Timeline March 1940

Events in March 1940 13

• 1858 – 1940 Selma Lagerlöf (1858-1940) Died 16 March 1940, aged 81 Swedish author of "The Wonderful Adventures of Nils" and "Gösta Berling's Saga". In 1909 she became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• 1872 – 1940 Michael Joseph Savage (1872-1940) Died 27 March 1940, aged 68 New Zealand's first Labour Prime Minister, from 1935, whose government built the country's welfare state. He died of cancer in office.
• 1891 – 1940 Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) Died 10 March 1940, aged 48 Russian writer and playwright whose novel "The Master and Margarita" was published only in the 1960s, long after his death. Much of his work was banned in his lifetime. He died of kidney disease in Moscow.
• 1940 Frisch-Peierls memorandum Two physicists show an atomic bomb is feasible In March Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, working in Birmingham, calculated that a few kilograms of uranium-235 could make a practical bomb. Their memorandum led to the British MAUD Committee. Its findings later spurred the American Manhattan Project.
• 1940 Woody Guthrie recorded by Alan Lomax Library of Congress Hours of songs and stories for the Library of Congress. Meets Pete Seeger the same month.
• 1940 – 1994 Raul Julia (1940-1994) Puerto Rican actor of stage and screen, known for Kiss of the Spider Woman and Gomez in The Addams Family.
• 1940 Raul Julia born in San Juan Raul Julia is born in San Juan.
• 1940 1940 World Snooker Championship Joe Davis Title 14 The final tournament before the WWII hiatus. Winner: Joe Davis; Runner-up: Fred Davis. Score: 37–36.
• 1940 The first Bombe Victory The first Bombe, named Victory, is delivered to Bletchley. Turing's insight, refined by Gordon Welchman's diagonal board, is to attack Enigma not by trying keys but by chaining logical contradictions until only consistent settings survive. Over two hundred Bombes are eventually built, and Enigma traffic is read for most of the rest of the war.
• 1940 – 2010 Solomon Burke (1940-2010) Died 10 October 2010, aged 70 Burke was an American singer often called one of the founding fathers of soul music, known for hits including Cry to Me and Everybody Needs Somebody to Love. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001. He died of a heart attack aboard a flight to Amsterdam.
• 1940 Lahore Resolution The Muslim League calls for separate Muslim states On 23 March the All-India Muslim League met in Lahore and presented a resolution demanding independent states for the Muslim-majority areas of British India. It was adopted the following day. Pakistan marks the date as Pakistan Day.
• 1940 Wang Jingwei regime established Japan installs a collaborationist government in Nanjing On 30 March Wang Jingwei, a former Kuomintang leader, became head of a Japanese-backed Reorganized National Government of China in Nanjing. It claimed to be the legitimate government of China but had little independence. It collapsed with Japan's defeat in 1945.
• 1940 – 2026 Barney Frank (1940-2026) Died 19 May 2026, aged 86 American Democratic congressman from 1981 to 2013, one of the first openly gay members of Congress and co-sponsor of the Dodd-Frank Act.