World War II calendar
What happened on March 8 during World War II? This date brings together 7 events from 1940, 1942 and 1945, with period photographs and links to the full operations documented across WW2 Theatres.
From 8 March 1940 the Poland Decrees forbade Polish workers in the Reich to leave their homes, use public transport or visit cinemas, theatres, restaurants and churches, and required them to wear a badge with the letter P. The decrees created one of the legal classes into which the Reich sorted its foreign workers, and the regulations of 1942 for Soviet workers extended the same approach.
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Dutch leaders met Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura at Kalijati on 8 March 1942 as organised resistance on Java collapsed. Lieutenant General Hein ter Poorten ordered the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army on Java to cease fighting, although isolated Allied units surrendered later. Japanese military rule replaced Dutch colonial administration on the island. Java came under the Sixteenth Army, Sumatra under the Twenty-Fifth Army, while much of the remaining archipelago fell under naval administration. The division reflected Japanese command requirements rather than the boundaries of the former colonial state. The new…
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Japanese forces entered Rangoon on 8 March 1942. The conquest of Burma cut one of the region’s major export sources out of Allied-controlled trade and added pressure to food markets across India and Ceylon. Bengal consumed mostly locally grown rice, yet the wider eastern Indian market had depended on Burmese exports to balance deficits elsewhere. The loss therefore mattered through regional prices and competition for grain as well as through direct Bengal imports. War expenditure and military demand were expanding at the same time. The food problem that developed in…
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Japan's capture of Rangoon cut Bengal off from Burmese rice imports that had helped balance regional shortages. The loss was a genuine external shock to a wartime food system already under pressure, but it did not by itself make famine inevitable. What followed was a sequence of harvest damage, inflation, market failure and policy responses that determined who could still obtain rice and at what price. Separating that initial shock from the later failures is essential to understanding why historians disagree about Bengal without disagreeing that the response failed catastrophically.
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Allied forces evacuated Rangoon and Japanese troops entered the city on 8 March. The loss removed Burma’s principal port and the maritime entry point for supplies that had moved north toward Lashio and then along the Burma Road to China. The campaign now turned inland. British and Indian formations withdrew north and west while Chinese forces operated farther east, and the question became whether a connected front could still protect central Burma and the route to Lashio. Without Rangoon, every supply problem worsened and every mile of retreat lengthened the…
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A force of 211 aircraft attacked Essen, including eighty-two equipped with Gee. The first wave reached the target region on schedule and dropped flares from radio fixes, exactly the kind of task for which the new system had been expected to transform the offensive. The final identification still failed. Flares burned out, industrial haze obscured the ground and scattered fires drew later crews away from the intended aiming point. Bombs fell across Hamborn, Duisburg, Oberhausen and the southern outskirts of Essen. Krupp's works were virtually untouched, and none of the…
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At about 23:30 on 8 March a Japanese force attacked Company E, 2d Battalion, 23d Marines, and the boundary between the 23d and 24th Marines. The main body was the 1st Company of the 310th Independent Infantry Battalion with a machine-gun platoon and an infantry platoon, joined by elements of the 3d Battalion, 145th Infantry, the 314th Independent Infantry Battalion, an engineer unit and naval personnel. An artillery preparation came first, then a close approach through shell-torn ground, and some attackers infiltrated the command post of 2/23. Captured maps listed…
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