singer of her day ) sang a rendition of " America the Beautiful " on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 after being refused use of Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution because of her skin color.

Van Vogt's first published SF story, " Black Destroyer " ( Astounding Science Fiction, July 1939 ), was inspired by Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin.

* 1939 Tea for Three ( dramatised by Margery Vosper from the short story Accident )

The ABC was built by Dr. Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry in the basement of the physics building at Iowa State College during 1939 – 42.

* 1939 – The United Kingdom and Poland form a military alliance in which the UK promises to defend Poland in case of invasion by a foreign power.

Auschwitz had for a long time been a German name for Oświęcim, the town by and around which the camps were located ; the name " Auschwitz " was made the official name again by the Germans after they invaded Poland in September 1939.

His reputation grew in the USA following the critical reception of his design for the Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, described by Frank Lloyd Wright as a " work of genius ".

He also illustrated Daphnis and Chloe by Longus ( 1937 ) and Chansons pour elle by Paul Verlaine ( 1939 ).

Alicante was the last city loyal to the Republican government to be occupied by dictator Franco's troops on 1 April 1939, and its harbour saw the last Republican government officials fleeing the country.

He was also deeply influenced by Sapir's death in early 1939.

The Beowulf manuscript was transcribed from an original by two scribes, one of whom wrote the first 1939 lines and a second who wrote the remainder, so the poem up to line 1939 is in one handwriting, whilst the rest of the poem is in another.

In 1939 the companies were acquired by the Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation.

The notation was introduced in 1939 by Paul Dirac and is also known as Dirac notation, though the notation has precursors in Grassmann's use of the notation for his inner products nearly 100 years previously.

But in 1939, Robert Oppenheimer and others predicted that neutron stars above approximately three solar masses ( the Tolman – Oppenheimer – Volkoff limit ) would collapse into black holes for the reasons presented by Chandrasekhar, and concluded that no law of physics was likely to intervene and stop at least some stars from collapsing to black holes.

Despite the term blitzkrieg being coined by journalists during the Invasion of Poland of 1939, historians Mathew Cooper and J. P Harris generally hold that German operations during it were more consistent with more traditional methods.

Many historians now hold the position that blitzkrieg was not a military theory, and the campaigns conducted by the German military in 1939 to circa, 1942 ( with the exception of Operation Barbarossa ) were improvised invasions put together and modified at the last moment and therefore was not a proper military strategy.

It first appeared in September 1939, by a Times newspaper reporter.

Richard Overy pointed out some 23 percent of German output was military by 1939.

Du Boulay retired in 1924 and was replaced by M. B. Williamson who served until his death in 1939.