I recently ran across this video where Bill Gates speaks about the death tolls of World War 1, the Spanish Flu, and World War 2. It struck me that some people living at the time surely must have thought such a large scale international war followed by a global plague followed by another war was fulfillment of Biblical end times scenarios. Coming from a Christian background where the newspaper is often incorrectly taken as some sort of road map to the end times, I'm curious if the same sort of thing was going on back then.
I guess my Google-foo is weak though, I'm having trouble digging up anything specific in this direction. Is anyone able to point me in the right direction?
Millenarianism might be a good place to start! It's the belief that a large change in society is imminent. Usually that change looks pretty apocalyptic. This is a belief that is popular among a wide variety of religions, from UFO cults to Jehovah's Witnesses. So you can look up the Wikipedia page for Millenarianism (okay, sorry AskHistorians, not a recommended source) or if you'd like something a little more reliable/academic, you could start on that page and look for academic articles/books about one of those movements. So if you're curious about post WWII, you might look to the Branch Davidians, who thought that the world was going to end in 1959 and are still around despite a siege with the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms in 1993 (look it up). Coming a little later, you might look at the "Helter Skelter" beliefs of the Manson "family" of murderers. They come a couple decades after World War II, but one could argue the influence is there.
The truth is I'm not finding a lot from the period you're interested in. Beckford (The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, 243) notes that while it is widely acknowledged that there was a rapid increase in New Religious Movements (which, in general, are more likely to have the kind of apocalyptic thinking that you're asking about) in the 60s and 70s. However, he also says that that isn't exactly a consensus. As a result, it's very possible that there were religious predicting the end of days immediately after WWII.
In the end, I don't have a great answer to your question, but hopefully I've at least supplied you with some vocabulary that'll let you do some research yourself. Most people seem to think that New Religious Movements became more popular a couple decades after WWII had ended, but that might not be the case.