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WWII On This Day: March 9

What happened on March 9 during World War II? This date brings together 3 events from 1942 and 1945, with period photographs and links to the full operations documented across WW2 Theatres.

1942
Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival and the British surrender party walking to the Ford Motor Factory in Singapore on 15 February 1942.
British official photographer / Imperial War Museums HU 2781 · UK Government public domain · Source
The Fall of the Southern Empires

Java Capitulates

Organized resistance on Java ended on 9 March after Japanese advances from the landing areas broke the island’s defensive system and the Dutch command accepted capitulation. Allied detachments were ordered to cease resistance as a conventional campaign. The oil-producing Netherlands East Indies had been the central economic objective of the southern plan. Its capture completed the main resource conquest and removed the largest Allied base remaining inside the Malay Barrier. From this point the Japanese southern perimeter ran through territory that the Allies had expected to use as their defensive…

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1945
A destitute mother and child on a Calcutta pavement during the Bengal famine of 1943-44.
Kalyani Bhattacharyee and Manoj Sarbadhikar / Bengal Speaks, Servants of Bengal Society · Public domain
World War II Famines

Japan removes the French administration mid-famine

Japan overthrew the French colonial administration on 9 March 1945 and replaced it with direct military control and a nominally independent Vietnamese government under Emperor Bảo Đại. The change came while famine mortality was already severe. Because Japanese military power and French civil administration overlapped during most of the crisis, responsibility cannot be divided neatly at the date of the coup. Vietnamese, French and international scholarship assigns different weights to requisitioning, colonial economic policy, harvest failure and transport disruption.

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USAAF aerial photograph of Tokyo showing damage from the firebombing raid of 9–10 March 1945, photographed on 10 March.
USAAF aerial photograph of Tokyo showing damage from the firebombing raid of 9–10 March 1945, photographed on 10 March. United States Army Air Forces · Public domain (U.S. Government) Source
The Bombing of Cities

Operation Meetinghouse

On the night of 9–10 March 1945 more than three hundred B-29s attacked Tokyo at low altitude with incendiaries. The bombers approached individually individually, a major departure from the large daylight precision formations. Wind and the density of the target area turned thousands of fires into a conflagration across roughly fifteen to sixteen square miles. American post-war sources and Japanese counts differ in detail, but the death toll is generally placed on the order of one hundred thousand people. The selected area contained extensive small-scale production and labour tied to…

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