- Mar 1 3 day Battle of Java Sea ends, US suffers a major naval defeat
- 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 Major League Baseball owners decide not to allow players in the military to play for their clubs when on furlough
14th Academy Awards
Mar 2 14th Academy Awards: "How Green was My Valley", Gary Cooper, and Joan Fontaine win
Shostakovich' 7th Symphony
Mar 5 World première of Dmitri Shostakovich' 7th Symphony in Kuybyshev, Russia
- Mar 7 15 Mk-VB Spitfires reach Malta
- Mar 7 1st cadets graduated from flying school at Tuskegee, Alabama
- 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 begins
- Mar 11 1st deportation train leaves Paris for Auschwitz Concentration Camp
MacArthur Heads for Australia
Mar 11 General MacArthur leaves Corregidor (Bataan) for Australia
- Mar 11 Japanese troops 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 US General Douglas MacArthur arrives in Australia to become supreme commander
Black Players Try Out
Mar 18 2 black players, Jackie Robinson & Nate Moreland, request a tryout with the Chicago White Sox, they are allowed to work out
- Mar 18 Illegal Free Netherlands announces boycott of theaters
Internment of Japanese Americans
Mar 18 US President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9102, creating the War Relocation Authority, which was charged with overseeing the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II
MacArthur Vows "I Shall Return"
Mar 20 General Douglas MacArthur vows "I came through and I shall return" after escaping Japanese-occupied 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
- Mar 26 Explosion of 20 tons of gelignite in a stone quarry at Easton, Pennsylvania, kills 21
'The Banality of Evil'
Mar 26 First "Eichmann transport" to Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps
Rommel's Offensive
Mar 26 German offensive in North Africa under General Erwin Rommel
- Mar 27 -28] Allies raid German submarine base in St Nazaire
- Mar 27 Japan forces Java to use "Tokyo time" 1½ hour forward
- Mar 28 -29] 234 RAF bombers attack Lubeck
- Mar 28 4th NCAA Men's Basketball Championship: Stanford beats Dartmouth, 53-38; Cardinal forward Howie Dallmar is named tournament Most Outstanding Player
- Mar 28 British naval forces raid Nazi occupied French port of St Nazaire
- Mar 28 St. Nazaire Raid (Operation Chariot): obsolete British destroyer HMS Campbeltown, rigged with explosives and flying German flags, rams gates of German occupied St Nazaire port in France, and self detonates; kills 360 Germans, and disables the dry dock for duration of the war
- 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 29 British cruiser HMS Trinidad torpedoes itself in the Barents Sea
- Mar 29 German submarine U-585 sinks
- Mar 30 1st RSHA-transport from France arrives in camp Birkenau
- Mar 30 SS murders 200 inmates of Trawniki concentration camp
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