March 20th, 1940 (WEDNESDAY)
UNITED KINGDOM:
RAF Coastal Command: German bombers attacking convoys driven off in consort with aircraft of Fleet Air Arm and warships.The prototype Armstrong Whitworth Albermarle reconnaissance bomber (P1360) makes its maiden flight.(22)
FRANCE: Prime Minister Edouard Daladier is forced to resign; he has been criticized for failing to effectively help the Finns. In France this has been seen as a way for the Allies to seize the initiative in the war and take the fighting away from French soil and, by association, avoid all the horrors of World War I.
GERMANY: Berlin: An amiable civil engineer who built Germany's autobahns has been given the job of mobilising all available manpower, including the conquered Poles and Czechs, to work in the munitions factories of the Reich. Dr Fritz Todt, said by foreigners who have met him to be the most likeable of the leading Nazis, becomes Minister for Armaments and Munitions; he will be the biggest employer of labour in Germany, and will control the allocation of scarce raw materials.
Todt's labour battalions built the massive Siegfried Line opposite the Maginot Line and have recently been working on the construction of an Ostwall opposite the Stalin Line in the east.
U.S.S.R.: Moscow: Russia warns of its opposition to an alliance of Scandinavian countries in the belief that it would be hostile.
ITALY: President Roosevelt's envoy, Sumner Welles, sails from Genoa, ending his efforts on behalf of the US to end the war.
SYRIA: Aleppo: Allied air force staffs meet to agree on their plans for a bombing raid on the Soviet oil fields.
CANADA: Corvette HMCS Napanee laid down.
U.S.A.: The U.S. Ambassador to Brazil, Jefferson Caffery, reports to Secretary of State Cordell Hull that the Brazilian government's protesting HMS Dorsetshire's stopping SS Wakama on 12 February had not pleased the British. The British maintained that they were protecting Brazilian commerce. "Indeed you are not," the Brazilian Minister for Foreign Affairs Oswaldo Aranha retorts, "you are definitely not protecting our commerce by maintaining your warships off our coast. It is apparent to me that your blockade of Germany is plainly ineffective. If it were effective, you could stop the German boats [sic] on the other side before they entered German ports."
ATLANTIC OCEAN: Home Fleet battlecruisers to the north of the Shetlands cover a cruiser sweep into the Skagerrak. As they do, screening destroyer HMS Fortune sinks U-44.