| 13501 | February 3 | Event | 1930 – Communist Party of Vietnam is founded at a "Unification Conference" held in Kowloon, British Hong Kong. |
| 13502 | February 3 | Event | 1931 – The Hawke's Bay earthquake, New Zealand's worst natural disaster, kills 258. |
| 13503 | February 3 | Event | 1933 – Adolf Hitler announces that the expansion of Lebensraum into Eastern Europe, and its ruthless Germanisation, are the ultimate geopolitical objectives of Third Reich foreign policy. |
| 13504 | February 3 | Event | 1943 – The SS Dorchester is sunk by a German U-boat. Only 230 of 902 men aboard survive. The Chapel of the Four Chaplains, dedicated by President Harry Truman, is one of many memorials established to commemorate the Four Chaplains story. |
| 13505 | February 3 | Event | 1944 – World War II: During the Gilbert and Marshall Islands campaign, U.S. Army and Marine forces seize Kwajalein Atoll from the defending Japanese garrison. |
| 13506 | February 3 | Event | 1945 – World War II: As part of Operation Thunderclap, 1,000 B-17s of the Eighth Air Force bomb Berlin, a raid which kills between 2,500 to 3,000 and dehouses another 120,000. |
| 13507 | February 3 | Event | 1945 – World War II: The United States and the Philippine Commonwealth begin a month-long battle to retake Manila from Japan. |
| 13508 | February 3 | Event | 1947 – The lowest temperature in North America, −63.9 °C (−83.0 °F), is recorded in Snag, Yukon. |
| 13509 | February 3 | Event | 1957 – Senegalese political party Democratic Rally merges into the Senegalese Party of Socialist Action (PSAS). |
| 13510 | February 3 | Event | 1958 – Founding of the Benelux Economic Union, creating a testing ground for a later European Economic Community. |
| 13511 | February 3 | Event | 1959 – Deaths of rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa. |
| 13512 | February 3 | Event | 1960 – British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan speaks of "a wind of change", an increasing national consciousness blowing through colonial Africa, signalling that his Government is likely to support decolonisation. |
| 13513 | February 3 | Event | 1961 – The United States Air Forces begins Operation Looking Glass, and over the next 30 years, a "Doomsday Plane" is always in the air, with the capability of taking direct control of the United States' bombers and missiles in the event of the destructio |
| 13514 | February 3 | Event | 1966 – The unmanned Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft makes the first controlled rocket-assisted landing on the Moon. |
| 13515 | February 3 | Event | 1967 – Ronald Ryan, the last person to be executed in Australia, is hanged in Pentridge Prison, Melbourne. |
| 13516 | February 3 | Event | 1969 – In Cairo, Yasser Arafat is appointed Palestine Liberation Organization leader at the Palestinian National Congress. |
| 13517 | February 3 | Event | 1971 – New York Police Officer Frank Serpico is shot during a drug bust in Brooklyn and survives to later testify against police corruption. Many believe the incident proves that NYPD officers tried to kill him. |
| 13518 | February 3 | Event | 1972 – The first day of the seven-day 1972 Iran blizzard, which would kill at least 4,000 people, making it the deadliest snowstorm in history. |
| 13519 | February 3 | Event | 1984 – John Buster and the research team at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center announce history's first embryo transfer, from one woman to another resulting in a live birth. |
| 13520 | February 3 | Event | 1984 – Space Shuttle program: STS-41-B is launched using Space Shuttle Challenger. |
| 13521 | February 3 | Event | 1989 – After a stroke two weeks previously, South African President P. W. Botha resigns as leader of the National Party, but stays on as president for six more months. |
| 13522 | February 3 | Event | 1989 – A military coup overthrows Alfredo Stroessner, dictator of Paraguay since 1954. |
| 13523 | February 3 | Event | 1995 – Astronaut Eileen Collins becomes the first woman to pilot the Space Shuttle as mission STS-63 gets underway from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. |
| 13524 | February 3 | Event | 1998 – Karla Faye Tucker is executed in Texas, becoming the first woman executed in the United States since 1984. |
| 13525 | February 3 | Event | 1998 – Cavalese cable car disaster: a United States military pilot causes the death of 20 people when his low-flying plane cuts the cable of a cable-car near Trento, Italy. |
| 13526 | February 3 | Event | 2007 – A Baghdad market bombing kills at least 135 people and injures a further 339. |
| 13527 | February 3 | Event | 2014 – Two people are shot and killed and 29 students are taken hostage at a high school in Moscow, Russia. |
| 13528 | February 3 | Event | 2015 – A collision between a commuter train and a passenger vehicle kills six in Valhalla, New York. |
| 13529 | February 3 | Birth | 1338 – Joanna of Bourbon (d. 1378) |
| 13530 | February 3 | Birth | 1392 – Henry Percy, 2nd Earl of Northumberland, English commander (d. 1458) |