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A German torpedo hits an American warship; Kearny survives on one engine

Eleven sailors die off Iceland while the United States still calls itself neutral.

Two months before Pearl Harbor, the United States was still officially neutral in the war tearing across the Atlantic. On October 17, 1941, the destroyer USS Kearny rushed to help a British convoy under assault by a German wolfpack near Iceland when U-568 put a torpedo into her starboard side, killing 11 sailors and wounding 22. Her crew confined the flooding to the forward fire room. After regaining power in the forward engine room, Kearny steamed to Iceland at 10 knots…

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More from October 17

Cornwallis asks Washington for terms; his guns have been silenced for days

A drummer boy beats the parley and a white handkerchief goes up over the British works at Yorktown.

Einstein steps off the boat in America, a scientist with no country to go home to

Seven months after refusing to return to Germany, he lands to take up a post at a research institute that barely exists yet.

A 6.9 quake hits the Bay Area as the World Series is about to start on live national TV

Light rush-hour traffic, cleared early for the game, kept the Nimitz Freeway collapse from killing far more.

Gates accepts 5,800 prisoners after Burgoyne's isolated campaign collapses on the Hudson.

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More from The World Wars

Guam is declared secure; 7,500 Japanese troops are still loose in the hills

Three weeks after wading ashore at Asan and Agat, Marines and Army troops end organized resistance on an island America lost in 1941.

Tokyo says it will surrender, but only if the Emperor stays on his throne

Four days after Hiroshima and one day after Nagasaki, Japan attaches a single condition to Potsdam's terms.

Handcuffed and under guard, the first inmates step onto Alcatraz

Sixty federal agents and marshals escorted 137 men from Leavenworth to an island the government called escape-proof.

Days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Washington tells the public how the bomb was built

Physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth's report explains the science while carefully withholding the engineering.

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