Four years of global carnage did not simply usher in an era of more destructive weaponry for the inhabitants of Earth to ponder; it also gave cause for tremendous improvements in medical care. This 1945 article anticipated a much better world that would be created from the smoldering remains of Europe and Asia - a world that was better prepared to address the health requirements of the diseased and the burned. The medical advancements that were forged between the years 1939 through 1945 saw remarkable improvements in surgery and anesthesia and brought new light on how the medical establishment understood blood and the treatment of venereal disease.
CLICK HERE... to read one man's account of his struggle with shell shock...
"The shock of modern battle is so severe to nervous systems that the hair color of thousands of young men in the Pacific and European theaters of war has turned gray overnight."
Not surprisingly, the young men in question had no interest in resembling their grandfathers
and so the services of a patriotic hair dye manu- facturing firm were secured.
Read more articles from PATHFINDER MAGAZINE...
"We were men on a chess board being pushed around by people we never saw, by orders we never read, going to places we didn't know the names of, not knowing where the front was... praying that the 'old man' knew what he was doing".
The passage above was found in a year book that told the tale of the 397th (U.S.) Infantry Regiment, of the 100th Division. The 100th Division was on the German's tale all the way to Berlin.
Click here to read about the depth of suffering American soldiers had to endure during the Battle of the Bulge.
If you've been looking for an editorial that was intended to take General MacArthur down a peg or two, you've found it. It was penned by Shelley Mydans (1915 - 2002), a journalist who was primarily known at the time for her LIFE MAGAZINE news dispatches; she found the General to be both admirable and repulsive at the same time and was thoroughly baffled as to why he was so loved on so many different continents.
Written two years before General MacArthur's stunning 1950 victory in the Korean War (the Battle of Inchon), this article makes apparent a deep-seated fear held within the senior leadership of the Democratic party that MacArthur was planning to challenge Truman in the 1948 presidential election.
Another article on General MacArthur can be read here...
Although our friends in Asia, Europe and Canada had been fighting the Axis for at least a year and a half, American corporations continued to trade with the fascists all the way up until the U.S. declaration of war. This 1941 article, published seven months prior to that day, goes into some detail on the matter; although corporations are not named, it is pretty easy to identify them by their products.
"One reason why America today is short of ships to fill Britain's desperate needs is [due to] the fact that for six years or more, Japan and her scrap agents bought almost every American cargo vessel placed on the auction blocks, using them for scrap to feed the blazing steel mills of Nipon."
Here are the U.S. Army casualty figures from December, 1941 through November, 1944. The provided graph points out the following major events that ushered in the larger numbers:
• The Philippine collapse
• The American landings in North Africa
• The Battle of Kasserine Pass
• The Sicily Landings
• Anzio
• D-Day
Shortly after this article appeared on the newsstands the Germans launched their winter counter-offensive in the Ardennes. The editors of this magazine anticipated the American losses for 1945 to be the highest yet.
Click here to read General Marshall's end-of-war remarks about American casualty figures.
A G.I. Rememberance of the ETO dead...
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