* 1939 – Burmese national hero U Ottama dies in prison after a hunger strike to protest Britain's colonial government.

On 24 May 1939 the Fleet Air Arm was returned to Admiralty control under the " Inskip Award " ( named after the Minister for Co-ordination of Defence who was overseeing Britain's re-armament programme ) and renamed the Air Branch of the Royal Navy.

* John Henry ( toxicologist ) ( 1939 – 2007 ), English toxicologist, professor at Imperial College London and a consultant to Britain's National Poisons Information Service

In a poll organised by The Architectural Review in 1939 to find what lay people thought were Britain's best modern buildings, Battersea Power Station was in second place, behind the Peter Jones building.

After Britain's declaration of war on Germany on 3 September 1939, Unity was distraught.

In 1939, it was renamed Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, Inc., and in 1956 the name was changed to Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc. Until 2000, a member of the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses was president of both the Watch Tower ( Pennsylvania ) and Watchtower ( New York ) corporations, as well as Britain's International Bible Students Association corporation ; in 2001, it was decided that the corporations ' directors need not be members of the Governing Body.

Canada declared war on Germany in 1939, following Britain's war declaration the week before.

From May to August 1939 the German Zeppelin LZ130 Graf Zeppelin II made flights along Britain's North Sea coast to investigate the 100 m-high radio towers the British had erected from Portsmouth to Scapa Flow.

Another British scientist working on radar technology and techniques was R. V. Jones, who had been appointed in 1939 as Britain's first Scientific Intelligence Officer and had spent the first years of the conflict researching how advanced the German radar technology was in comparison to Britain, and convincing doubters that the Germans actually had radar.

A fictional account of British national policy in 1939, it tells how Britain's secretary of state tried to keep world peace, even with the Royal Air Force aggressively brandishing rocket airplanes and an atomic bomb.

During the 1939 / 40 season Football was stopped following Britain's declaration of war and not resumed until the end of war.

In 1939, Britain's King George VI, representing the dominion of Canada, visited the Yard during his Washington stay.

Snow also presented a special on BBC Radio 4 focusing on " Britain's First Day of War in 1939 ".

As the Second World War broke out in 1939, Thomas introduced the Pan-Malayan war tax scheme to fund for Britain's war efforts.

At PC Bruno, outside Paris, on 20 October 1939 the Poles resumed work on German Enigma ciphers in close collaboration with Britain's Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park.

He continued working with the cream of Britain's acting crop during his ten years ( 1929 – 1939 ) on the West End stage.

Inskip's tenure at Defence remains controversial, with some arguing that he did much to push Britain's rearmament before the outbreak of the Second World War but others argue he was largely ineffectual. In early 1939 he was replaced by First Sea Lord Lord Chatfield, and moved to become Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs.

Twinn joined GC & CS — Britain's codebreaking service — in early 1939, recruited after seeing an advertisement, working first in London before moving to Bletchley Park.

The Ministry was formed on 4 September 1939, the day after Britain's declaration of war.

This version of Bonnet's flag is probably one of a number of pirate flags appearing on an undated manuscript with unknown provenance in Britain's National Maritime Museum, which was donated by Dr. Philip Gosse in 1939.

In August 1939, with war imminent and protected government facilities in the suburbs not yet ready, the War Rooms became operational on 27 August 1939, only days before the invasion of Poland on 1 September, and Britain's declaration of war on Germany on 3 September.

By 1939 Scott had become one of Great Britain's leading young stage actresses.

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

The initial funds were released in September, and the 11-tube prototype was first demonstrated in October, 1939.

In 1939, coinciding with the start of World War II, Rene Dubos reported the discovery of the first naturally derived antibiotic, gramicidin from B. brevis.

Since the first pioneering efforts of Florey and Chain in 1939, the importance of antibiotics, including antibacterials, to medicine has led to intense research into producing antibacterials at large scales.

* 1939 – The Grapes of Wrath, by American author John Steinbeck is first published by the Viking Press.

In 1939 Grothendieck went to France and lived in various camps for displaced persons with his mother, first at the Camp de Rieucros, and subsequently lived for the remainder of the war in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, where he was sheltered and hidden in local boarding-houses or pensions.

The first female member Florence Rankin joined AA in March 1937, and the first non-Protestant member, a Roman Catholic, joined in 1939.

Informally known as " The Big Book " ( with its first 164 pages virtually unchanged since the 1939 edition ), it suggests a twelve-step program in which members admit that they are powerless over alcohol and need help from a " higher power "; seek guidance and strength through prayer and meditation from God or Higher Power of their own understanding ; take a moral inventory with care to include resentments ; list and become ready to remove character defects ; list and make amends to those harmed, and then try to help other alcoholics recover.

The world's first fatal hijacking occurred on 28 October 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.

The first wave of the Government Code and Cypher School ( GC & CS ) moved to Bletchley Park on 15 August 1939.

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

Bundaberg rum was first produced in 1888, production ceased from 1907 to 1914 and from 1936 to 1939 after fires, the second of which caused rum from the factory to spill into the nearby Burnett River.

( The first edition was published in 1939.

* Andreas Gruentzig ( 1939 – 1985 ), first developed balloon angioplasty

From 1938 to 1945, he held a succession of positions, first becoming senior history master at Blundell's School in Tiverton, Devon in 1938 ( and also a Captain in the school's OTC ), then instructor at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth in 1939.

The National Speleological Society of the USA was later founded in 1941 ( originally formed as the Speleological Society of the District of Columbia on May 6, 1939 ) and the Swiss Society of Speleology created in 1939 in Geneva, but the first speleological institute in the world was founded in 1920 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, by Emil Racovita, a Romanian biologist, zoologist, speleologist and explorer of Antarctica.

* Cardinal ( grape ), a table grape first produced in California in 1939

* Naughty But Mice ( 1939, debuts Sniffles, first Jones-created series character )

There were plans for races at Zandvoort before World War II: the first street race was held on June 3, 1939.

The fact that the Sun has a million-degree corona was first discovered by Gotrian in 1939 and Bengt Edlén in 1941 by identifying the coronal lines ( observed since 1869 ) as transitions from low-lying metastable levels of the ground configuration of highly ionized metals ( the green FeXIV line at 5303 Å, but also the red line FeX at 6374 Å ).