- Mar 1 3 day Battle of Java Sea ends, US suffers a major naval defeat
- Mar 1 Baseball decides that players in military can't play when on furlough
- Mar 1 J Milton Cage Jr's "Imaginary Landscape No 3" premieres in Chicago
- Mar 1 Japanese troops occupy Kalidjati airport in Java
- Mar 1 Suriname camp for NSB people opens to save Jews
- Mar 1 Tito establishes 2nd Proletarit Brigade in Bosnia
Film Awards
Mar 2 14th Academy Awards: "How Green was My Valley", Gary Cooper & Joan Fontaine win
Joan Fontaine
Gary Cooper
Music Premiere
Mar 5 World première of Dmitri Shostakovich' 7th Symphony in Kuybyshev, Russia
Dmitri Shostakovich
- Mar 5 Japanese troop march into Batavia
- Mar 7 15 Mk-VB Spitfires reach Malta
- Mar 7 1st cadets graduated from flying school at Tuskegee
- Mar 8 Japanese forces capture Rangoon, Burma
- Mar 8 KNIL, Dutch colonial army on Java, surrenders to Japanese armies
- Mar 9 Construction of the Alaska Highway began
- Mar 11 1st deportation train leaves Paris for Auschwitz Concentration Camp
Douglas MacArthur
- Mar 11 Japanese troop land on North Sumatra
- Mar 12 British troops vacate the Andaman Islands in Gulf of Bengal
- Mar 13 Julia Flikke of the Nurse Corps, becomes 1st woman colonel in US army
- Mar 17 Bełżec Concentration Camp opens with the transport of 30,000 Lublin Polish Jews
- Mar 17 General Doug MacArthur arrives in Australia to become supreme commander
- Mar 18 Illegal Free Netherlands announces boycott of theaters
Event of Interest
Mar 18 2 black players, Jackie Robinson & Nate Moreland, request a tryout with the Chicago White Sox, they are allowed to work out
Jackie Robinson
Franklin D. Roosevelt
- Mar 19 Thoroughbred Racing Association of US formed in Chicago
- Mar 20 Convoy PQ13 departs Reykjavik Iceland to Russia
- Mar 20 General MacArthur vows "I came through and I shall return" after escaping Japanese invaded Philippines
- Mar 20 Major German assault on Malta
- Mar 21 Convoy QP9 departs Great Britain to Murmansk
- Mar 23 2,500 Jews of Lublin massacred or deported
- Mar 23 Japanese forces occupy Andaman Islands in Indian Ocean
- Mar 24 US government begins moving native-born citizens with Japanese ancestry into detention centres under Executive Order 9066, with intention of preventing home-grown espionage
- Mar 25 1st 700 Jews from Polish Lvov district reach the Bełżec Concentration camp
'The Banality of Evil'
Mar 26 First "Eichmann transport" to Auschwitz & Birkenau concentration camps
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- Mar 26 Explosion of 20 tons of gelignite in a stone quarry at Easton, Pennsylvania, kills 21
Event of Interest
Mar 26 German offensive in North Africa under General Erwin Rommel
Erwin Rommel
Boxing Title Fight
- Mar 28 -29] 234 RAF bombers attack Lubeck
- Mar 28 4th NCAA Men's Basketball Championship: Stanford beats Dartmouth 53-38
- Mar 28 British naval forces raid Nazi occupied French port of St Nazaire
- Mar 29 British cruiser HMS Trinidad torpedoes itself in the Barents Sea
- Mar 29 British destroyer HMS Campbeltown explodes in St Nazaire: 400 Germans die
- Mar 29 German submarine U-585 sinks
- Mar 29 Bombing of Lübeck in World War II was the first major success for the RAF Bomber Command against Germany and a German city
- Mar 30 1st RSHA-transport from France arrives in camp Birkenau
- Mar 30 SS murders 200 inmates of Trawniki concentration camp