The Bank of England became nationalized in 1946.
By Phil Kohn. Dedicated to the memory of his father, GM3 Walter Kohn, U.S. Navy Armed Guard, USNR, and all men and women who have answered the country’s call in time of need. Phil can be contacted at ww2remembered@yahoo.com.
After 252 years as a privately owned entity, the Bank of England is nationalized on March 1, 1946, with control taken over by the British government. Dutch troops land on East Bali in the Netherlands East Indies. In Pyongyang, in Soviet-occupied northern Korea, anti-communist activists attempt to assassinate Kim Il-sung, the leader of the Korean People’s Army, by throwing a hand grenade at him at a political rally. Kim is saved by the quick action of nearby Second Lt. Y.T. Novichenko, of the Red Army, who catches the grenade and throws it away, where it explodes harmlessly.
Soviet troops evacuate some areas of Iran on March 2 but remain in the northwest of the country. Arabs strike for twelve hours in Palestine over the deportation of Arab leaders to the Seychelles, in the Indian Ocean, after their capture in Germany. Residents of Greenwich, Connecticut, hold a special referendum on whether the United Nations headquarters should be built in their town. (Many U.S. cities are vying to be the venue of the UN headquarters, but a UN site-selection committee’s first choice is a 42-square-mile plot that includes much of Greenwich and parts of Stamford and North Castle, because the site’s location in “idyllic countryside” is in close proximity to New York City.) Residents oppose “UNOville,” as it is called locally, because over one thousand families would be displaced, and traffic — already bad — would get much worse. Of the residents who cast ballots in the referendum, over 69% vote “no,” telling the UN to go somewhere else. (The final tally is 4,450 “no” votes to 2,019 “yes” ballots.) Prominent among opposition leaders is banker and politician Prescott Bush (the father of U.S. President George H.W. Bush and the grandfather of U.S. President George W. Bush).
American Airlines Flight 6-103 from Tucson, Arizona, on March 3 crashes into a mountain on its approach to San Diego, California, killing all 27 aboard the DC-3. The flight had originated in New York, with multiple scheduled stops en route.
In Alexandria, Egypt, 19 people are killed and 299 are injured in anti-British rioting on March 4. Fifteen armored brigades of the Red Army invade Iran’s Azerbaijan region while other brigades are deployed along the borders of Turkey, Iraq and Bulgaria. Leftist rioters in Teheran prevent Iran’s parliament from sitting. In Finland, Carl Gustav Mannerheim resigns as president, due to illness, and is succeeded by former prime minister Juho Passikivi.
In a speech at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, former British prime minister Winston Churchill says, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended upon the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in . . . the Soviet sphere.” The speech popularizes the term “iron curtain” and draws attention to the division of Europe.
Prime Minister Ahmad Qavam of Iran on March 6 personally protests to Joseph Stalin in Moscow about the continued presence of Soviet troops in his country. The U.S. government ends wartime controls on many consumer items, including musical instruments and phonograph records. With weapons, uniforms, vehicles and landing craft supplied by the United States, French troops, with the permission of the Vietnamese, come ashore at Haiphong to oversee the peaceful departure of Nationalist Chinese occupation forces. Ten French soldiers are killed when Chinese troops fire on them “by mistake.” Shortly after the departure of the Chinese, the First Indochina War ignites when the Vietnamese realize the French will be staying to re-colonize the country. Jackie Robinson becomes the first African American in the Twentieth Century to play in a Major League Baseball game — a spring-training contest in Florida between the Brooklyn Dodgers and their farm club, the Montreal Royals. Robinson plays shortstop for the Canadian club. (Robinson is not the first black player to play in “the majors.” Between 1870 and 1883, at least four African Americans — Frank Stewart, Charles Bannister, John “Bud” Fowler and Moses Fleetwood “Fleet” Walker — (and likely more) played on “white” professional baseball teams. In 1883, a segregationist, unwritten “Gentlemen’s Agreement” among team owners went into effect that precluded blacks from playing in the major leagues for 63 years. The “Agreement” is broken when the Dodgers’ part-owner, president and general manager, Branch Rickey, signs Robinson to a minor-league contract.)
Police on March 7 fire on rioters in New Delhi, India, killing six. The rioters are objecting to the presence of U.S. troops in a British victory parade. A show of force by armed police allows the Iranian parliament to meet in Teheran for the first time in three days. In Moscow, the U.S. embassy delivers a note to the Soviet Foreign Ministry calling on the Soviets to honor their agreement to depart Iran. The 167 residents of Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, are evacuated by the U.S. Navy so atomic-bomb testing can get underway there.
The U.S. Civil Aeronautics Board gives its approval on March 8, 1946, for helicopters to be used by civilians in the U.S. It grants certification to Bell Aircraft Corporation for its Bell 47, a modified version of the military’s H-13 Sioux rotorcraft.
In Cairo, the British ambassador announces on March 9 that British troops will be withdrawn from Egypt.
Italian women are allowed to vote for the first time on March 10, in local elections. In Lviv, Ukraine, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, under pressure from the Soviet government, severs its longstanding ties with Rome and enters into a union with the Moscow-controlled Russian Orthodox Church.
Rudolf Höss, an SS functionary who had been the longest-serving Nazi commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, is arrested by British military police at Gottrupel, near Flensburg, in northern Germany, on March 11. He has been working on a farm under an alias. Upon interrogation, he admits to overseeing the murder of over 2.5 million people, mostly Jews, at Auschwitz. Accused of murdering 3.5 million people, Höss corrects the interrogator: “No. Only 2.5 million; the rest died of disease and starvation.” (Höss is tried before a tribunal at Nuremberg in April 1946, found guilty of war crimes, transferred to the Polish government, and executed by hanging, at Auschwitz, in Oświęcim, Poland, on April 16, 1947.)
The Chinese occupation of Laos north of the 16th parallel ends on March 12. Paul-Henri Spaak, an influential Socialist politician, replaces Achille van Acker as prime minister of Belgium. In Yugoslavia, Gen. Dragoljub “Draža” Mihailović, Serbian leader of the Chetnik guerrilla group, is found by government agents after two years in hiding and brought to Belgrade where he is to be tried for war crimes. (Initially, Mihailović’s Chetniks — staunch royalists and nationalists — and Tito’s communist Partisans were anti-Nazi allies. By 1941, the Chetniks had begun collaborating with the Axis and were involved in massacres of Bosnians and Croatians in an attempt to position themselves in power after the war ended.) Ferenc Szálasi, Hungary’s head of state and prime minister during the last six months of the country’s Axis-allied participation in the war, is hanged in Budapest. He had been tried in February 1946 and convicted of “war crimes and high treason.”
Chinese Nationalist troops peacefully replace the Soviet occupation force in Mukden, Manchuria, on March 13. In the Netherlands East Indies, formal negotiations begin for a peace settlement between Dutch and Indonesian leaders.
On March 14 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Fred Rose, the first (and to date, only) member of the Communist Party of Canada elected to the House of Commons of Canada, is arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on suspicion of spying for the Soviet government. (Rose is ultimately tried and convicted of conspiring to turn over information to the Soviets and sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison. He is expelled from the Canadian Parliament on January 30, 1947.)
