Indian independence and partition took place in 1947.
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.
The United Kingdom’s Cabinet Mission to India departs London on March 15, 1946, with Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s blessing on India’s right to independence. The Mission — consisting of Lord Pethick-Lawrence, the Secretary of State for India, Sir Stafford Cripps of the Board of Trade, and Albert V. Alexander, the U.K. Minister of Defence — will meet with Indian representatives regarding the eventual independence of British India. The British are hopeful, for strategic purposes, that both Indian constituencies — Hindus and Muslims — will agree to a unified India.
Maximilien Blokzijl, a Dutch singer and journalist who made broadcasts to the Netherlands for the Nazis, is executed at The Hague for treason on March 16. It is the first execution by the Dutch government in the Netherlands since 1854.
Red Army troops on March 17 begin departing Denmark’s Bornholm Island, which had been seized from the Nazis in May 1945. Bornholm is in the Baltic Sea, east of the rest of Denmark.
March 18 is the last day that 1.1 million Koreans residing in Japan may apply for repatriation. Some 614,000 opt to return to Korea, all but 10,000 to places south of the 38th parallel. (North of that demarcation line is Soviet-occupied, south of there is occupied by the U.S.) In Japan, 63 women are hired as law-enforcement officers, the first-ever female police in the history of the country.
Nikolai Mikhailovich Shvernik replaces Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. on March 19. Iran appeals to the UN Security Council over the presence of Soviet troops remaining in the country almost three weeks after the treaty date for their withdrawal, which was March 2, 1946. Two separate crashes of U.S. Army planes in northern California kill 33 servicemen. In the first, a B-29 crashes into a mountain near Livermore, while in the second, a C-47 cargo plane with 26 aboard explodes in mid-air and crashes near Hobart Mills. French Guiana (in South America), Réunion (in the Indian Ocean), and Martinique and Guadeloupe (both in the Caribbean) become overseas departments of France.
Tule Lake War Relocation Center, in Newell, California, near the Oregon border, closes on March 20. It is the last remaining of the ten internment camps built by the federal government to hold Japanese-Americans who had been forcibly removed from their West Coast homes during the war.
The United Nations sets up temporary headquarters at Hunter College in New York City on March 21. Per planning that had begun in the fall of 1945 for a post-war air force independent of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense establishes the Strategic Air Command, at Bolling Field, in the District of Columbia, and the Tactical Air Command, at Langley Field, near Newport News, Virginia. In California, Kenny Washington signs a contract with the Los Angeles Rams, becoming the first African-American to play for a National Football League team since 1933, when the league began an unwritten ban on hiring black players.
The first U.S.-built rocket to leave the earth’s atmosphere reaches an altitude of 50 miles on March 22, 1946. To accomplish the achievement, the U.S. Army uses a team of German and American scientists to adapt German V-2 rockets that had been captured during the war. The British mandate in Transjordan comes to an end. The United Kingdom and Transjordan sign the Treaty of London, granting independence to Transjordan while permitting the British to maintain military bases in the country.
The strike by the United Auto Workers against the General Motors Corporation that began on November 21, 1945, ends on March 23, with workers winning an 18.5-cents-per-hour wage increase. W. Averell Harriman, former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, is named as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom. President Truman sends an ultimatum to Joseph Stalin demanding that the Soviets comply with their agreement to withdraw their troops from Iran.
The U.K.’s Cabinet Mission on March 24 arrives in Delhi, India, to discuss the future independence of India within the British Commonwealth. While the British hope for a unified India, the country’s (Hindu) Indian National Congress and the Muslim League seem less willing than ever to compromise on a unified, independent India. The U.S.S.R. announces it will withdraw its troops from Iran, thus defusing a diplomatic crisis with the United Kingdom and the United States.
The British Broadcasting Corporation begins transmitting short-wave radio programming in Russian to the Soviet Union on March 25. In the Bronx, New York, the United Nations Security Council temporarily convenes in buildings of Lehman College, part of the City College of New York.
In Greece, a large demonstration takes place in Athens on March 26 against the holding of national parliamentary elections, scheduled for March 31. Protesters, mainly leftists, are attacked by soldiers and police, and many are injured.
On March 27, Oklahoma A&M defeats North Carolina, 43-40, at Madison Square Garden in New York City to win the NCAA basketball tournament. It is the first NCAA tournament to have four teams (of the initial eight in the single-elimination tourney) advance to the finals site. (The NCAA’s true “Final Four” format, however, will not go into effect until 1952.)
The U.S. Department of State releases the Acheson-Lilienthal Report on March 28. The document, written by a committee headed by U.S. Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson and attorney David Lilienthal, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, outlines a plan for the international control of nuclear power as a means of avoiding nuclear warfare in the future. (As the Cold War progresses, however, the Report is basically ignored and forgotten.) The results of the first general elections for the provincial assemblies of the eleven provinces of British India are certified. The Indian National Congress Party wins majorities in eight of the assemblies, while the Muslim League commands majorities in two others.
A new constitution for the Gold Coast, the British Crown Colony on the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa, goes into effect on March 29. For the first time, the colony’s legislative council has a black majority.
In the British and American sectors of Germany, 7,000 Allied military personnel on March 30 fan out and round up and arrest over 1,000 individuals involved in “a well-financed” attempt to revive the Nazi Party. The movement has been organized by Artur Axmann, who had been the leader (Reichsjugendführer) of Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) from 1940 until the end of the war. Axmann had escaped from the Führerbunker in Berlin shortly after Hitler’s suicide and had eluded capture by the Soviets. He had been living under an alias in Lübeck, Germany, but was arrested there in December 1945 when a U.S. Army counterintelligence operation discovered his clandestine Nazi-revival plans. (In May 1949, a Nuremberg de-Nazification court tries Axmann and finds him guilty of indoctrinating youth in National Socialism but concludes he had committed no war crimes. He is sentenced to three years and three months in prison as a “major offender.”)
After only 18 days in office — heading the shortest-termed government in Belgium’s history — Paul-Henri Spaak is replaced by Achille van Acker —Spaak’s predecessor — as prime minister of Belgium on March 31. In Greece, the first post-war parliamentary elections take place, with the Communist Party of Greece refusing to participate. Some 38% of the population adheres to a left-wing boycott of the voting. International observers note “serious intimidation” of leftists. A right-wing, royalist government is elected as a result, and Konstantinos Tsaldaris becomes prime minister.
On April 1, 1946, 400,000 bituminous-coal miners in the United States go on strike under the auspices of the United Mine Workers of America. The United Kingdom forms the Malay Union, a federation of the Malay states and the Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca. Singapore, the large city at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, is declared a separate crown colony. An 8.6-magnitude earthquake strikes just south of the Aleutian Islands, destroying the Scotch Cap Lighthouse on Unimak Island, Alaska, killing six people. A resulting tsunami, traveling at over 500 miles per hour smashes into Hilo, Hawaii, with a 55-foot-high wall of water, killing 173 people, injuring 163, destroying 488 buildings and damaging 936 more. Damages are estimated at over $26 million. By prior agreement, French troops begin departing Syria. The event is celebrated thereafter in that country as Evacuation Day — a national holiday.
In Tokyo, Gen. of the Army Douglas MacArthur, administrator of the Allied occupation, issues orders on April 2 forbidding the fraternization of American military personnel and Japanese citizens. Originally intended to curb consorting with prostitutes, the order soon expands to total segregation, with Japanese being barred from American facilities, and vice versa.
Lt. Gen. Masaharu Homma, who oversaw the Bataan Death March, is executed at Los Baños, south of Manila, the Philippines, on April 3. Postal relations resume between the Netherlands and Germany. An article in an Amsterdam newspaper brings to the attention of publishers the existence of a diary of a young Jewish teenager who died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The girl kept the journal for two years while her family was being hidden from the Nazis by Dutch accomplices. The day after the family was arrested, the diary was rescued and kept hidden from the Germans by one of the Dutch women (Hermine “Miep” Gies) hiding the family because it included the names of those who had helped. Upon the return from Auschwitz of the father— the family’s sole survivor — his daughter’s diary was handed over to him. Published in the Netherlands in 1947, the book is translated and published in English in 1952 as “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.”
In Greece, Panagiotis Poulitsas becomes interim prime minister on April 4, replacing Themistoklis Sophoulis until Konstantinos Tsaldaris — winner of the controversial parliamentary elections on March 31 — can take office. In Washington, D.C., the eleven-nation Far Eastern Commission — with strong urging by Gen. of the Army Douglas MacArthur — exempts Japanese emperor Hirohito from being tried for war crimes. (MacArthur feels Hirohito needs to remain on the throne as a symbol of continuity and cohesion for the Japanese people.)
