March 31st, 1943 (WEDNESDAY)
NETHERLANDS: The shipyards at Rotterdam are bombed by the US 8th Air Force. Seventy eight B-17s and 24 B-24s were dispatched but because of clouds, only 33 B-17s of the 303d and 305th Bombardment Groups (Heavy) bombed the target at 1225 hours local. (Jack McKillop and Michael Ballard)
GERMANY: Major-General Peltz of the Luftwaffe is appointed Angriffsführer England, in charge of bombing raids against England.
Rastenburg: Hitler meets Bulgaria's King Boris III for consultations.
With the whole country now geared up for "total war", the armaments industry accounts for a massive 70% of Germany's national product. Since 1939, production of arms and equipment has quadrupled. Overall industrial production has risen by only 12%.
The National Socialist government says that recovery from the appalling losses of the Wehrmacht in the USSR will be made on a rising tide of new weaponry, although male armaments workers are being sent to replace their dead countrymen at the front. All businesses that are not essential to the war effort have been closed.
Agricultural production has fallen severely as farmhands are siphoned off to the war industries and fertilizers are increasingly hard to come by. Even production of the much-praised potato has dropped, and it is now illegal to feed spuds to livestock.
But the economy would be in a far worse state if it were not for the National Socialists' systematic exploitation of the occupied countries' resources and labour. Nearly one-fifth of the food consumed in Germany comes from abroad.
POLAND: Auschwitz-Birkenau: With the opening of the second of four spanking-new crematoria here today, the camp's capacity to process human beings into ashes has taken another step forward. The extermination of Jews and Gypsies on such a scale brings a new problem: how to dispose of their belongings?
In order to maintain the illusion that they are to be resettled, deportees are allowed to take a bundle of clothes or a small suitcase of belongings each. When they arrive, and undergo the selection that sends most of them straight to the gas chamber, they must drop everything.
A special corner of the camp, called Canada, is full of privileged prisoners whose task is to sort the goods into piles. In the middle of the yard are two enormous mountains, one of blankets, and one of suitcases and knapsacks. Prisoners sort clothing into piles; the yellow stars will be taken off, the bloodstains cleaned up and the old clothes shipped to the Reich for distribution to the German needy.
To the right, hundreds of prams; to the left, thousands of pots and pans. All around are huts filled to the rafters with shaving brushes, spectacles, dentures, corsets, wigs, false limbs, shoes, handkerchiefs; the pitiful residue of lives cruelly terminated in a cloud of poison gas. The children's toys, bottles, dummies and tiny clothes bear mute testimony to the slaughter of the innocents.
Money and valuables - mainly watches, jewellery, and currency - are set aside and sent to the Reichsbank. This includes the few diamonds squeezed out of toothpaste tubes where hopeful deportees hid them, and gold teeth and fillings wrenched from the mouths of corpses before cremation.
U.S.S.R.: Soviet troops occupy Anastasyevsk, north of Novorossiisk.
The Soviet Navy records 1 submarine loss during the month that is not listed by day:
S-54 Northern Fleet off coast of Norway (mined off Norwegian coast) (Mike Yared)
TUNISIA: Cap Serrat is occupied by the British.
ITALY: Sardinia: A large USAAF bombing force attacks the Axis air base and transit port of Cagliari.
CHINA: The US opens training centres for Chinese infantrymen.
NEW GUINEA: US infantrymen under Colonel Archibald MacKechnie land at the mouth of the Waria river.
PACIFIC: Japanese aircraft raid the Russell Islands.
U.S.A.: Rogers and Hammerstein's musical Oklahoma opens on Broadway. (Michael Ballard)
Washington: The US High Command orders the invasion of Attu, in the Aleutian Islands.