The reforms that were imposed upon Occupied Japan in the Forties and Fifties did not simply come in the form of death sentences for war criminals - but additionally the Japanese came to know the rights and protections that are guaranteed to All Americans under the United States Constitution. For the first time ever Japanese women were permitted to vote, unions were legalized and equality under the law was mandated. This small notice concerned the overthrow of the feudal laws that governed the Japanese tenant farmers.
"Much has been written and much more whispered about relations between American Negro soldiers and white girls in Britain and elsewhere. To get at the facts, Newsweek assigned William Wilson of its London bureau to a candid review of the subject. His findings , largely from the standpoint of the Negro soldiers themselves [are as follow]."
Five months after the death of President Roosevelt, writer Michael Sayers (1911 – 2010) managed to get this FDR article to press while the public's interest in the man was still hot. It addressed the tremendous lengths the Secret Service went to on a daily basis to protect President Roosevelt from Axis assassins and general kooks who wanted a shot at him:
"The White House detail, headed by six-foot Michael Reiley (1909 - 1973), stayed beside the President at all times. They became his shadows, unseen in the public glare, but always at hand... The President was not permitted to set foot in any place that had not been thoroughly investigated beforehand."
Halfway through 1944 American magazines began their individual count-downs until the war's end; running with articles about the post-war world, the end of rationing, the demobilized military and the guaranteed boom that would come in the menswear industry. The attached fashion editorial appeared early in 1945 promotes the versatility of gabardine wool, it's earliest appearance in the Middle ages, it's use in uniforms and it's newest application in sportswear.
The article is illustrated with five terrific color photographs.
"Hundreds of GIs were gathered at the Rainbow Corner Red Cross Club in Piccadilly when bundles of "Stars and Stripes" extras were tossed out free. The paper bore a huge banner headline, 'Germany Quits!' and contained the official Ministry of Information announcement which all England had just heard on the air."
"News of the Reich's final and complete surrender found Piccadilly, Marble Arch and other popular intersections jammed with people. At first incredulous, the cautious British worked up to a pitch of demonstrative joy..."
"The game was up. At the Prat de Llobregat airfield outside Barcelona the traitor sat heavily on a camp stool, waiting for the reprieve. It did not come. The Franco government had found Pierre Laval too hot to handle... Laval shrugged: 'I suppose if Petain can face the music, I can'. But later he shouted: 'It is unfair... delivering me to my country.'"
Howard Katzander of YANK filed this short dispatch regarding all that he witnessed following the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Weimer, Germany:
"The camp is a thing that has to be seen to be believed, and even then the charred skulls and pelvic bones in the furnaces seem too enormous a crime to be accepted fully. It can't mean that they actually put human beings --some of them alive --into these furnaces and destroyed them like this."
One quality that can be found in the memoirs of both world wars is a shared sense that the males of their respective generations had been singled-out for extermination, and when the end to these wars finally came, the most seasoned combat veterans were in a state of disbelief that they would be allowed to grow old, when so many had died. Some of this relief can be felt in this article from 1945 in which the battle-savvy men of the U.S. Army's Fifth Ranger Battalion anticipated their return to civilian life now that the war was over.
"I don't believe it will do much good to talk about the war with civilians. I don't think war is something that anyone can know about unless they're actually in it. I would just rather forget I was ever in the army..."
The Rangers underwent intense training in hand-to-hand combat, you can read about about it in this 1942 magazine article.
So joyously silly were the G.I.s in Anchorage, Alaska, on that day that they donned civilian neckties with their uniforms as they gallivanted about the streets laughing. But that wasn't enough: enlisted men swapped rank insignia with officers and officers with the enlisted - so great was the news that these men would be permitted to grow old and die in bed!
A list of five outstanding Britons (two women and three men) accompanied by a description of their selfless acts performed during the Nazi Blitz on their homeland.
"Who dares to doubt when Britons sing that there will always be an England?"
The British populace began to familiarize themselves with gasmasks as early as 1936 - you can read about that here.
Eyewitness accounts of all the excitement that was V.E. Day in Paris:
"On the Champs Elysees they were singing 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary,' and it was a long way even the few blocks from Fouquet's restaurant to the Arc de Triomphe if you tried to walk up the Champs on VE-Day in Paris. From one side of the broad and beautiful avenue to the other, all the way to the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe in the Place de l'Etoile, there was hardly any place to breathe and no place at all to move. That was the way it was in the Place l'Opera and the Place de la Republique and all the other famous spots and in a lot of obscure little side streets that nobody but Parisians know."
"Down the line, since [Truman] voted in the Senate in 1935 for U.S. participation in the World Court, his positions on foreign relations and international policy have been consistently on the side of FDR and for the fight against fascism."
"Nobody tried to deny it. The Germans had achieved perhaps the most valuable of military advantages - surprise. How did they do it? [In these two articles] Allied officers gave some obvious reasons, but critics guessed at some that were less obvious."
"Said Winston Churchill in offering thanks for Divine help in the race for atomic power, 'By His mercy British and American science outpaced all German efforts.'"
"Thank God, to be sure. But it should not be overlooked that for this work He had an able servant in Lief Tronstad. As saboteur par excellence, the young professor was a ball and chain on Nazi ankles in this race to the atomic finish line."
"Out of the Pearl Harbor investigation last week came a decoded telephone conversation made on November 27, 1941, two weeks before the Japanese attacked, that had all the elements of a penny-dreadful spy thriller... On the Washington end of the trans-pacific phone call was Saburo Kurusu, Japanese special envoy to the United States; on the Tokyo end, Admiral Yeisuke Yamamoto, Chief of the American Division of the Japanese Foreign Office."
The conversation guaranteed Yamamoto that the negotiations between the two sides were proceeding smoothly and that the attack on Pearl Harbor would be a surprise.
"We are gathered here, representatives of the major warring powers, to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored."
Those were the words of General Douglas MacArthur when he opened the Japanese Surrender Proceedings on board the deck of the American battleship, Missouri on the morning of September 2, 1945. This report was filed by Yank correspondent Dale Kramer, who amusingly noted that all concerned were dressed in a manner fitting the occasion, with the exception of the American officers who (oddly) seemed unable to locate their neckties that morning.
Click here if you would like to read about the atomic blast over the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Attached is the U.S. War Department study regarding the tactical uses of German airborne forces throughout the course of the Second World War; from the Battle of Crete to the Battle of the Bulge:
"In Russia, the Balkans, and the December 1944 counteroffensive in the Ardennes, units varying in strength from a platoon to a battalion have been landed behind enemy lines to disrupt communications, to seize such key points as railroads, roadheads, bridges and power stations."
"Television was about ready for immediate commercialization when Pearl Harbor forced the industry to mark time, but engineers agree that the war has hastened electronic developments to a point that could not have been expected for 15 years under normal circumstances."
During the summer of 1945, Yank reporter Corporal Howard Katzander, spent some time among the Third Army's prisoners of war where he happened upon a German senior officer who was in a very talkative mood:
"The story he was telling was the story of why the war did not end last July. It was the story of the attempt to assassinate Hitler and he knew all about it. Because this was Lieutenant Colonel Wilhelm Kuebart, a member of the Wermacht General Staff, and one of the original plotters."
Published in June of 1945, this must have been the first English language article about the Valkyrie plot.
"The General had seen welcomes in Paris and London and Washington and New York, but he got the warmest reception of all when he hit his boyhood home town, little Abilene, Kansas."
"As soon as the Eisenhower party was seated a gun boomed and the parade began. It wasn't a military parade. It told the story of a barefoot boy's rise from fishing jaunts on nearby Mud Creek to command of the Allied expeditionary force that defeated Fascism in Western Europe."
In 1944, a class of sixth graders wrote General Eisenhower and asked him how they can help in the war effort; click here to read his response...
"The Japanese are making frenzied and costly attempts at Okinawa to stem our advance toward the home islands, but their efforts appear no more successful than they were in the Philippines and Iwo Jima."
Translated from German, labeled "CONFIDENTIAL" and printed in a booklet for a class at the U.S. Army Military Academy in 1945 was the attached German Army assessment of the D-Day invasion. Distributed on June 20, 1944, just two weeks after the Normandy landings, the report originated in the offices of Field Marshal von Rundstedt (1875 - 1953) and served to document the German reaction to the Allied Operations in Normandy.
"Somebody on our transport said that a transport ship was like a moving van. Somebody else said it was more like a freight car. But the Supply Officer, a short, skinny man who wrote poetry for the ship's daily paper, gave us the best description. He said that a transport was like a tenement house. That, I think, was the best I heard that day... A troopship is like a tenement house in many ways."
"From inside Germany last week emerged the picture of a state that by all normal standards was in the last stages of dissolution... All signs indicated a physical breakdown perhaps as great as that of France in 1940... Refugees, mostly women and children with blankets around their bodies and shawls on their heads to protect them from the sub-zero weather, queue up for hours outside bakeries to get a loaf of bread. Draftees ride tanks in never-ending columns."
Here is the first half of the thrilling account of the Battle of Leyte Gulf (October 23 - 26, 1944) as it appeared in two installments in Collier's Magazine in January, 1945.
When Hitler blew his brains out (April 30, 1945), what was left of the baton was passed to the Nazi fleet admiral, Karl Doenitz (1891 - 1980). This article points out that the admiral was a predictable choice for Hitler to make and no one at SHAEF was surprised.
Two months after the Fascists cried "uncle" and raised their white flag, this article went to press that was filled with two pages-worth of previously classified information as to the important roll that British and American radar played in winning the war. It was 1945 articles like this in which the world finally learned why the German submarine blockade of Britain proved to be so unsuccessful, why the London blitz was such a devastating blow to the Luftwaffe and how the Allied navies succeeded in getting so many convoys across the North Atlantic.
"Seven million New Yorkers let down their hair last night in the wildest, loudest, gayest, drunkest kissingest, hell-for-leather celebration the big town has ever seen."
Click here to read about VE-Day in New York City...
A quick dispatch filed by YANK MAGAZINE correspondent Larry McManus from the pristine halls of a Pasadena military hospital (previously the Vista del Arroyo Hotel) where total bedlam broke out when the word was announced that the Japanese had cried "uncle":
They went wild...they slid down banisters, they chinned themselves on the hospital's chandeliers. The remark most of them made was, 'No Pacific trip now!'"
A fascinating article reporting on "the Baby Cage", the Allied prisoner of war camp that held some 7,000 boy soldiers of the German army, ages 12 through 17.
In light of the fact that so manyGerman youths had been indoctrinated from their earliest days in Nazi dogma and then dumbfounded to a far greater degree within the Hitler Jugend system, the Allied leadership post-war government believed that this group needed to be instructed in the ways of tolerance before being let loose into the general population.
Click here to read about the Nazi indoctrination of German youth.
By 1945 the Japanese Army was beginning to see the writing on the wall insofar as their occupation of China was concerned. With the collapse of Germany they knew they could expect the Soviets to attack at any time - this foreboding inspired them to corral greater numbers of hapless Chinese and force them to build barricades in order to postpone the inevitable.
An excerpt from General Marshall's introductory essay to his 1945 Biennial Report for U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson concerning the progress and general status of the American Army through the period beginning on July 31, 1943 through June 30, 1945.
Click here if you would like to read an article about 1940s fabric rationing and the home front fashions.
"New York City's reaction was a snowstorm of wastepaper that cascaded from buildings as the people shouted and sang in the streets. Others openly wept and prayed on sidewalks... News of the surrender spread like wildfire on Wall Street and set off an all morning celebration by jubilant downtown workers who left their jobs."
The True Glory is a documentary film about the Allied victory in World War II using actual footage from the war; the film was a joint effort between Great Britain and the United States intending to show the team work that won the war. Beginning with the D-Day invasion of Normandy Beach, the film chronicles the collapse of the Nazi war machine on the Western Front:
"This is the sort of film the Germans would never have made - because it shows our victories without gloating and admits setbacks like the Ardennes breakthrough; because it's peppered with humor and because, at the end, it warns against repetition of such a war."
The fact that more boy babies are born during and immediately after major wars is a phenomenon that was discovered by the underpaid statisticians employed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in 1942. The articles that are attached are but two of what was probably four hundred articles that appeared on the topic that year. The writers and thinkers of the digital age continue studying this actuality - among them is the gang over at Psychology Today who wrote:
"Scientists have known for a long time that more boys than usual are born during and after major wars. The phenomenon was first noticed in 1954 with regard to white children born during World War II in the United States. It has since been replicated for most of the belligerent nations in both World Wars. The phenomenon has been dubbed the 'returning soldier effect.' There is no doubt that the phenomenon is real, but nobody has been able to explain it. Why are soldiers who return from wars more likely to father sons than other men?"
In the attached 1945 article an anonymous YANK MAGAZINE correspondent describes for his young readers how the last World War ended; the widely reported misinformation of a premature armistice treaty that was reported as being signed on November 7, 1918 - the retraction, and the subsequent announcement of the genuine armistice being signed four days later. General John J. Pershing recalled the scene in Paris:
"It looked as though the whole population had gone out of their minds. The city turned into pandemonium. The streets and boulevards were packed with people singing and wearing all sorts of odd costumes. The crowds were doing the most clownish things. One could hardly hear his own voice, it was such bedlam."
Click here to read another article describing the Armistice Day celebrations in 1918 Paris.
Click here to read an explanation as to what was understood about the truce of November 11, 1918.
"Training for combat, according to veterans in Italy, should be a hell of a lot more realistic and a hell of a lot more thorough."
"'They oughta learn them guys' is that favorite beef you hear from combat veterans when they talk about replacements who have just joined their outfits...the average replacement doesn't know enough about the weapons an infantryman uses. 'He usually knows enough about one or two weapons...but he should know them all. He may know how to use and take care of the M1 or carbine, but if you need a BARman or machine-gunner quick, you're up a creek.'"
Statistical data concerning the U.S. Army casualties in June and July of 1944 can be read in this article.
Published four months after the World War II Japanese surrender, the Yank Magazine editors saw fit to publish the happily obsolete plans for the invasion of Japan: operations Coronet and Olympic.
This article is accompanied by nineteen pictures illustrating the various ways tin cans are put to use by the American military during W.W.II, and it was printed to show the necessity of full civilian participation along the home front. In order to guarantee that this message would get out to everyone, magazine editors would have been provided with these photographs and an assortment of facts by a government agency called the Office of War Information.
The attached article is an eye-witness account of the World War II surrender proceedings in Reims, France in the early days of May, 1945. Written in the patois of the 1940s American soldier (which sounded a good deal like the movies of the time), this article describes the goings-on that day by members of the U.S. Army's 201st Military Police Company, who were not impressed in the least by the likes of German General Gustav Jodl or his naval counterpart, Admiral Hans von Friedeburg.
Surrender or not, the Germans continued killing their enemies for hours after their capitulation - you can read about that here
Click here to read how the Army intended to transfer men from the ETO to the Pacific Theater.
This article follows the efforts of the Tank Destroyers (TD) in the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge:
"This TD work is among the most dangerous of the war. One of the chief reasons is that TDs are constantly up against superior enemy weapons. For example, none of our TDs (except possibly the M-36) can penetrate the 8-inch frontal armor of the King Tiger, whereas the German 88-millimeter anti-tank gun has been able to penetrate any American tank. And to kill the tiger, TDs must shoot for the tracks, then assault the disabled monster with high explosive, setting it afire."
Click here to read about the equipment and training of American tank destroyers during the Second World War.
This highly personal column appeared in one of New York City's evening papers and seemed characteristic of the feeling experienced by much of the U.S. after hearing about the unexpected death of President Roosevelt.
Written by Joe Cummiskey, the column stands out as the type of remembrance that is thoroughly unique to those who write about sports all day long, which is who Mr. Commiskey was:
"Somehow or other, if you were in sports, you never thought of FDR so much as connected with the high office which he held. Rather, you remembered him most the way he'd chuckle, getting ready to throw out the the first ball to open the baseball season. Or how he'd sit on the 50 at the Army-Navy game..."
A YANK staff writer Robert Bendiner (1910 - 2009), summed-up the eventful period that began with the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on
April 12, and ended with the Japanese surrender on August 10, 1945. He pointed out that within that period remarkable changes had been made; not merely the deaths of Hitler, Mussolini and the collapse of Imperial Japan, but it was clear to many that the stage was being set for a new world. The foundations were in place for the creation of a "durable world security organization" and as if that wasn't enough, there was a new, hideous weapon called the "Atomic Bomb" that would cast a long shadow across the land and mark this new era as a unique period in world history.
"After a streak like that it would not be surprising if a revulsion against "big news" should set in. It may well be that people long to pick up a paper in which nothing more cosmic is reported than the city's reception of a visiting channel-swimmer, and nothing more violent than a tie-up on the Magnolia Avenue trolley line."
Click here to read how British women struggled to understand American slang.
"Conspicuously absent from the first list of Japanese war criminals issued by Allied occupation authorities is the Zaibatsu - the industrialist class which backed the military's war plans, then fattened of the raw materials brought in from conquered territory and from war profits at home... The arrest order includes the entire Tojo Cabinet responsible for the sneak attack on Pearl harbor, and 28 others ranging from the infamous Lt. General Massaharu Homma down to lesser officers charged with atrocities against prisoners."
"New Yorkers sat in stunned silence yesterday as they watched the incontrovertible proof of the unbelievable - the U.S. Army Signal Corps motion pictures of Nazi horror camps and charnel houses... People came out of the theaters shaking their heads, or gazing blankly off into space, or cursing them under their breaths. They produced mixed reactions - a mixture of horror, of grief, of anger, of hate."
"We should reduce Germany to dust. The Germans can't be trusted, and we have to watch Argentina and Spain."
As the last year of the war began, the American home front turned their attention to all the various commercial products that would once again be offered in the shops. New cars were a popular topic, but the one subject Americans were most curious about was television.
Having surrendered to the Nazis during the closing weeks of the war, General Maurice Rose of the Third Armored Division, was shot dead by a German tank commander.
An eyewitness account of the devastation delivered to Tokyo as reported by the first Americans to enter that city following the Japanese surrender some weeks earlier:
"Downtown Tokyo looks badly beaten. Along the Ginza, which is the Japanese Fifth Avenue, every other building is either burned to the ground or wrecked inside. A lot of the department stores and smart shops have English and French signs over their doors...Our official estimate of the bomb damage in Tokyo is 52 percent of the city."
"The people of Tokyo are taking the arrival of the first few Americans with impeccable Japanese calm. Sometimes they turn and look at us twice, but they have shown no emotion toward us except a mild curiosity and occasional amusement...They are still proud and a little bit superior. They know they lost the war, but they are not apologizing for it."
An anonymous columnist at The Commonweal (New York) was quick to condemn the use of the Atomic Bombs:
"... we are confronted with an obligation to condemn what we ourselves did, an obligation to admit that our victory has been sadly sullied not only because we used this weapon but because we have tacitly acceded to use it."
"Some of the highlights: Firecrackers, hoarded in Chinatown for eight years, rattled like machine guns... Servicemen and civilians played tug-of-war with fire hoses... Market Street, the wide bar-lined thoroughfare that has long been the center of interest for visiting GIs and sailors, was littered with the wreckage of smashed War Bond booths ... A plump redhead danced naked on the base of the city's Native Sons monument after servicemen had torn her clothes off. A sailor lent the woman a coat, and the pair disappeared."
The introductory essay from the U.S. War Department's intelligence manual concerning fascist Germany:
"Total war is neither a contemporary invention nor a German monopoly. But total mobilization, in the sense of the complete and scientific control of all the efforts of the nation for the purpose of war, and total utilization of war as an instrument of national policy have been developed to their highest degree by the German militarists."
To gain some understanding of the nature of total war, you might want to click here and read about how the American cosmetics industry of the 1940s was forced to alter their production patters.
Here is a short notice from a Catholic weekly crediting the editors of THOUGHT magazine for having printed a 1940 protest lodged by the German Cardinals Faulhaber (Munich) and Bertram (Breslau) for the obscene Nazi practice of murdering mental patients.
Dashiel Hammett (1894 - 1961) had a pretty swell resume by the time World War Two came along. He had a number of celebrated novels and short stories published as well as a few well-paying gigs writing in Hollywood. It was during this period, in the Thirties, that he had created some of the wonderful characters that are still remembered to this day, such as Sam Spade ("The Maltese Falcon") and Nick and Nora Charles ("The Thin Man"). During the war, it was rare but not unheard of, for an older man with such accomplishments to enlist in the army -and that is just what he did. This one page article clearly spells out Hammett's period serving on an Alaskan army base; his slow climb from Buck Private to Sergeant; his difficulty with officers and the enjoyment of being anonymous.
Accompanying the article is a black and white image of the writer wearing Uncle Sam's olive drab, herringbone twill -rather than the tell-tale tweed he was so often photographed wearing.
Here is an eyewitness account of the daily life at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Ravensbrück was the largest concentration camp for women in Germany. The Germans gassed between 5,000 and 6,000 prisoners at Ravensbrück before Soviet troops liberated the camp in the April of 1945.
The White Crackers residing in California cared little about the triumphs of the 442: during the Spring of 1945, two honorably discharged Japanese Americans were fired upon by passing cars - the racists were never caught. Secretary of War Henry Stimson labeled the attacks as "an inexcusable and dastardly outrage."
Far-flung correspondent Max Lerner (1902 - 1992) penned the attached editorial concerning the necessity of reëducation Japanese school children:
"The Japanese youth are the key to Japan's future. There were 12,000,000 of them in the elementary schools before the war, dressed in school uniforms, bowing before the Emperor's portrait every day on entering and leaving... The values taught to him were feudal and fascist values, but the weapons given him were modern weapons. This is the combination that produced the suicide-squadrons of the Kamikaze."
"Though these words are feeble, they come from the bottom of a heart overflowing with pride in your loyal service and admiration as warriors. Your accomplishments at sea, in the air, on the ground and in the field of supply have astonished the world."
The editors of YANK reported that the week of VE Day the
"...first-run movie houses showed films of a kind seldom if ever seen by American audiences. The films, made for the most part by the U.S. Army signal corps, showed piles of human bones, mass graves and beaten, starving men who looked more like corpses than human beings...Homefronters sat in shocked silence, broken now and then in by low gasps."
On the evening of March 26, 1944, fifteen O.S.S. agents were executed following a failed raid on Italian soil to blow-up an Axis railroad tunnel. The sabotage mission was in support of the allied attack taking place further south at Monte Cassino (Battle of Monte Cassino, January 17, 1944 – May 19, 1944) and had the tunnel been successfully blown, supplies to the defending Germans would have been cut off.
This YANK article reported on the first war crime trial of the post World War Two era: the trial of German General Anton Dostler (1891 - 1945), who gave the order to execute the O.S.S. prisoners. In his defense, General Dostler insisted that he was acting under the orders of General Gustav von Zangen, who denied the claim.
"The GIs had managed to keep their VJ spirit bottled up through most of the phony rumors, but when the real thing was announced the cork popped with a vengeance. A spontaneous parade, including jeeps and trucks and WACs and GIs and officers and nurses and enlisted me, snaked from the Red Cross Club at Rainbow Corner down to the Place de l'Opera and back..."
An interesting article, written with a sense of embarrassment regarding the injustice done to the Japanese-Americans, and published a few weeks shy of VJ-Day. The article reports on how the former internment camp families were faring after they were released from their incarceration. 55,000 Japanese-Americans chose to remain in the camps rather than walk freely among their old neighbors; one man, Takeyoshi Arikawa, a former produce dealer, remarked:
"I would like to take my people back home, but there are too many people in Los Angeles who would resent our return. These are troubled times for America. Why should I cause the country any more trouble?"
Important references are made concerning those families who had lost their young men serving in the famed 442 Regimental Combat Team: a U.S. Army unit composed entirely of Nisei that was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation for it's fortitude displayed in Italy, France and Germany.
The citizens of Philadelphia took the news calmly. There were isolated pockets of tremendous joy, but many were wary because they had celebrated the event the previous month when a false rumor had circulated.
"Many soldiers and sailors were gathered in small groups in Market, Walnut and Chestnut streets. One said: 'Even if it's true, it doesn't mean a thing. It's over for us when we get out of this uniform.'"
A report from Boston, Atlanta, Baltimore, Cleveland, Minneapolis, St Louis and Springfield (Mass.) as to how VE-Day was celebrated (or not) in these cities:
"To get an over-all view of VE-day in America, Yank asked civilian newspapermen and staff writers in various parts of the country to send an eye-witness reports. From these OPs the reports were much the same. Dallas was quiet, Des Moines was sober, Seattle was calm, Boston was staid."
The attached article weighs the way infantry basic training was conducted at the beginning of the war and how it had changed as the war progressed, evolving into something a bit different by 1945. The training period was originally a 13 week cycle in 1941, yet in time after carefully watching the soldiers in the field and finding that infantrymen needed a broader understanding of the tools at hand, the infantry training at Camp Wheeler, Georgia, had been extended an extra two weeks. One of the obvious factors involved a far wider pool of combat veterans to rely upon as instructors.
You might also like to read this article about W.W. II cavalry training.
Statistical data concerning the U.S. Army casualties in June and July of 1944 can be read in this article.
The attached article is disguised as a Hollywood fluff piece about actress Angela Lansbury (b. 1925), who at that time was about to earn her first and only Academy Award, but journalist Peter Churchill devoted the majority of column space to the life and career of her socialist grandfather George Lansbury (1859 – 1940), one time Member of Parliament and star of the British Labor Party:
"Old George was born, bred, lived and died among the poor of London, and never had any money, and yes, that goes for the time he was a member of His Britanic Majesty's Cabinet, too. But the folks down at the less desirable parts (we don't talk of slums) of the Bow and Bromley district of London where he lived could tell you what a difference it made to have a Cabinet Minister for a neighbor."
Click here to read George Lansbury's account of time he met Lenin...
What a thoroughly outrageous article this is! In my experience reading news pieces from both world wars I have never once come across one in which the journalist pinpoints a particular fighting unit and labels it as substandard - but that is exactly what happens in this article about the all-black 92nd Division. Previously, I never thought such a thing would ever happen with a censored press that sought to preserve the morale of both soldiers and home front - but I was wrong.
The U.S Marine Corps is not in the practice of sending their oldest members into harm's way - they aren't now, and they weren't in 1942. But when they imparted this information to Gunnery Sergeant Lou Diamond (1890 - 1951), he would have none of it - the mere idea that the world was to be at war, and he would be excluded: not going to happen:
"Lou roared his way through the battles of Guadalcanal and Tulagi and did much to back up the Marine Corp's contention that he is far and away the the most expert mortar sergeant in any branch of the service."
Posted herein is a report on the seven-month study on the effects marijuana has on military personnel that was conducted in 1944:
"A great many of [the participants] attempted to form a compensatory image of themselves as superior people. 'I could be a general like MacArthur. He looks smooth - like he's high all the time.'"
At the invitation of General Eisenhower, the most prominent newspaper editors in the country crossed the Atlantic to witness the atrocities that transpired at Nazi concentration camps. They were shocked to find that the German people 'feel absolutely no sense of guilt.'"
During the second week of February, 1945, the men of the U.S. Ninth Infantry Division ran across one of the six Leadership Academies run by Nazi King-Pin, Robert Ley (1890 – 1945; you can read about him here). Among the papers they liberated was a public relations pamphlet explaining what was required of each candidate and what would happen to them if they want out:
"These men must know and realize that from now on there is no road back for them. When the party takes the Brown Shirt away from anybody, the man involved will not only lose the office he holds, but he, personally, and his family, wife and children, will be destroyed."
As far as superstitions and clothing are concerned, hats seem to be the one garment that has the most unfounded and irrational precepts attached to their existence. Plentiful are the dictates pertaining to where hats should never be placed or worn - these superstitions existed centuries before the Second World War, but for one citizen of San Angelo, Texas, he had his own beliefs where hats are concerned and some believed that, as a result, he was able to save the lives of 56 American servicemen...
"A religion-in-the-schools trial, held last week in the Champaign, Illinois Circuit Court, will probably make history. The plaintiff was Mrs. Vashti McCollum, 32, pert, wide-eyed wife of a University of Illinois professor, demanding that the Champaign School Board discontinue a five-year program of religious instruction in school buildings, on the ground that the constitutional separation of church and state is jeopardized."
An eyewitness account of VJ day as it was celebrated in Paris:
"The GIs had managed to keep their VJ spirit bottled up through most of the phony rumors, but when the real thing was announced the cork popped with a vengeance. A spontaneous parade, including jeeps and trucks and WACs and GIs and officers and nurses and enlisted me, snaked from the Red Cross Club at Rainbow Corner down to the Place de l'Opera and back..."
General Marshall's post-war report remarked on one clear advantage that the German Army was privileged to exploit again and again throughout the war:
"The German ammunition was charged with smokeless, flashless powder which in both night and day fighting helped the enemy tremendously in concealing his fire positions."
As the American effort to restructure a defeated Japan commenced, it seemed obvious to all that one of the first things to go was the Zaibatsu Family. Zaibatsu was the name given to the eight families which had held a monopoly on the manufacturing wealth and banking power in Japan since the mid-to-late Nineteenth Century. Made up of many names that you will recognize, this article goes into some detail explaining how the power structure worked and its relation with the Emperor.
A smattering of opinions on the subject of VJ Day (they all seemed to have been in favor of it) were offered up by a collection of Rome-based American soldiers composed of assorted hues and ranks.
The attached article is a swell piece of journalism that truly catches the spirit of home front America. You will read about the war-weary Hollywood that existed between the years 1941-1945 and the movie shortages, the hair-pin rationing, the rise of the independent producers and the ascent of Van Johnson (4-F slacker) and Lauren Becall:
"Lauren, a Warner Brothers property, is a blonde-haired chick with a tall, hippy figure, a voice that sounds like a sexy foghorn and a pair of so-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it eyes"
When the Yank staff writers asked the G.I.s to "name the greater menace to our country and our values" -most of the servicemen polled seemed to agree that the real enemies were from Japan; while Germany, it was believed by most, simply had to be brought back into the fold.
Gertrude Stein, witness to both World Wars, believed that the there were many differences between the W.W. I American Doughboy and their W.W. II counterparts, but the primary differences was the absence of Bibles.
Dashiel Hammett (1894 - 1961) had a pretty swell resume by the time World War II came along. He had written a string of well-received novels and enjoyed a few well-paying gigs in Hollywood. During the war years it was rare, but not unheard of, for an older man with such accomplishments to enlist in the army - and that is just what he did. The attached article spells out Hammett's period serving on an Alaskan army base, his slow climb from Buck Private to sergeant, his difficulty with officers and the enjoyment of being anonymous.
Accompanying the article is a black and white image of the writer wearing Uncle Sam's olive drab, herringbone twill - rather than the tell-tale tweed he was so often photographed wearing.
Click here to read a 1939 STAGE MAGAZINE profile of Hammett's wife, the playwright Lillian Hellman.
"For the 417,034 Axis prisoners of war in this country, the War Department last week had word that repatriation was in sight. The 362,170 Germans and 49,784 Italians definitely would be home by early Spring; the 5,080 Japanese, as soon as General of the Army MacArthur was ready to receive them."
"The last flight was coming home. The planes circled through the thick mist toward the stern of the Essex-class carrier. One by one they hit the deck: Hellcats, Corsairs and EBMs, with names like 'Hydraulic Bess', 'Miss Fortune', 'Sweater Girl' and 'Kansas City Kitty'...When the air-crewmen came back from their low low-level raids, the thing they talked about most was the lack of Jap opposition."
Click here to read an interview with a Kamikaze pilot.
"The destruction of Nagasaki looks nothing like the debris in Cassino or Leghorn. The strange thing here is the utter absence of rubble. You can see a couple of square miles of reddish-brown desolation with nothing left but the outlines of houses, a bit of wall here and half a chimney there. In this area you will see a road, and the road will be completely clean. It is too soon after the bombing for the Japs to have done any cleaning of the roads and you can't see a single brick or pile of broken plaster or lumber on any street or sidewalk in town."
"Philadelphia Coast Guardsmen yesterday observed the surrender of Germany by recalling that their branch of service fired the first American shot in the war against Germany, capturing the first enemy ship and taking the first Nazi prisoner... It was in September, 1941, that the Coast Guard cutter Northland captured the Norwegian freighter Busko, loaded with equipment for a German weather station to be established in Greenland."
This column, by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, was an articulate effort at make some sense of her husband's death, which took place during one of the most critical periods in world history:
"Perhaps in His wisdom, the Almighty is trying to show us that a leader may chart a way, may point out the road to lasting peace, but that many leaders and many peoples must do the building. It cannot be the work of one man, nor can the responsibility be laid upon his shoulders, and so when the time comes for peoples to assume the burden more fully, he is given rest."
"Soldiers respect for this weapon traces to two things. It fires .45 caliber slugs as a cyclical rate of 600 to 700 per minute. An enemy struck by a carbine or riffle bullet can keep coming - as Japs have shown. A man struck by a Tommy Gun slug is stopped dead in his tracks. A burst of fire can cut a man in two."
Throughout the course of the war in the Pacific, there were as many as twelve Japanese female radio commentators broadcasting assorted varieties of demoralizing radio programming to the American and Allied forces from Japan. However the Americans knew nothing of this collective and simply assumed that all the broadcasts were hosted by one woman, who they dubbed, "Tokyo Rose".
The story told in this article begins in the late summer of 1945 when:
"...one of the supreme objectives of American correspondents landing in Japan was Radio Tokyo. There they hoped to find someone to pass off as the one-and-only "Rose" and scoop their colleagues. When the information had been sifted a little, a girl named Iva Toguri (Iva Toguri D'Aquino: 1916 – 2006), emerged as the only candidate who came close to filling the bill. For three years she had played records, interspersed with snappy comments, beamed to Allied soldiers on the "Zero Hour"...Her own name for herself was "Orphan Ann."
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...
An article touching on the war-weary appearance of Kyoto, Japan. Although the writer had been informed by the locals that Kyoto was very special to the Japanese, the dullard was really unable to see beyond the filth, rampant prostitution and general disrepair of the city in order to understand this.
Attached you will read a 1945 editorial written by the art critic Clayton Boswell, who articulately expressed the great hope that the art world had emotionally invested in color television:
"This is what the art world has been waiting for - in the meantime struggling with the futility of attempting to describe verbally visual objects over the air. Now art on the television will be on par footing with music. And what radio has done in spreading the appreciation of good music will be duplicated with fine art...Then indeed will Andrew Carnegie's dream of progress through education come true."
April 14, 1945 is remembered as President Truman's first day as Chief Executive. FDR died on the twelfth and he was sworn-in shortly after that. Just what he did with the rest of that day, much less on the thirteenth, is a mystery to me - but, let it be known here and now that his first day exercising his Presidential Authority was on the fourteenth. He met with the brass caps from the Pentagon, planned speeches, spoke on the telephone with numerous New Deal big-wigs and shook many, many hands. All involved were in agreement that it was the busiest day in his life.
A report from Portland, Oregon, Houston, Texas, Los Angeles and San Francisco, California as to how those cities celebrated the surrender of Germany in May of 1945.
Among the many dubious legacies of the Second World War is a growing cult of males who have tended to feel that the German women of the SS are worthy of their attention (Kate Winslet's appearance in the 2008 movie, "The Reader" didn't help). This article (and the accompanying photographs) make it quite clear that no one would have found these men more pathetic than the G.I. guards of Prisoner of War Enclosure 334, who were charged with the task of lording over these Teutonic gorgons and who, to the man, found these women to be wildly unattractive.
"The girls who served in Adolf's army are a sorry, slovenly looking lot. In a P.O.W. camp near Florence they spill their gripes to G.I guards."
Yank staff correspondent Bill Reed wrote the following account of the Fifth Marine Division's slug fest on the island of Iwo Jima throughout the months on February and March, 1945:
"For two days the men who landed on Green beach were pinned to the ground. Murderous machine-gun, sniper, and mortar fire came from a line of pillboxes 300 yards away in the scrubby shrubbery at the foot of the volcano. No one on the beach, whether he was a CP phone operator or a front line rifleman, was exempt. The sight of a head raised above a foxhole was the signal to dozens of Japs, safely hidden in the concrete emplacements, to open up. Men lay on their sides to drink from canteens or urinate. An errand between foxholes became a life-and-death mission for the man who attempted it."
The word "reconversion" is a term so odd to our era that my auto-correct insists it is a misspelling - but the word appears more than a few times in the September 3, 1945 issue of Newsweek and it pertains to process of turning the economy (and society) from one centered on war to one that caters to consumers. This article encapsulates the excitement of the previous week when the war was declared over - POWs returned, rationing ended, Lend-Lease completed, nukes created, draft quotas reduced, traitors hanged and the recruits demobilized.
Click here to read about child labor exploitation during the Second World War...
A report on what Hitler's Bavarian retreat, Berchtesgaden, looked like after the 101st Airborne got through redecorating the place. This is an amusing article written by Yank reporter Harry Sions, who seemed to really want to know what Hitler's taste in furnishings, books and movies truly was like. However the most entertaining parts of the article were the interviews with Hitler's dimwitted domestic staff:
"Is it true," we asked her, "that the Fuhrer chewed on rugs when he became excited?"
"'Only you Americans believe such nonsense,' she replied".
The following is an extract from General Eisenhower's report on the Allied operations from June 6 through the 26 of August, 1944:
"Many factors are woven into warp and woof of this great victory...One was the meticulous care in planning and preparation, another was the fact that we achieved some degree of surprise involving place, timing and strength of attack. The excellence and sufficiency of amphibious equipment, with measures for dealing with beach defenses and obstacles, was also important. In the air, the Luftwaffe has taken a fearful beating. Since June 6, 2378 German aircraft have been destroyed in the air and 1,167 on the ground..."
Assorted observations from the man who operated Hitler's elevator at Berchtesgaden can be found herein.
What you won't find "herein" is a piece of Hitler trivia that I just picked-up. The story goes that the American comedian Bob Hope was given a tour of Hitler's bunker shortly after the German surrender. Accompanied by a U.S. colonel, the two men brought lots of American cigarette cartons with them to bribe the Russian guards (the bunker was in the Soviet sector); Hope walked away with the enormous banner that was draped in the dictator's lounge, as well as the handle off of Hitler's toilet. The toilet handle has remained among the comedian's possessions in Toluca Lake, California ever since.
On January 26, 1942 the long awaited boatload of U.S. troops to Great Britain had finally arrived. The first American G.I. to step off the plank and plant his foot on British soil was Pfc. Milburn H. Henke (1918 - 1998) of the 34th Infantry Division; and as the news spread throughout all of John Bull's island that help had arrived and the first guy had a German surname, the Brits (always big fans of irony) had a good laugh all around.
This article tells the tale of the 1st Battalion, 34th Division which had the distinction of being the longest serving U.S. combat unit in the course of the entire war. It was these men of the Mid-West who took it on the chin that day at Kasserine (America's first W.W. II battle, which was a defeat), avenged their dead at El Guettar, landed at Salerno, Anzio and fought their way up to Bologna. By the time the war ended, there weren't many of the original men left, but what few there were reminisce in this article. Interesting gripes about the problems of American uniforms can be read.
"You're damn right those Nisei boys have a place in the American heart, now and forever. And I say soldiers ought to form a pickaxe club to protect the Japanese-Americans who fought the war with us. Any time we see a barfly commando picking on those kids or discriminating against them, we ought to bang them over the head with a pickaxe. I'm willing to be a charter member".
A 1945 Yank Magazine article concerning American teen culture on the W.W. II home front in which the journalist/anthropologist paid particular attention to the teen-age slang of the day.
"Some of today's teenagers ---pleasantly not many --- talk the strange new language of "sling swing." In this bright lexicon of the good citizens of tomorrow, a girl with sex appeal is an "able Grable" or a "ready Hedy." A pretty girl is "whistle bait." A boy whose mug and muscles appeal to the girls is a "mellow man," a "hunk of heart break" or a "glad lad."
To read about one of the fashion legacies of W.W. II, click here...
With the exception of the attached piece, there is no magazine article in existence that illustrated so clearly the soul-piercing pain that descended upon the city of New York when the word got around that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died. YANK correspondent Bill Davidson walked from one neighborhood to the next recording much of what he saw:
"Nowhere was grief so open as in the poorest districts of the city. In Old St. Patrick's in the heart of the Italian district on the lower East Side, bowed, shabby figures came and went, and by the day after the President died hundreds of candles burned in front of the altar. 'Never' a priest said 'have so many candles burned in this church'." "A woman clasped her 8-year-old son and said, 'Not in my lifetime or in yours will we again see such a man.'"
"It is in Palestine where the Jews are building a national home, that the Arab enjoys higher standards of living and of health than anywhere in the Middle East... The Arab population of Palestine has risen from 600,000 to 1,200,00."
Although his membership in the Communist Party would not be known until he had already been out of the House of Representatives for six years, Hugh De Lacy (1910 – 1986) was easily recognized by his colleagues as quite the radical...
No doubt De Lacy's favorite presidential candidate was the American socialist Norman Thomas - and you can read about him here...
Here is a series of articles from YANK magazine that reported on the funeral of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. One of these four correspondents was assigned to write about the general sense of loss that New Yorkers felt upon learning of the death of their president:
"Not in my lifetime or in yours, will we again see see such a man."
CLICK HERE... to read the obituary of President Kennedy.
Carlton Rouh was awarded the M.o.H. for performing numerous acts of courage on the South Pacific island of Peleliu during the September of 1944; in this article he speaks bluntly about the nature of heroes and the discomfort they experience when being praised in a nation that was so deeply in need for such men.
Click here to read about another W.W. II Medal of Honor recipient.
The use of animals in war is as old as war itself; but the concept of kicking dogs out of perfectly good aircraft so they might be able to parachute onto snowy hilltops and deliver aid to wounded combatants dates to World War II. This printable "Collier's Magazine" article tells the story of the "Parapups":
"Completely G.I., the dogs have service records, serial numbers, enlistment papers and shots against disease. Sentimentalists along the Alaska Division even proposed that they be authorized to wear Parawings after five jumps."
"At long last the impact of of total war had bruised the American consciousness. Despite the initial success of General MacArthur's victory on Luzon and the Russians on the Eastern front, the first three weeks of 1945 had brought the nation face to face with the realities ahead as at no time since Pearl Harbor. No single factor could this metamorphosis be attributed, but it was plain that the stark lists of causalities and the growing hardships at home had contributed to it."
This is an Auschwitz testimony from a larger work titled The Camp of Disappearing Men. It was printed in 1944 by an organization called the Polish Workers Party and the singular voice giving the account is unidentified. This eyewitness does not explain how he made good his escape but the testimony was published in the Spring of 1945 - when the existence of the death camp was first discovered and made known to the world.
N.B.: Auschwitz was first called Oświęcim, named for the nearest Polish city.
This is a short anecdote that recalled a slice of life on board a USN troop ship as it ferried men from one bloody atoll to the next. The two speaking parts in this drama were both officers who butted heads regularly until they understood that what united them was the welfare of the
dying young men returning from the beaches who had given their last full measure.
To read articles about W.W. II submarines, Click here.
During the closing weeks of the war it was estimated that the Germans lorded over as many as 65,000 American POWs. Likewise, in the United States, there were 320,118 German Prisoners of War held captive. This article compares and contrasts how each army chose to treat their prisoners.
During the Spring of 1945 Americans watched films about Nazi atrocities and were outraged - click here to read about it
This notice was the Yank magazine account of what has come to be known as "the Great Raid" that was commanded by Lt Col. Henry A. Mucci (1909 - 1997). On January 30, 1945 Mucci lead a raiding party of 121 hand-picked men of the 6th Rangers accompanied by some 300 Filipino guerrillas into the jungles on Luzon (The Philippines) in order to liberate the survivors of the Bataan Death March from the Cabanatuan Prison Camp. At the loss of only two men, the raiders freed 510 American POWs.
Click here to read more about the Cabanatuan POW camp.
No other cartoonist during the Second World War ever portrayed the American GI so knowingly and with more sympathy than the STARS and STRIPES cartoonist Sgt. Bill Mauldin (1921 – 2003), who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartoons in 1945.
Mauldin wrote the attached essay at the end of the war and gave the Yank Magazine readers an earful regarding his understanding of the front, the rear and all the the blessed officers in between
Click here to read a wartime interview with another popular 1940s American cartoonist: Milton Caniff.
"Flags of two new kinds are flying in the city - white flags displayed by the panic-stricken populace, and the first Soviet flags that, Reuters says, are hoisted over what tall buildings are left within the captured districts. Three Soviet guards carried a blood-soaked banner 2000 miles from Stalingrad to Berlin. Pravda says the soldiers kneeled and kissed the flag and then raised it over a ruined building."
On April 2, 1945, elements of the American First Army liberated a German prison camp adjacent to the little town of Orb, Germany:
"What they found there appalled even the toughest GI and seemed to demonstrate that in some cases at least the Germans had treated British and American prisoners of war as badly as any of the pitiful slave laborers."
Its been said that World War Two was the first high-tech war, and a passing look at many of the military tools used between 1939 and 1945 will bare that out to be true. It was not only th the first war in which jet engines and atomic bombs were used, but also the first war to deploy walkie-talkie radios, rockets, and radar. This article concerns what the U.S. Department of War classified as a weapons system just as revolutionary as the atomic bomb: the VT fuse artillery shell (a.k.a. the time proximity fuse). It was used with great success in various theaters: anti-Kamikaze in the Pacific, anti-personnel in the Ardennes and anti V-1 in defense of Britain.
This is a short article that goes into greater detail outlining the successes listed above and explains how the system worked; it also is accompanied by a diagram of the shell.
"The city that had seen its own brand of fascism and international banditry tumble only a few months before had little energy left for reaction to the fall of Japan. The American Forces network broadcast the first authentic VJ news at 0210, and most of Berlin's polyglot occupation population, as well as most native Berliners, were asleep."
Two months after the death of President Roosevelt, and with W.W. II almost at an end, the censorship concerning FDR's presidential aircraft was terminated. The reporters at Newsweek were not slow in reporting all that could be known about this comfy juggernaut that had spirited FDR to Malta, Yalta and Cairo. The plane was a Douglas C-54A, reconfigured to sleep five and was equipped with an inter-cabin telephone, radio, and a stateroom. The President had anticipated traveling hither and yon while planning the post-war world, but other plans got in the way.
Here is the Newsweek obituary for the American W.W. II army commander General George S. Patton:
"As spectacular in his tactics as in his speech, he used his armor as Jeb Stuart employed his cavalry... Time after time his divisions broke through and slashed forward in drives which made military history. After the victory, German generals said they had feared him more than any other American field commander."
Click here to read about Patton's prayer for good weather during the Battle of the Bulge...
Click here to read about the Patton Tank in the Korean War...
Earl Blackwell and Ted Strong founded a curious institution that they called "Celebrity Services, Inc." in 1938 - figuring, as they did, that
"Today America has more celebrities than it can keep track of and Celebrity Services aims, simply, to keep track of them."
"Celebrity Services' office is a busy hodge-podge of files, cross-files, indices, cards folders, stuffed pigeonholes, telephones, confidential memos address books, private dossiers and fat envelopes" - all pertaining to the lives of 50,000 celeb-utopians.
"It now becomes apparent that the U.S. Government, long before Pearl Harbor, knew Tokyo's war plans almost as thoroughly as did the Japanese. To all practical purposes, Washington had ears attuned to the most intimate, secret sessions of Japan's cabinet."
A year and a half before the Pearl Harbor attack, Naval Intelligence sold a Japanese agent some bogus plans of the naval installation - more about this can be read here.
"The Navy's own story of the events that led up to Pearl Harbor now can be drawn from top-secret documents placed before the Pearl Harbor Committee. These documents show that misunderstanding, inadequate co-ordination and other factors helped the Japanese surprise attack, even though the Navy was almost certain a Pacific war was coming."
This article appeared two days before the German capitulation; the Allies were in Berlin, Hitler was dead and the Pentagon was planning to send some men home while shipping a million off to fight the Japanese.
Here is an in-depth examination as to whether or not government-sponsored healthcare was suitable for post-war America. Written by a journalist who was decidedly for the proposal, you will not be surprised to read the same exact arguments were presented on both sides as they were during the Obama years.
"The bill's friends argue that tax-supported medicine is no more un-American than tax-supported education."
I recommend this article primarily for it's three funny illustrations; the copy is not likely to hold your attention for too long. It concerns civilian applications for military technology, such as that era's hand-held radios that were the wonder of the period. As you will see from the illustrations, the cartoonist recognized so well that such inventions could serve as the grandfather of the cell phone and he drew people on the street and driving cars -all chatting away on their walkie-talkies. Good fun.
Reporter Robert Shaplen (1917 - 1988) filed this account of how the GIs have reacted to the strangest country they have ever encountered:
"Looking at the Japanese, the average GI wonders how they ever managed to prosecute a war in the first place. Everything in Japan, even broken and blasted cities and factories, has a miniature toy-like appearance. Automobiles, the ones that are left, don't work; trains bear little resemblance to the Twentieth Century Limited or a fast freight back home. The short, slight people are dressed poorly and drably."
This brief column tells the story of three women war correspondents who marched at the point of the spear alongside the American infantry in order to report on the collapse of Hitler's Germany. The correspondents in question were:
• Lee Carson in Remagen
• Iris Carpenter in Remagen
• Ann Stringer in the city of Bonn
The Story of G.I. Joe was released shortly before the war ended and was praised by General Eisenhower for being the best war movie he had ever seen. Directed by William Wellman, the film was applauded by American combat veterans of the time for it's accuracy - in their letters home, many would write that Wellman's film had brought them to tears. The movie was based on the war reporting of Ernie Pyle as it appeared in his 1943 memoir, Here Is Your War: Story of G.I. Joe. Although it is not mentioned here, Pyle himself had spent some time on the set as a technical adviser, and the film was released two months after his death.
When this small piece was published there was a lot of talk concerning the blessings of the tin can. Recycling was in its infancy on the home fronts during the Second World War and tin played a big part for both the military (you can read about that here) and civilly (the home preservation of fruits and vegetables). This short article will tell you more about this helpful invention that aided in the allied victory.
A Yank Magazine interview with the author of Gone with the Wind (1936).
At the time this article was printed, Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949; Pulitzer Prize 1937) was an American publishing phenomenon; Gone with the Wind (or GWTW, to those in the know) was said to be the fastest selling novel in the history of American publishing. Her one book had a sales record of 50,000 copies in one day and approximately 1,500,000 during it's first year. By May of 1941 the sales reached 3,368,000 in the English language alone (there were 18 translations made in all; the novel was a blockbuster in Germany, where 5000,000 editions were swiftly sold).
Published six months after the German surrender was this account of post-war Vienna, Austria: the people, the shortages and the black-market. Originally liberated by the Soviet Army, the Americans occupied the city three months afterward; this is an eyewitness account as to what Vienna was like in the immediate wake of World War II. Reading between the lines, one gets a sense that the Viennese were simply delighted to see an American occupying force swap places with the Soviet Army, although the Soviets were not nearly as brutal to this capital as they were to Berlin.
In compliance with the Potsdam Conference, Vienna was soon divided into four zones of occupation.
"At 5:45 p.m. telephones rang simultaneously in the Washington bureaus of the AP, UP and [the International News Service] on a conference call from the White House. The familiar voice of Steve Early, who had retired only recently after twelve years as White House press secretary, called the roll to make sure all were listening. Then: 'Here is a flash. The President died suddenly early this afternoon'"
"Swiftly the news went around the world... No president had meant quite so much to the press as Mr. Roosevelt. Few in history had been more consistently and bitterly opposed by a majority of publishers. Perhaps none had more admirers and fewer detractors among working newsmen. No president since his cousin Theodore, who coined the word 'muckracker', had on occasion denounced press and newsmen alike more harshly. Yet most newsmen forgave him his peevish moments. Certainly none had been more news-rich and none had ever received the voluminous coverage that President Roosevelt had. Over the years, the Roosevelt twice-a-week press conference was the Capital's biggest newsmaker."
Written seven months after VE-Day, this article reported on life in the American zone of occupation:
"Today, with every facet of his life policed by foreign conquerors, the German civilian faces the worst winter his country has known in centuries. And it is likely to be but the first of several such winters. He is hungry now, and he will be cold. Shelter is inadequate. His property is looted by his neighbor. Lawlessness and juvenile delinquency disturb him. Public health teeters in precarious balance which might tip the disaster."
Between the years 1941 and 1945 the United States achieved a level of power that the tyrants of yore only dreamed about:
"Clearly here was a phenomenon to make anyone sit up and take notice - a new kind of military machine, a new kind of global power that apparently could be delivered anywhere in the world, at any time... By building 75,000 to 100,000 planes yearly and by improving planes and motors, we have emerged suddenly as an air power...No other nation has made a comparable investment in carrier aviation. No other nation would dare to put an expeditionary force to sea against a nation strong in carriers and land -based aircraft...With the object of defending ourselves, we have solved one problem after another until we have stumbled on a formula for conquering most of the world."
"In a dismal forest near Vladivostok, Japanese commanders removed their caps, bowed low, and surrendered their entire Manchurian forces to the Russians... Growing numbers of enemy troops threw away their arms and joined the long lines of ragged Japs trudging down dusty Manchurian roads to Soviet Prison stockades. When a number of of Jap officers objected to the wholesale surrender, they were killed by their own men."
Among the surrendered was the Japanese puppet, Henry Pu Yi (1906 - 1967), eleventh and last Emperor of the Qing dynasty.
Here is a 1945 article about the Croatian-born American ballerina Mia Slavenska (1916 – 2002) and her popularity. The article divides its column space between telling us about the dancer and providing a brief history of ballet - and how it was once joined at the hip with opera.
"American troops on Okinawa thought they knew all there was to know about Jap fanaticism. But last week the Japs served it up with a new twist. The evening of May 24 started out like any other on the battle-torn island. The enemy sent its usual flight of Kamikaze suicide planes to strafe American airfields and dive into shipping offshore... At the height of the earsplitting air battle, the Japs played their trump card" - from the fuselage of a twin-engine bomber that had belly-landed on an American airfield, emerged Japanese infantry.
The following is an extract from General Eisenhower's report on the Allied operations from June 6 through the 26 of August, 1944:
"Many factors are woven into warp and woof of this great victory...One was the meticulous care in planning and preparation, another was the fact that we achieved some degree of surprise involving place, timing and strength of attack. The excellence and sufficiency of amphibious equipment, with measures for dealing with beach defenses and obstacles, was also important. In the air, the Luftwaffe has taken a fearful beating. Since June 6, 2378 German aircraft have been destroyed in the air and 1,167 on the ground..."
Statistical data concerning the U.S. Army casualties in June and July of 1944 can be read in this article.
"On Sunday morning, August 5 (Washington time), an American airplane flew over Hiroshima, a Japanese army base [!] on the Inland Sea. It dropped a single bomb. When that missile struck the earth, it blew up in the greatest man-made explosion in the history of the world. The United States had loosed an atomic bomb on Japan."
Assorted reports from various European capitols concerning the capitulation of Hitler's Germany:
"Finally, when Paris believed the news, it was just a big-city celebration --crowds and singing and cheers and lots of cognac and girls. People stopped work and airplanes of all the Allied forces buzzed the Champs Elysees. Pvt. Ernest Kuhn of Chicago listened to the news come over the radio at the 108th General Hospital. He had just been liberated after five months in a Nazi PW camp and he still had some shrapnel in his throat. "I listened to Churchill talk", he said, "and I kept saying to myself, 'I'm still alive. The war is over and I'm still alive' I thought of all the guys in the 28th Division Band with me who were dead now. We used to be a pretty good band."
Click here to read how the Army intended to transfer men from the ETO to the Pacific Theater.
The June 1st issue of YANK MAGAZINE did a fine job of capturing the excitement that was felt in civilized quarters as the allied armies poured into Germany from all sides. As the news of Hitler's suicide spread throughout Europe, a YANK reporter took a sampling of G.I. opinion on the subject. One G.I. in Italy opined:
"Now they say Hitler is dead. Maybe he is. If he is, I don't believe he died heroically. Mussolini died at least something like a dictator, but somehow I can't figure Hitler dying in action..."
Read an article about some bored newspaper editors who were curious to know what the headlines would look like if Hitler had been killed in 1941.
"The Japanese Cabinet decided yesterday a general election will be held January 20 to 31 [1946], and the Tokyo newspaper Yomuri Hochi urged 'spontaneous and vigorous action' toward forming a democratic government."
Wanting the Japanese Cabinet to know who was in charge, General MacArthur moved the date up to December seventeenth [1945]. It was the first time Japanese women had ever voted.
Reported by four war correspondents, this is the second half of a Collier's article narrating the largest naval battle to have ever been fought in military history:
"Secretary of the Navy Forrestal summed up the results as 'One of the great naval victories of the war that will go down, along with Midway and Guadalcanal sea battles as one of the great, shattering blows struck against Japanese sea power. The Japanese fleet was indeed beaten, routed and broken.'"
"Walking into Hiroshima in broad daylight, wearing an American uniform and knowing that you were one of the first Americans the people in that utterly ruined city had laid eyes on since the bombing, was not a comfortable feeling."
After the war it was discovered that one quarter of the Hiroshima dead were Koreans who were there as slave laborers.
The October 3, 1946 issue of the Atlanta Constitution ran a front page headline declaring that Imperial Japan had successfully tested their own Atom Bomb during the summer of '45. Click here to read more on this topic.
Click here to read General Marshal's opinions regarding the Atomic Bomb.
American war correspondent John Terrell visited the rubble that was once Hitler's headquarters/crash pad in central Germany and, with the aid of one of his former domestics, attempted to piece together what life was once like there.
Norwegian traitor Vidkun Quisling (1887 - 1945) insisted on his innocence throughout his trial and all the way up to the day of his firing squad. To counter his claims in the courtroom prosecutors produced the diary of Hitler's foreign minister, Alfred Rosenberg, that clearly stated that Quisling was complicit from the very beginning in the invasion of his homeland. A pride of Norwegian military officers recalled the day of the Nazi attack when Quisling refused to give the mobilization order.
Click here to read an article about another European traitor: Pierre Laval.
U.S. Representative Emanuel Cellar (1888 - 1981) and a number of senators were all in agreement that the International Red Cross had failed in their task to police Nazi P.O.W. camps for prisoner abuse:
"In accordance with the conditions of the Geneva Convention, the Red Cross has the right to visit prisoner-of-war camps... These killings, starvations, and abuses did not happen in one day. They were prolonged operations. Didn't the Red Cross know about them?"
There was some concern among members of the prosecuting legal team assembled at Nuremberg as to whether the Nazi defendants were mentally capable of standing trial for their heinous crimes. It was decided that each of the accused be administered an IQ test; to the surprise of all (except the accused) it was discovered that many of these men possessed intelligence levels that ranked at genius and near-genius grade!
A printable piece from a 1945 Collier's Magazine outlining how Sergeant Edward F. Younger (died August 6, 1942) selected which of the four unidentified Doughboys set before him would be interred in the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington Cemetery.
Attached is a stirring collection of eyewitness accounts by the American survivors of the Malmedy Massacre (December 17, 1944) that took place during the Battle of the Bulge.
"The German officer in the car stood up, took deliberate aim with a pistol at an American medical officer in the front rank of the prisoners and fired. As the medical officer fell, the Germans fired again and another American dropped. Immediately two tanks at the end of the field opened up with their machine guns on the defenseless prisoners..."
By thew war's end it was revealed that 43% of American prisoners of war had died in Japanese camps; by contrast, 1% had died in German POW camps.
Click here to read about the Nazi murder of an American Jewish P.O.W.
This article was penned by Yank correspondent Evans Wylie; it is an account of Ernie Pyle's (1900 - 1945) surprise appearance during the Okinawa campaign and the violent death that Pyle had long anticipated for himself. His end came while he was being driven along a road in the company of Marines in a sector that was believed to have been safe.
Of all the many American war correspondents writing during World War II, Pyle was, without a doubt, the most well loved; he was adored by readers on the home front as well as the GIs in the field. Like many men, Pyle struggled in his career as a younger man; yet when the war broke out he very quickly found his voice - and his readership soon followed.
Attached is a four page article that reported on the deserters of the U.S. Army who organized themselves into Chicago-style gangs in post-occupied Paris, replete with gun-molls, hideouts, fencing contacts and all the trimmings of a third-rate-blood-and-thunder detective story.
In Nazi occupied Paris there was a secret underground movie theater (93 Champs Elysees) operating throughout the entire four year period and it charged an excessive sum of francs to gain entry. Guess which Chaplin film was shown?
This is an article about the 1940s comic book industry and the roll it played during W.W. II.
The writer doesn't spell it out for us, but by-and-by it dawned on us that among all the various "firsts" the World War Two generation had claim to, they were also the first generation to read comic books. Although this article concentrates on the wartime exploits of such forties comic book characters as Plastic Man and Blackhawk, it should be remembered that the primary American comic book heroes that we remember today were no slackers during the course of the war; Superman smashed the Siegfried Line prior to arresting Hitler as he luxuriated in his mountain retreat; Batman selflessly labored in the fields of counterintelligence while Captain America signed-up as a buck private.
Click here to read an article about the predecessor to the American comic book: the Dime Novel.
If you would like to read a W.W. II story concerning 1940s comic strips and the failed plot to assassinate General Eisenhower, click here.
"I have visited these [death] camps and I have seen the prisoners and the conditions under which they existed or died. It would be hard, with a mere camera, to overstate the essential horrors of these camps... It is not a pretty site to see - as I did... I fancy that no other generation was ever required to witness horror in this particular shape..."
The following article and illustration were clipped from the World War Two G.I. magazine, YANK; which we have included in our study of American World War One naval uniforms because we couldn't imagine that the regulations involving the wearing of the lid could have been that much more different from the days when Admiral Simms ran the shop.
While in the process of drawing up the charter for the United Nations, several foreign dignitaries took time out to look around at the citizens of San Francisco and share their candid observations with the editors of YANK MAGAZINE as to what an American is.
During the summer of 1938 the Nazis allowed one of their photo journalists out of the Fatherland to wander the highways and byways of the United States. This is what he saw...
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek stepped up to the plate and answered nine questions that were put to him by COLLIER'S editor Henry La Cossitt, concerning the future of democracy in China.
When Brazil joined forces with the Allies in 1942, they were soon lavished with numerous ships, submarines and armaments that would aid them in their struggle against global Fascism. By the time 1945 rolled around, it became clear to anyone in the region that Brazil had become the second mightiest nation in the hemisphere.
"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.
"They killed Mussolini and his henchmen. They killed 1,000 persons in five days in and around Milan. Some Partisans thought the city was still not cleaned of Fascists when the American Army finally entered on Sunday afternoon April 29 and by their presence ended the assassinations.The fighting was about over; the even more difficult struggle was for stability was already beginning but with less excitement."
Admiral Pete Mitscher (1887 – 1947) was one of the primary architects of American naval aviation during the 20th Century.In this column, one of the officers who served under him during the admiral's command of carrier Task Force 58 recalls why he came to admire the man as deeply as he did.
One of Admiral Pete Mitscher's officers recalls the man with tremendous admiration:
"They used to think a carrier was a hit-and-run fighter, but Pete changed that. He said, 'Hit'em and stay. Hit'em again tomorrow. And he did.'"
"The German Army has been defeated, but the German murderers are still murderers, the Junkers are still Junkers and they are still Nazis - and all of them are looking ahead to the next war....Here is what the Germans, whose commanders begged for mercy at the signing of the surrender, did in the 24 hours just before and after the formal deadline for capitulation..."
"After five and a half years of ever growing battle against ever-stronger enemies, the German Army in 1945 looks, at a glance, much the worse for wear. It is beset on all sides and is short of everything. It has suffered appalling casualties and must resort to old men, boys, invalids and unreliable foreigners for its cannon fodder...Yet this shabby, war-weary machine has struggled on a in a desperate effort to postpone it's inevitable demise. At the end of 1944 it was still able to mount an offensive calculated to delay for months the definitive piercing of the Western bulwarks of Germany."
Here is an instructional cartoon for students illustrating how the United Nations was intended to function during a crises.
The cartoonist clearly indicated the step-by-step protocol that was designed to eradicate world wars with a diplomatic process beginning jointly in both the U.N. General Assembly as well as the U.N. Security Council, proceeding on to three other possible U.N. committees (such as the Trusteeship Council, the Military Staff Committee or the International Courts) before the general body would be able to deploy any international force on it's behalf.
By the time the war ended the WACs were 100,000 strong -
they had earned 314 medals and commendations, including 23 Legion of Merit awards and fourteen Purple Hearts. Throughout the war, seventeen thousand WACs had served overseas but by Christmas of 1945 their global strength had been cut in half.
The attached column is a 1945 magazine profile of Clement Attlee (1883 – 1967: U.K. Prime Minister: 1945 - 1951) it appeared just a few weeks following the long over-do wrap-up of the Second World War and the hasty ouster of Conservative Party Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965).
Here is the NEWSWEEK MAGAZINE account of the defense of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge (December 16, 1944 - January 25, 1945). The article opens with a thorough explanation of General McAuliffe's famous response to the German officers who came in search of an American surrender.
A swell article that truly catches the spirit of the time. You will read about the war-torn Hollywood that existed between the years 1941-1945 and the movie shortage, the hair-pin rationing, the rise of the independent producers and the ascent of Van Johnson and Lauren Becall:
"Lauren, a Warner Brothers property, is a blonde-haired chick with a tall, hippy figure, a voice that sounds like a sexy foghorn and a pair of so-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it eyes"
Mention is also made of the hiring of demobilized U.S. combat veterans to serve as technical assistants for war movies in such films as "Objective Burma".
This is a three page article concerning the city of New York from Yank's on-going series, "Home Towns in Wartime". The Yank correspondent, Sanderson Vanderbilt, characterized Gotham as being "overcrowded" (in 1945 the population was believed to be 1,902,000; as opposed to the number today: 8,143,197) and I'm sure we can all assume that today's New Yorkers tend to feel that their fore-bearers did not know the meaning of the word.
New York was the home base of Yank Magazine and this article presents a young man's view of that town and the differences that he can recall when he remembers it's pre-war glory (Sanderson tended to feel that the city looked a bit "down-at-the-heel").
Click here if you would like to read an article about the celebrations in New York the day World War Two ended.
During the late war period, leftist playwright Lillian Hellman (1905 – 1984), was twice denied permission to travel to war-torn Britain on the grounds that she had been recognized as an active communist. Yet, ironically, those same pencil-pushers in the State Department turned around a few months later and granted her a passport to visit the Soviet Union in August of 1944 - as a guest artist of VOKS, the Soviet agency that processed all international cultural exchanges. It was during this visit that she penned the attached eyewitness account of the Nazi retreat through Stalin's Russia:
"Five days of looking out of a train window into endless devastation makes you sad at first, and then numb. Here there is nothing left, and the eye gets unhappily accustomed to nothing and begins to accept it..."
Click here to read a 1939 STAGE MAGAZINE profile of this writer.
As informative as this World War Two article about photographer Edward Steichen (1879 – 1973) is, it fails to convey to the reader what an interesting soul he must have been. Steichen was a respected photographer in modernist circles prior to volunteering for service in the First World War, and by the time he joined the U.S. Navy for the second go-round, his stock was even higher.
Here is an eyewitness account of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp as experienced by U.S. Representative Clare Boothe Luce (R, Connecticut, pictured above):
"It was policy, Nazi policy, to work them and starve them and then throw them in the into the furnaces when they could no longer struggle to their feet. Dead men tell no tales. Well, the 51,000 dead of Buchenwald are talking now, and they are telling the people of the Democracies that they will have died in vain, unless we know and believe what excruciating sufferings they endured."
The seasoned war correspondent explained in the attached article as to why Operation Market Garden was such a disaster (and the censors let him) and why the next ambitious Allied parachute assault, Operation Varsity, would be different. Reminiscing about all that he saw of the famed parachute jump beyond the Rhine prior to being forced to turn-tail and bail out over English-occupied Belgium, he observed:
"...the C-46s come in and apparently walk into a wall of flak. I could not see the flak, but one plane after another went down. All our attention was on our own ship. It could blow up in mid-air at any moment. From the pilot's compartment came streams of stinging smoke."
In this article,YANK MAGAZINE correspondent Al Hine summed-up all the assorted happenings on the 1945 Big Band landscape:
"The leading big bands now are Woody Herman's, Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton's. Benny Goodman, who broke up his own band for the umpteenth time, is a featured performer in Billy Rose's super revue, 'The Seven Lively Arts', but the maestro is said to be thinking of turning over his Rose job to Raymond Scott and making another stab at the band business."
A reminiscence by screen writer, artist and all-around literary misfit Rob Wagner (1872 - 1942) as he recalled the bad old days of 1918, when he was hoodwinked into believing that the widespread prohibition of alcohol would help achieve an Allied victory in World War I. When the war ended and time passed, he noticed how the Noble Experiment was evolving into something quite different, and how it was altering not only his friends and neighbors, but American culture as a whole.
"Before Prohibition, the average business or professional man, never dreamed of drinking spirits during the working day...Now, however, a full grown man with the sparkle in his eye of a naughty sophomore, will meet you on Spring Street at eleven in the morning, slap you on the back, and ask you to duck up to his office where he will uncork his forbidden treasure..."
YANK correspondent, Sergeant Ed Cunningham, filed this report concerning all that he saw during the earliest stages of the German counter-attack in Bastogne; some Americans were leaving, some were staying, new ones were arriving - and all the while the Belgian townsfolk watched in confusion and hoped for the best.
Standing before the judges who made up the 11-nation war crimes tribunal in occupied Tokyo, General Hideko Tojo, among 19 other Japanese wartime leaders, put on the show of his life:
"Without hesitation, Tojo accepted full blame for plunging Japan into war. But it was, he insisted, a 'defensive' war, and 'in no manner a violation of international law..'"
YANK reporter Harry Sions listened in as sixteen Nazi officials, having known and worked with Hitler in various capacities through the years, sat back and recalled the events of Hitler's last 365 days in power. Much was said regarding the failed assassination attempt (project Valkyrie) but some of the more interesting content refers to the closing days in the bunker with Bormann, Keitel and Jodl.
It was reported that shortly after he took up residence in the bunker, Hitler's hair and mustache was transformed to a bright white, yet he was not the only man in Europe in need of hair dye; click here about these other fellows.
YANK correspondent Mack Morris wandered through the fallen Nazi capital of Berlin two days after it's collapse and recorded his observations:
"There were Russians in the the square, dancing and a band played. In Unter den Linden were the bodies of dead civilians, the dust of their famous street like grease paint on their faces."
Click here to read about the German surrender proceedings that took place in the French city of Reims on May 6, 1945.
Click here to read about the inmate rebellions that took place at Auschwitz, Sobibor and Triblinka.
"In the Holy Land are two organizations: the Stern Gang and the NMO, the members of which employ kidnapping, extortion and murder to gain their ends; civil war and independence for Palestine."
In the attached article Collier's Magazine foreign correspondent Frank Gervasi reported on the who and what of these organizations.
"New Yorkers milled around the Wall Street district and Times Square, and over a loudspeaker Mayor Fiorlello H. LaGuardia told them to behave themselves..."
Click here to read about the VJ-Day celebrations around the world.
Gathered from all the various battlefronts around the globe, the attached article serves as a archive of spontaneous reactions uttered by a smattering of stunned GIs when they heard that President Roosevelt had died:
"Pvt. Howard McWaters of Nevada City, California, just released from the hospital and waiting to go back to the Americal Division, shook his head slowly. 'Roosevelt made a lot of mistakes,' he said. 'But I think he did the best he could, and when he made mistakes he usually admitted it. Nobody could compare with him as President.'"
Click here to read about President Harry Truman...
In the fall of 1978 former TIME MAGAZINE war correspondent Bill Walton remarked privately about how wildly inappropriate it was to cast the pretty-boy actor Ryan O'Neal in the roll as General James M. Gavin (1907 – 1990) for the epic war film, A Bridge Too Far. Having dropped into Normandy in 1944 with a typewriter strapped to his chest, Walton witnessed first-hand the grit and combat leadership skills that made Gavin so remarkable. The attached Yank article tells the tale of Gavin's teen-age enlistment, his meteoric rise up the chain of command and his early advocacy for a U.S. Army parachute infantry divisions.
Another article contrasting the Germans and the Japanese can be read here...
&lIn 1944, Karl Jay Shapiro (1913 – 2000) was pulling in the big-bucks as a U.S. Army Private stationed in New Guinea, but unlike most of the khaki-clad Joes in at least a one hundred mile radius, Shapiro had two volumes of poetry under his belt (Person Place and Thing and "Place of Love") in addition to the memory of having been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In this short interview, he explains what a poet's concerns should be and offers some fine tips for younger poets to bare in mind. A year latter, while he was still in uniform, Shapiro would be awarded the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
This illustrated article appeared in "Yank Magazine" during March of 1945 and explained fully what fabric rationing was and how the American home front fashion consumer was affected:
"The absence of cuffs and vests aside, pre-war styles in men's clothing are still obtainable. A man can get plaids, stripes, herringbones and all sorts of weaves in brown, blue, gray and all the various pastel shades. ...Women generally have had to make great changes in their dressing habits. In the first place the shortage of rubber has raised hell with the girdle, or foundation garment.".
Click here to read more about fashion on the W.W. II home front...
In this study concerning the religions of the United States during the mid-to-late period of the Second World War, it was revealed that there were a total of 256 religious bodies in the country; of this 13 reported a membership numbering in excess of one million followers. All-in, there were 72,492,669 who were members of one faith or another:
A two page magazine article about the U.S. Navy destroyer Newcombe (DD-586), a hard-charging ship that suffered heavy damage from repeated Kamikaze attacks off of Okinawa on April 6, 1945 (the Ryukyu Islands):
"Then the plane shot past them, ripped through the gun mount and shattered itself against the after-stack. There was a blinding flash. The Newcombe shuddered and rolled heavily to starboard."
"On March 10, 1945, a group of Superforts crossed Japan's coast line. Behind them came another group, and another in a line stretching far back toward Saipan. In a long, thin file they roared over Tokyo. They flew low and out of their open bellies spilled bombs of jellied gasoline. When they hit, they burst, spewing out billowing, all-consuming fire. The flames leaped across fire lanes, swallowed factories, destroyed skyscrapers."
Click here to read about August 28, 1945 - the day the American occupation began.
The Chief of Staff's 1945 report concerning the U.S. Army's progress and set-backs during the course of the war mentioned one element:
"in which the German Army held an advantage almost to the end of the war. The first was the triple-threat 88-mm [field gun] which our troops first encountered in North Africa..."
"Some Jap officers, unable to face the prospect of defeat, dressed in their best uniforms, laid their samurai swords by their sides and then shot themselves in the head. Tokyo broadcast a plaintive admission from the Jap commander on Iwo Jima, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi:"
'This island is the front line that defends our mainland and I am going to die here.'
The 625th issue of Newsweek marked their twelfth year on the newsstand:
"The first issue, dated February 17, 1933, was a workmanlike job of news digesting by a staff of 22, and for four years it faithfully followed this pattern [until a new publisher took the helm in 1937 and it really kicked into high gear]."
"Intelligence officers of the U.S. Army, just returned from Germany, brought appalling stories of the conditions under the policy of divided control established at Potsdam last August. Berlin, they reported confidentially, had a pre-war population of four million and an average daily death of toll of 175. Berlin today, although harboring over a million refugees from what was Eastern Germany, has a population of just over three million; deaths, 4,000 a day."
Lt. Alexander Nininger, Jr. (1918 - 1942) was posthumously awarded the first Medal of Honor of the Second World War, but regardless of that fact he got the brush-off in this column which was primarily written in order to inform the public of a new CBS radio program. The radio show was titled CMH and was intended to tell the individual stories of each and every MoH recipient of W.W. II.
A printable account from a YANK correspondent assigned to General Patton's Third Army as it swept through Germany and liberated the wounded Air Corps personnel who had been kept at a German military hospital during their recuperation.
Statistical data concerning the U.S. Army casualties in June and July of 1944 can be read in this article.
Using the most accurate figures available to them at the time, the editors at PM Daily News compared and contrasted the two world wars for their readers in their VJ-Day issue.
The attached 1945 article was intended to serve as a suit-buying-guide for all those young men who were in the throes of trading in their military uniforms for civilian attire.
The one kind of wool that is not discussed in this article is "worsted": this was the wool that was specifically reserved for the uniforms of the U.S. military (enough to outfit 12 million souls) and there wasn't a single thread of it that could be purchased on the civilian market.
Apparently the arguments that we still hear today concerning whether or not use of the Atomic Bomb in 1945 was justifiable popped-up right away. The following is a letter to the editor of Yank Magazine written by a hard-charging fellow who explained that he was heartily sick of reading the
"-pious cries of horror [that] come from the musty libraries of well-fed clergymen and from others equally far removed from the war".
An eye-witness account of life in post-war Berlin: the rubble, the black-market, the politics, the night clubs, the newspapers, the natives and the four occupying armies.
A light and breezy review concerning the findings of a U.S. government study regarding the effectiveness of the Allied strategic bombing campaign against Nazi Germany:
"...the survey authorities report that although air power might have been more advantageously applied in this case or that, its decisive bearing on the victory was undeniable...At sea, its contribution, combined with naval air power, brought an end to the enemy's greatest naval threat -the U-boat; on land, it helped turn the tide overwhelmingly in favor of allied ground forces."
Articles about the daily hardships in post-war Germany can be read by clicking here.
This is a swell article that truly catches the spirit of the time. You will read about the war-torn Hollywood that existed between the years 1941-1945 and the movie shortage, the hair-pin rationing, the rise of the independent producers and the ascent of Van Johnson and Lauren Becall:
"Lauren, a Warner Brothers property, is a blonde-haired chick with a tall, hippy figure, a voice that sounds like a sexy foghorn and a pair of so-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it eyes"
Mention is also made of the hiring of demobilized U.S. combat veterans to serve as technical assistants for war movies in such films as "Objective Burma".
Was Adolf Hitler a follower of Jesus Christ or was he a man who saw no intelligence in the universe whatever? Today, for reasons that are quite understandable, neither the atheists or the Christians are eager to count the madman in their ranks. Hoping to diffuse this never-ending argument (that has found a home on the internet) OldMagazineArticles.com offers this page of research from a U.S. Army study on Hitler's military that indicates Hitler's sympathy for atheists.
"The aspiration to be the first to meet the Red Army is aired all the way up and down the line, from division generals to the boys in the foxholes. And if the Yanks had their way, they'd hit the first road east and keep helling it eastward till they hit the vodka. As one soldier from an armored division put it:"
"'This is what the hell we've been pushing across Europe for and I don't want to lose the pie when I practically have it in my mouth.'"
When World War II was inching toward it's bloody conclusion, Japan launched its Fu-go Campaign - a project designed to deploy thousands of high-altitude hydrogen balloons armed with incendiary devices. These balloons were to follow the westerly winds of the upper atmosphere, drifting to the west coast of North America where they were expected descend into the forests and explode.
A one page study of German World War II tactics that was created by the United States Department of War two months prior to the German surrender:
"...the Germans have placed a considerable reliance on novel and sensational weapons such as the mass use of armor, the robot bomb, and the super-heavy tank. Their principal weaknesses in this regard have been their failure to integrate these new techniques with established arms and tactics --German field artillery, for example, did not maintain pace with German armor -and their devotion to automatic weapons at the expense of accuracy."
In late April of 1945, American tank crews south of Torgau (Germany) began to pick up the chattering of Soviet infantry units on their radios - the transmissions were generated by the advanced units of Marshal Konev's (1897 - 1973) First Ukrainian Army and both the allied units were elated to know that the other was nearby, for it meant one thing: the end of the war was at hand.
Thankfully, Yank's correspondent Ed Cummings was with the U.S. First Army when the two groups met at the Elbe River and he filed the attached article.
On the matter of the American fashion designer Adele Simpson (1904 - 1995), it must be remembered that she was a prominent player in American fashion for many decades; a woman who had been awarded both a Coty Award (1949) as well as a Neiman Marcus Award (1946). Her creations were highly sought after by the crowned heads of both Europe and Hollywood.
Click here to read about wartime fabric rationing in the 1940s.
G.I. JOE MAGAZINE was established shortly after the war by a shrewd, commerce-driven soul who fully recognized that the American veterans of W.W. II would have a good deal to say about their military hardships, and would need a venue in which to do it. The attached article was written by a veteran who preferred to remain anonymous; the righteous indignation can be keenly sensed in his prose as he explained the three-tiered justice system that he believed to have been built into the offices of the U.S. Army military court system. The first tier meted out soft justice for officers, the second dispensed a harsh justice to White enlisted men, and the bottom tier dished-out a far more vile variety to the American soldiers of African descent.
"As for the defendant's guilt: the British Attorney general named seven individually as 'murderers, robbers, black-mailers and gangsters' who led Germany into war..."
Click here if you would like to read what the German people thought about the trials...
"When Michael Campiseno turned 18, he was pulled out of his senior class in Norwood High School and drafted. Mike was sore. He swore that if he ever returned, he'd throw his discharge papers on the desk of the board chairman and say, 'Now, ya sonuvabitch, I hope you're satisfied!'"
Here is the skinny on Draft Board 119 of Norwood, Massachusetts - an average draft board that sent 2,103 men off to war (75 of them never returned).
The Americans arriving in Japan after the surrender proceedings were hellbent on capturing the American traitor who presided over so many disheartening broadcasts -- the woman they nicknamed "Tokyo Rose":
"...one of the supreme objectives of American correspondents landing in Japan was Radio Tokyo. There they hoped to find someone to pass off as the one-and-only "Rose" and scoop their colleagues. When the information had been sifted a little, a girl named Iva Toguri (Iva Toguri D'Aquino: 1916 – 2006), emerged as the only candidate who came close to filling the bill. For three years she had played records, interspersed with snappy comments, beamed to Allied soldiers on the "Zero Hour"...Her own name for herself was "Orphan Ann."
Toguri's story was an interesting one that went on for many years and finally resulted in a 1977 pardon granted by one who had listened to many such broadcasts: President Gerald R. Ford (1913-2006), who had served in the Pacific on board the aircraft carrier "USS Monterey".
The editors of Yank assembled six veteran platoon sergeants to talk about mistakes that most U.S. Army replacements make when they go into combat, and to speak seriously about which weapons and small unit tactics work best when confronting the German enemy:
"The first mistake recruits make under fire" began T/Sgt. Harry R. Moore, rifle platoon sergeant from Fort Worth, Texas, "is that they freeze and bunch up. They drop to the ground and just lie there; won't even fire back. I had one man just lie there while a German came right up and shot him. He still wouldn't fight back."
to read about how the Army addressed the problem of soldiers who wouldn't pull their triggers...
This is a conversational General Eisenhower article that primarily concerns the plans for the Allied occupation of Germany, coupled with every American soldier's wish to simply get in boats and go home:
"I'm just as bad off as any GI today," General Eisenhower said quietly. "I don't want to be here. I'm 54 years old and I lead a kind of lonely life."
The third paragraph makes reference to a "pretty British secretary named Lt. Kay Summersby".
"The big question for the United States is how long American troops are to occupy Japan. The Potsdam Declaration says that the occupying forces of the Allies shall be withdrawn from Japan as soon as the objectives outlined are accomplished and 'there has been established in accordance with the Japanese people a peacefully inclined and responsible government.'"
"U.S. officials appear to be thinking in terms of an occupation of only 5 or 10 years. Japanese officials, however, in looking ahead to a resurgence of Japanese power, appear to be thinking in terms of 50 to 100 years."
"Berlin has fallen to all intents and purposes. Stalin in a May Day order announces that the victory flag of the red Army flies over the main part of the ruined Nazi capital."
An brief article by a former Chief of Naval Operations (1930 - 33), Admiral William V. Pratt praising the Pacific naval strategy of Fleet Admiral Nimitz.
Click here to read about Admiral Raymond Spruance.
A PM reporter was present one day in Germany as a mixed mob of Third Army grunts and tank men had a tête-à-tête concerning their observations of the German people:
"Aren't these Heinies the stupidest people you ever saw?"
"In the end, the German soldier faced the greatest ignominy which any soldier can receive. His own people discredited and betrayed him. The people knew the war was lost. They knew too that fanatical resistance meant that their homes and their fields were lost, too. Many an American soldier owes his life (though from the long range point of view, not his gratitude) to the very people who heiled Hitler into power. They would stool-pigeon on those SS troops who remained behind our lines to carry out guerrilla warfare."
Bernard Baruch (1870 - 1965) was a major player in President Franklin Roosevelt's "Brain Trust"; during World War Two he served that president as a respected adviser concerning economic matters. Not long after this interview, during the Truman Administration, he was appointed to serve as the first U.S. Representative on the U.N Atomic Energy Commission.
Click here to read a 1945 article about the funeral of FDR.
"Newton Wilson, a modest, quiet, somewhat academic man who never leaps before he looks through, in and around a situation, became the 20th Century innovator of precise recipes; a sort of Fanny Farmer of flying."
Click here to read about the earliest airline stewardesses...
Here is a smattering of editorial opinions collected from numerous newspapers across the United States concerning the Japanese surrender and the close of World War II.
Four years after Pearl Harbor, the editors of the Japanese newspaper Asahi gazed out of the windows from their offices and saw the charred remains of their enemy-occupied homeland and recognized that they'd made a fatal mistake:
"We once more refresh our horror at the colossal crime committed and are filled with a solemn sense of reflection and self-reproach..."
An article about New York's Broadway theater scene during the Second World War:
"Show people will never forget the year 1944. Thousands of men and women from the legitimate theater were overseas in uniform -actors and actresses, writers, scene designers, stage hands - and all looked back in wonderment at what war had done to the business... Letters and newspapers from home told the story. On Broadway even bad shows were packing them in..."
As the Battle of the Bulge reached its conclusion and the Germans resumed their retreat, British General Bernard Law Montgomery (1887 – 1976) held a press conference in which he praised the fighting abilities and the leadership skills of all those Americans who resisted the German onslaught in the Ardennes:
"But when all is said and done, I shall always feel that Rundstedt was really beaten by the good fighting qualities of the American soldier..."
This is one of the more enjoyable reads on the site. Published during the Summer of 1945, with the war in Europe over and the Japanese capitulation only six weeks away, the Liberty editors saw fit to run an article that recalled the absolute devotion that so many USO performers displayed again and again in order to guarantee that American military personnel abroad was fully entertained and amused - no matter their proximity to the enemy.
When Tokyo heard that Nazi Germany had cried uncle and surrendered to the Allies on May 8, 1945, the Imperial Japanese spin-machine digested the news and simply decided that it was a non-event.
Articles about the daily hardships in post-war Germany can be read by clicking here.
Some seven months before Japan quit the war, the anointed heads of the Institute of Pacific Relations convened in Hot Springs, Virginia to discuss what the Allied Occupation of Japan would look like.
Click here to read about August 28, 1945 - the day the occupation began.
During the August of 1945, C.C. Beall (1892 – 1970), popular commercial illustrator of the Forties, was dispatched by Collier's to illustrate the surrender of the Imperial Japanese Empire on the decks of the battleship Missouri - and to draw-up whatever else caught his fancy on mainland Japan. Much of his account concerns his search for food and suitable lodgings.
"The Yank is not expert at deception, but he can change his plans rapidly. He is a wizard at handling machinery and he can build airfields, roads and advance bases with uncanny speed."
- so wrote one of the bewildered Japanese Army generals concerning his experiences with the American military in the Pacific.
For those of you out there who collect facts about American World War II medals, here is an article from the early post-war period involving the amount of gallantry medals that were awarded throughout the course of the U.S. involvement to U.S. Army personnel. Keep in mind that this is an immediate assessment from the fall of 1945 and that the Army would continue to distribute the decorations to the deserving G.I.s for many more years to come. The article discusses the amount of Medals of Honor that were awarded and the percentage of that number that were posthumously awarded. The number of Purple Hearts that were distributed is a topic that is not touched upon here.
During the Autumn of 1944, when the great momentum was with the Allies and the German Army was in rapid retreat, the SS newspaper Das Schwartz Korps declared that an Allied-occupied Germany would not be a placid land:
"The Allied soldiers shall find no peace. Death will lurk behind every corner. They might establish a civilian administration, but its leaders would not live a month. Nobody could execute the enemy's orders without digging his own grave. No judge could pronounce sentences dictated by the enemy without being crucified in his own window frame in the dead of night."
This article goes into great detail concerning how the SS intended to make good on these words.
"The story behind the atomic bomb is a detective story with no Sherlock Holmes for a hero. The number of scientists who took part in the search was without parallel...The dramatic story begins with Dr. Lise Meitner (1878 – 1968), a woman scientist and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. In 1938 Dr. Meitner is bombarding uranium atoms with neutrons and then submitting the uranium to chemical analysis. To her amazement..."
In the wake of the SCOTUS opinion, Korematsu v. U.S., some talk could be heard about the return of the Japanese Americans to the previous homes. This article examines the anti-Nisei attitudes in two Western states, California and Oregon. It was the conclusion that the former had become a bit more tolerant and the later a bit worse (sadly the last paragraphs, printed on brittle brown paper, withered away in our hand.)
"They're finally done in, and the rat is dead in an alley back of the the Wilhelmstrasse."
"Take a Bow, GI - take a bow, little guy."
"Far-flung ordinary men, unspectacular but free, rousing out of their habits and their homes - got up early one morning, flexed their muscles, learned the manual of arms (as amateurs) and set out across perilous oceans to whop the bejeepers out of the professionals."
It was no secret around Washington that President Franklin Roosevelt was partial to the U.S. Navy. The admirals and other senior officers of the navy certainly knew - and loved it. The attached essay was an appreciative salute to FDR composed shortly after his death by Admiral William Pratt (1869 – 1957):
"Other men, military in training and veterans of successful land campaigns, have sat in the White House, but never before in the history of our country has any man ever sat there whose instincts at heart were essentially those of a sailor."
Click here to read about FDR as Under-Secretary of the Navy.
"Hanoi is now the fountainhead of the largest and most successful anti-French insurgent movement ever mounted in Indo-China. Here Vietminh (first and last words of Viet Nam Doclap Dong Minh, meaning the league for the independence of Viet Nam) has set up the provisional government of the Viet Nam Republic. Viet Nam is the ancient name for the coastal provinces of Indo-China. Vietminh has been actively in existence since 1939. The President of Viet Nam and leader of the whole insurgent movement is a slight, graying little man of 55, named Ho Chi Minh who commanded guerrillas in collaboration with American officers in Northern Tonkin... For 43 years he has devoted himself to anti-French activity. Constantly reported captured or dead, he never actually fell into French hands."
As the American occupation forces began to pour in and spread throughout the cities and countryside of Japan, both occupied and occupier slowly get to learn of the other. The cordial attitude of the Japanese leads General MacArthur to conclude that the military presence need not be as large as he had once believed:
"Curious and awed, increasingly friendly Japanese flocked to watch what they called the 'race of giants' at work."
"...On, on, on it went into the night and the next night as the biggest city in the world went its way toward picking up the biggest hangover in its history. It was a hangover few would ever regret."
Click here if you would like to read an article about the VE Day celebrations in Europe.
Click here if you would like to read about the VE Day celebrations in the United States.
War correspondent George Burns reported on the momentous day when the American Army came to arrest the former Prime Minister of Imperial Japan, General Hideko Tojo (1884 - 1948). Tojo served as Japan's Prime Minister between 1941 and 1944 and is remembered for having ordered the attack on the American naval installation at Pearl Harbor, as well as the invasions of many other Western outposts in the Pacific. Judged as incompetent by the Emperor, he was removed from office in the summer of 1944.
"It is reported by WRA (War Relocation Authority) that between January 2 and April 22, there have been 16 shooting incidents in California. Nobody was hit. It is clearly terroristic activity aimed at frightening Nisei who have the temerity to come home and try to earn a living from their farms again".
"As well as anything else, the leadership of Sian-Kuan Lin explains why the people of China continue to wage barehanded battle against the overwhelming might of Japan. It is a story that starts in 1927 when Chang Kai-shek marched North against the war lords, fighting to make Sun Yat Sen's dream of a great Chinese republic come true."
"War and the Working Class, Moscow publication, asserts that German labor must be used to restore the destruction wrought by the German Army in Europe...In an article entitled Labor Reparations, it contends that Using German labor for this purpose will achieve effective military and economic disarmament of Germany."
Katherine Dunham (1909 - 2006) was an African-American dancer and choreographer, producer, anthropologist, author and Civil Rights activist - enjoying throughout the decades one of the most successful dance careers a dancer could ever hope for. Attached is a profusely illustrated review of her 1945 production, Tropical Revue. It implies that much of the audience came away recognizing her originality and genius - while others simply thought she was a burlesque artist.
To the American G.I.s serving along the Italian Front, the presence of rockets was like a page out of a Buck Rogers comic book. They had grown accustomed to seeing them mounted on the wings of quickly speeding American fighter aircraft, but to see and hear them up close and personal when fixed to the turret of a Sherman tank (pictured) seemed altogether too bizarre. This article, "Rockets in Italy", will allow you to learn about the use and deployment of the U.S. Army's "ground rocket-gun" and how it amazed all the men who ever came near enough to see one.
Click here to read about one of the greatest innovations by 20th Century chemists: plastic.
For reasons unknown, the men who ran the Allied war effort chose to ignore the fact that it was German Admiral Karl Doenitz who issued the order that German U-boats were to machinegun all Allied lifeboats after sinking their vessels. The attached journalist was right in pointing out that Doenitz was whitewashed. But it didn't stick - he was found guilty at Nuremburg and served 12 years.
The attached article is comprised of numerous war stories from the GIs of the 96th Infantry Division who were assigned the pleasant chore of slugging it out with the Japanese in the Leyte Valley of the Philippines.
To mark the 67th birthday of the silent film director D.W. Griffith, the editors of a once illustrious Hollywood literary magazine pasted his famous profile on their magazine cover and devoted four columns to his achievements.
This article appeared in an issue Click Magazine that was deliberately edited to aid those young men who had been wearing uniforms for the past few years and, subsequently, had no knowledge whatever of tailoring or of fabric that was not government issued. It consists of a handy guide for the aspiring dandy showing just how a gentleman's suit should fit if it is to be properly worn.
During the Summer of 1945, with the Germans licked and the Japanese on the ropes, Ford announced that their first car for the post-war market would be produced the following year. It was called the Mercury and it came in hard top and convertible (don't ask for seat belts).
PM war correspondent Victor Bernstein filed this story three weeks before VE-Day concerning a 180-mile forced march that was the lot of assorted Allied prisoner of war in Germany. Numerous interviews with the survivors of the march revealed that the Nazis lording over as many as 4,000 POWs choosing to brutalize the U.S. prisoners in much the same way they abused Poles and Soviets. British POWs seemed not to attract their ire.
Accusing one of their fellow inmates of treason ("Vaterlandsverrater"), a Nazi kangaroo court located in the POW camp in Tonkawa, Oklahoma murdered him. The U.S. Army administrators who run the camp dutifully received the body as if justice had been served, and buried it in the camp graveyard. This article explains how all this came about.
New York's Broadway theater scene during World War II:
"Show people will never forget the year 1944. Thousands of men and women from the legitimate theater were overseas in uniform -actors and actresses, writers, scene designers, stage hands - and all looked back in wonderment at what war had done to the business... Letters and newspapers from home told the story. On Broadway even bad shows were packing them in..."
Esther McCoy (1904 - 1989) was one of the few voices in Forties journalism to champion modern architecture in the city of Los Angeles. Sadly, the common thinking among too many critics and editors at the time held that "Gomorrah-Sur-la-Mer" could only to be relied upon for innovations like Cobb Salad and valet parking - but McCoy recognized that the city's dramatic quality of light and odd lunar landscape combined to create fertile ground for modern architecture. Unlike other like-minded critics and historians who discovered the city in later decades, such as Reyner Banham, McCoy came to know the Viena-trained architect Rudolph Schindler, who is the subject of this 1945 article.
War correspondents see and hear about many courageous acts that serve as a testimony to the level of personal commitment held high by many (but not all) of the American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who served in the Second World War, and when I read the opening paragraphs about this hero, I knew it was going to be unique:
"His name is Staff Sergeant Henry E. Erwin of Bessemer, Alabama. He was the radio operator on a B-29, and what he did, we think, was the bravest thing we ever heard of."
In this brief report on the National Conference of Christian and Jews, a break-down of the various cultural groups is presented along with a list of the assorted religious denominations found in America at that time. We suppose that Hispanics and Asians were excluded because their numbers were so terribly small at that time.
A member of the 34th Infantry Division wrote to the editors of YANK to let all members of the Army know how much respect he had for the Nisei soldiers in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
This report was filed shortly after the Soviet - U.S. link-up on the River Elbe and one week from the official Nazi surrender on May 8, 1945. The Red Army was in Berlin and the British and Americans were
"pressing relentlessly from all points of the compass on the Nazi Alpine redoubt. A second a third meeting between the Western and Easter Allies may have already taken place... To the south, General George S. Patton's tank columns, sweeping across the Austrian frontier, were in field radio contact with the Soviets."
Click here to read about the Soviet - U.S. link-up on the Elbe.
When General Marshall listed the numerous advantages that the U.S. Army enjoyed during the war (you can read it here), he included on his list the Willys Jeep. The Jeep and the Two and Half-Ton truck, he believed, contributed mightily to the mobility of American Forces in most theaters. The two articles attached herein go into some detail about the strengths of the Jeep, but concentrated primarily on the improvements made in the vehicle as Jeep prepared for its launch in the civilian market place.
The greatest deception deployed by the German Army during the the Ardennes Offensive was to parachute Nazi commandos into the American lines - men who had been raised in the U.S. and spoke the language well. They wore American uniforms and performed heinous acts of sabotage, and as this article spells out, lured many GIs to their deaths.
"Berliners with an ear cocked to the cold east wind could hear the drums of doom: The heavy roll of Russian artillery along the Oder River. By night, flares from Soviet planes bombing the Berlin-Frankfurt highway lit up the eastern horizon."
Attached is the sweetest conte crayon illustration ever to depict a Tiger tank is accompanied by some vital statistics and assorted observations that were recorded by the U.S. Department of War and printed in one of their manuals in March of 1945:
"This tank, originally the Pz. Kpfw. VI, first was encountered by the Russians in the last half of 1942, and by the Western Allies in Tunisia early in 1943..."
Click here to read about the German King Tiger Tank.
Click here to read a 1944 article about the Tiger Tank.
This article is illustrated with a photograph of the King Tiger tank and accompanied by some vital statistics and assorted observations that were documented by the U.S. Department of War and printed in one of their manuals in March of 1945:
"The king Tiger is a tank designed essentially for defensive warfare or for breaking through strong lines of defense. It is unsuitable for rapid maneuver and highly mobile warfare because of its great weight and and low speed...The King Tiger virtually is invulnerable to frontal attack, but the flanks, which are less well protected, can be penetrated by Allied antitank weapons at most normal combat ranges."
The American answer to the Tiger was the M26 Pershing Tank; read about it here.
If you wish to read about the only German tank of World War I, click here.
In a city prone to revelry, New Orleans had prematurely celebrated the end of World War Two on three previous occasions; not willing to go down that path a fourth time, the residents were in a state of disbelief when the news of the Japanese surrender began to circulate all over again. However, when it was understood that this time the rumor proved true everyone seemed grateful for the rehearsal time.
Printed weeks before the close of the war, the carefully controlled presses at Yank printed this two page article explaining how the Japanese army worked and who exactly was "the Japanese soldier".
Ever since the age of photography began, one of the semi-official pastimes of the American people involves taking note of the rapid facial decay of their assorted presidents while in-office - and as the collected photographic portraits of Abraham Lincoln clearly indicate, no one will be naming a skincare product after him any time soon, however, the aging process that effected his face so dramatically has been the subject of Lincoln admirer's through the years, and some are collected in the attached article.
Perhaps one of the first magazine articles about the beautiful actress Martha Vickers (1925 – 1971) who is best remembered by fans for her performance as the fabulously slutty "Carmen Sternwood" in the 1946 film The Big Sleep.
This article tells the tale of her early days in 1940s Los Angeles and her work as a photographer's model, which turned more than a few of the crowned heads of Hollywood.
"On Tuesday, August 28 (Tokyo time), the Japs got their first taste of the ignominy of surrender... The occupation forces were ordered to go ashore much as they regularly did in amphibious operations - with full combat equipment and battle dress, across beaches and onto docks. No chances were to be taken."
This is a fascinating article about the surviving Nazi big-shots as they waited for the Nuremberg trials to begin. Incarcerated at the Palace Hotel in Fromburg, Luxembourg (code named "Ashcan") this COLLIER'S MAGAZINE article explains how the camp worked and who was there (Goering, Jodl, Keitel, von Ribbentrop, Streicher, Kesserling and Grand Admiral Doenitz):
"There was no coddling or recognition of rank at Ashcan. The only entertainment was atrocity films. Recently the internees were treated to the spectacle of Buchenwald... Ribbentrop bowed his head and walked straight out to the dining room. Kesserling was white as a sheet..."
"Into the records of the Pearl Harbor investigating committee last week went a little-noticed document that added new mystery to the disaster of December 7, 1941:"
"Four months before the enemy struck, the Army and Navy air command at Pearl Harbor drew up a joint defense plan which correctly forecast the hour, the direction, the size of the force and the strategy by which the Japs actually attacked."
"The Battle of the Ardennes was practically over. The salient which once poked 52 miles into Belgium from the German frontier had been ground down to a nub by last week.... The German retreated slowly and in good order. In the sleet and fog of the Ardennes they pulled back their armor and other vehicles while their artillery and infantrymen put up stiff rearguard actions."
In Nazi occupied Paris there was a secret underground movie theater (93 Champs Elysees) operating throughout the entire four year period and it charged an excessive sum of francs to gain entry. Guess which Chaplin film was shown?
To get a sense as to how thoroughly the Japanese diplomatic codes had been compromised, we recommend that you read the attached article. It is composed entirely of the chit-chat that took place between the government functionaries in Tokyo, their diplomats in Washington, their spies in Hawaii and their representatives in Berlin.
The article winds up explaining that the one vital communication that contained the information regarding the day of Japan's attack was not translated until December 8.
An escaped Australian Private, having been rescued by a U.S. Navy submarine, recalls how life was in the hell of a Japanese jungle P.O.W. camp, where all Allied prisoners were forced to build a railroad for the Emperor:
"'I often sit and wonder what I'm doing here' reflected Pvt. James L. Boulton of Melbourne, Australia. 'By the law of averages I should have been dead two years ago, and yet here I am smoking Yank cigarettes, eating Yank food with Yank nurses taking care of me. When I was a PW in the jungles of Burma I never thought I'd survive the beatings and fevers and ulcers.'"
"...There were crowds in Piccadilly Circus and Leicester and Trafalgar Squares. Quite a few people got rid of their waste paper by throwing it out the windows, a sign that the need for saving such things for the war effort was just about over."
"In Honolulu, where the war began for the U.S., the first news of it's ending reached a sleepy-eyed Chinese-American radio technician shortly after 1200 hours (12:00 a.m.) when he had just finished making his regular weekly check on KGU's station transmitter and was ready to leave for home."
"Stand by for important news about the Potsdam ultimatum."
"Flight nurse, WACs and GIs all streamed from their barracks and joined the howling procession..."
"I have always said that there are no good Jews, but that boy proved me wrong."
-so spake the Nazi king-pin Julius Streicher (1885 – 1946) upon being confronted by the goodness of one American serviceman who went out of his way to be kind and identified himself as a Jew.
This small piece is an excerpt from a longer article; to read the entire magazine article, click here.
Julius Streicher had an IQ that measured 106 - click here to read about the IQs of the other lunatics in Nazi leadership...
Click here to read about the inmate rebellions that took place at Auschwitz, Sobibor and Triblinka.
"The Senate special committee on atomic energy had heard both pros and cons on atomic energy control. Last week it heard another kind of testimony - a terrifying eyewitness account by Dr. Philip Morrison, nuclear physicist of the Los Alamos atomic bomb laboratory, [who] spoke of the effects on Hiroshima."
The overlords of the Illinois justice system became so fed-up with the growing divorce rate in their state as a result of wives who stepped-out while their husbands were fighting overseas, and they decided to do something about it. The Illinois Attorney General proposed a plan:
"Penalties for conviction range from $500 fine or a year in jail or both for the first offense to $3,000 fine or three years in jail or both for a third conviction."
A post-game interview with Hollywood star Marlene Dietrich (1901 – 1992) concerning all the many places throughout the European Theater of Operations that she performed before Allied audiences, at times performing very close to the German front line.
Marlene Dietrich's only daughter, Maria Riva Dietrich (b. 1924), wrote that her mother, feeling a deep sense of pity and gratitude, made love to a very large number of front line soldiers.
Click here to read about the woman who entertained the U.S. troops during the First World War.
Shortly after the German exit from Paris, French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) put pen to paper in an effort to help explain what the citizens of that city were feeling throughout the German occupation of Paris:
"At first the site of them made us ill; then, little by little, we forgot to notice them, for they had become an institution. What put the finishing touches to their harmlessness was their ignorance of our language. A hundred times I've seen Parisians in cafes express themselves freely about politics two steps away from a blank looking German soldier with a lemonade glass in front of him. They seemed more like furniture than like men."
Here is a single page interview with Paul Tibbets (1915 – 2007) and the crew of the Enola Gay as they recounted their historic mission over Hiroshima during the closing days of World War Two. Paul Tibbets remained in uniform long after the war and eventually retired as an Air Force General. When he died during the fall of 2007 it was revealed that he preferred there not be a memorial service, nor any marker identifying his grave in order to deprive protesters of a staging ground. His ashes were sprinkled over the North Atlantic.
This is a fascinating read. The writer, Sergeant Joe McCarthy (no relation), was very observant on matters involving the behavior of the natives when in the presence of Americans, their attire and demeanor; the accuracy of the bomb damage and the food available. A conversation is recalled that took place between the author and an English-speaking newspaperman in which details about Japanese life during wartime prove revealing.
"Nobody here wants to have much to do with us. It looks as if there will be no fraternization problem in Japan."
Click here to read additional articles about the post-war world.
"The tremendous military advantage of this terrifying weapon fell to us through a combination of good luck, good management and prodigious effort. The harnessing of atomic power should give Americans confidence in their destiny..."
Click here to read more magazine articles about the Atomic Bomb.
Click here to read one of the fist opinion pieces condemning the use of the Atomic Bomb.
General Marshall recalled the decisions made concerning how many American men would be drafted and in what branches of service they would be needed. He recalled the number of divisions each Allied nation raised and how many divisions the Germans and Japanese put in the field. The article also remembers that two thirds of the German Army was deployed along the Eastern front and he wondered what might the Americans have done had Germany defeated the Reds.
"It is remarkable how exactly the mobilization plan fitted the requirements for victory. When Admiral Doenitz surrendered the German Government, every American division was in operational theaters."
"Here is the first inside story of South America's leading arms producer, Fritz Mandl (1900 – 1977), who 'fled' from Austria with $60,000,000. On the U.S. black list, he has been called 'one of the most dangerous men in the world'".
Here is a printable list of chronological events and battles that took place in the Pacific Theater between December 7, 1941 through May 3, 1945. Please keep in mind that this is only a partial list, the YANK editors who compiled the chronology had no foreknowledge of the U.S. assaults on Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Click here to read an interview with a Kamikaze pilot.
A short column filed by an eye-witness in Manila who described well the profound sense of melancholy that descended upon the W.W. II Japanese prisoners of war when they had learned of the Japanese surrender.
Click here if you would like to read an article about the Japanese surrender proceedings in Tokyo Bay.
Click here to read more articles about the liberation of Paris in 1944.
Although the press questioned U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson (1867 - 1950) as to why the Selective Service Department had been ordered to call-up an additional 100,000 men when it was agreed that the U.S. military was already "over strengthened" with the full participation of 7,700,000 personnel currently under arms, Stimson made it clear in this notice from the Far East Edition of YANK, that he had his reasons - and this article lists a number of them.
After four hard years of watching sappy Hollywood drivel about the war and the home front, the censorship machine was finally dismantled - which allowed the servicemen to speak their minds about what they REALLY thought about those movies...
Lloyd Cortez Hawks (1911 - 1953) was a U.S. Army private and a recipient of the United States military's highest decoration for valor — the Congressional Medal of Honor. Hawks performed his celebrated acts of derring-do while serving as a medic attached to the 30th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Division outside of Carano, Italy.
"Nobody has been able to figure out to anyone's satisfaction why Sinatra has the effect he has on his Bobby Sox fans. One of his secretaries, a cute dish whose husband is serving overseas, said: 'The doctors say it's just because he's got a very sexy voice, but I've been with him a year now and his voice doesn't do a thing to me'."
The last eight months of the home front saw the suspension of all horse racing (in the interest of preserving tires and gas) and more foods, both delicious and otherwise, became a good deal harder to locate.
Those sly dogs at Script Magazine! They printed the smiling mug of the twenty-five-year-old Angela Lansbury (1925 - 2022) on the cover of their rag, briefly praising her for being the youngest performer to have ever been nominated for an Academy Award (she soon won the 1944 Best Supporting Actress statue for Gaslight), and ran a "profile" of the lass on a page eight article that was misleadingly titled "Our Cover Girl", only to devote 85% of the columns to her socialist uncle.
With the fall of imperial Japan, Yank correspondent Robert MacMillan was one of the very first journalists to interview the Japanese Kamikaze pilot Norio Okamoto, which allowed his readers to gain some understanding as to how the Kamikaze Corps operated:
"Okomoto's story took all the wind - the Divine Wind - out of the Kamikaze sails. Even the interpreter, a Japanese civilian, was surprised. He had worked for radio Tokyo and while he knew a lot of the propaganda stories were ridiculous, he had believed the Kamikaze legend."
The philatelists in our audience know well the G.I. stamps issued by the U.S. Post Office in 1945; what they may not know are some of the stories that lay behind them (some stories are sad and some are merely pathetic).
The Hobo News printed poems, cartoons, pin-ups, essays and news items that were useful to that unique class of men who rode the rails and frequent flop-houses. It was established in New York City by Pat "The Roaming Dreamer" Mulkern (1903 - 1948); the paper was run by hobos, for hobos and printed proudly across the awnings of their assorted offices were the words "a little cheer to match the sorrow". Mulkern recognized that no self-respecting litigator would ever stoop to sue a newspaper with such a pathetic name, and so the paper was voluntarily in constant violation of U.S. copyright law by habitually printing the articles they most admired that had earlier appeared in Collier's, The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post.
Even though the war had ended some four months earlier, the American people were still receiving envelopes from the Department of War about the deaths and maimings of their sons when this article appeared.
These columns reported that peacetime took some getting used to, but day by day, the nation was slowly swinging into its post-war stride.
The attached article tells the story of the first Americans to cross the Rhine river into Germany following the capture of the Ludendorf Bridge at Remagen, Germany.
"One of the most striking incidents of the first day's action on the bridge was the way German snipers opened up on their own men who had been taken prisoners. As each batch of PWs was lead across the bridge, a storm of sniper fire from the surrounding hills swept its ranks. Several were killed."
Pictured on page two is a photograph of the first American to make it across: Sgt. Alexander A. Drabik (1910 - 1993) of the 27th Armored Infantry Division.
Click here to read about a popular all-girl band that performed with the USO.
This Yank Magazine article, written just after the Channel Islands liberation, tells some of the stories of the Nazi occupation of Jersey and Guernsey Islands.
"Before the war the English Channel Islands - long known as a vacation spot for the wealthy - were wonderful places to 'get away from it all.'"
"Then the Germans came to the islands after Dunkirk, and for five years 100,000 subjects of his majesty the King were governed by 30,000 Nazi officers and their men."
As a result of the generous "proxy-marriage" laws allowed by the citizens of Kansas City, Kansas, many young women, feeling the urge to marry their beaus residing so far afield as a result of the Second World War, would board buses and trains and head to that far-distant burg with one name on their lips: Finnegan. This is the story of Mr. Thomas H. Finnegan, a successful lawyer back in the day who saw fit to do his patriotic duty by standing-in for all those G.I.s who were unable to attend their own weddings.
It was the practice of the German military to separate American Jewish soldiers from their fellows and transfer them to concentration camps for execution. The corpse of one of these men was found at the Nazi concentration camp in Ohrdruf, Germany.
Click here to read about the malnourishment and starvation of Allied prisoners of war...
"The coming winter will be an extremely trying one for our occupation troops. If present conditions continue, there is certain to be starvation in Germany."
"In South China, 6,000 French troops stood ready to reenter French Indo-China. A portion of the French fleet and a French air force unit prepared to back them up."
An anonymous reporter relays all that came across his desk in the way of wild victory celebrations on VJ Day. Spread out over 14 paragraphs are eyewitness accounts of the pandemonium that spread across the nation when the news arrived that the war was over.
Attached is Martha Gellhorn's (1908 – 1998) very disturbing eyewitness account of the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau, Poland:
"Nothing about war was ever as insanely wicked as these starved and outraged naked, nameless dead. Behind one pile of dead lay the clothed healthy bodies of the German guards who had been found in this camp. They were killed at once by the prisoners when the American Army entered."
The man primarily responsible for delivering the innocent into the ovens of the death camps was Obergrupenfuehrer Albert Ganzenmüller click here to read about him...
Although the attached cartoon illustrations from "Volkischer Beobacher" depicts a German soldier using a Panzerfaust anti-tank weapon, the intended readership was actually the old men and under-age boys who made up the out-gunned and under-manned Volkssturm militia units at the close of the war. The panzerfaust ("tank fist") has been characterized as the first expendable anti-tank RPG. Also included in this file is the U.S. Army study concerning this weapon.
Here are the observations of Patrick Gordon Walker (1907 - 1980), a broadcast journalist with the BBC who was present with the British Army when they liberated the Bergen-Belsen Death Camp on April 15, 1945.
"Men were hung for hours at a time, suspended by their arms, hands tied behind their back in Belsen. Beatings in workshops were continuous, and there were many deaths there. Just before I left the camp, a crematorium was discovered."
A quick read, which begins with the story of how the British Army of occupation in Germany managed to detain and identify Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler (1900 – 1945) when he was disguised in the Wehrmacht uniform of a sergeant. The remaining paragraphs are devoted to instructing the reader as to how similar ploys could be managed to identify other German war crimes suspects when they are in captivity.
A report from the trials that were held in late August, 1945, in order to prosecute those Allied POWs who collaborated with their Nazi captors. The four who were discussed in this column were all Canadians.
"German prisoners of war are not coddled at the Fort Dix camp. The PWs are not mistreated, but neither is any kindness shown them. The officers supervising them are not cruel or lenient; they adhere strictly to the letter of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners."
PM reporter Jack Shafer knew all this to have been true, because he went to Fort Dix and saw for himself.
When the flaks had all said their bit and the Japanese and Germans had all signed on the dotted line, Yank Magazine did what everybody else was doing - they demobilized. When the magazine published their last issue numerous magazine and newspaper editors were pretty choked-up about it and they wrote columns about how sad they all were to see it go; this one appeared in another U.S. Army rag.
An eyewitness account of all the excitement that was V.E. Day in Paris:
"On the Champs Elysees they were singing 'It's a Long Wat to Tipperary,' and it was a long way even the few blocks from Fouquet's restaurant to the Arc de Triomphe if you tried to walk up the Champs on V-E Day in Paris. From one side of the broad and beautiful avenue to the other, all the way to the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe in the Place de l'Etoile, there was hardly any place to breathe and no place at all to move. That was the way it was in the Place l'Opera and the Place de la Republique and all the other famous spots and in a lot of obscure little side streets that nobody but Parisians know."
Attached is a 1945 article written for the many homesick GIs who wondered what musical treats they were missing in their absence. All the great performers are cataloged as well as a list of many of the most popular home front hits from the top forty.
"Popular music back home hasn't changed much. The same familiar bands play the new hit tunes."
Would you like to read a 1941 article about Boogie-Woogie?
A printable one page article that expounds on the evolution of the P-47 Thunderbolt through varying stages of development into the fuel-efficient juggernaut called the P-47N. Remembered in the World War II annals as the dependable escort of the B-29 Super fortresses that bedeviled the axis capitals during the closing months of the war.
"No sacrifice was made in ammunition, guns or protective armor to provide the P-47N with this long range. It still carries eight 50.-caliber guns, four in each wing. It also can carry 10 five-inch rockets which pack the destructive power of five-inch artillery or naval shells."
"The Red Army has Berlin. The once fat, strong heart of German power, now a wreck, was taken in 12 days of [the] bloodiest battle by the overwhelming might of Marshals Zhukov and Konev. The surrender of the remnants of the Nazis in the ruins of the Chancellery where Hitler is said to have his end, and the smashed-up Tiergarten turned a page in history>"
By the end of 1944 the P.o.W. population within the U.S. stood somewhere in the neighborhood of 340,000 and was growing at a rate between 25,000 to 30,000 each month. The vast majority of them (300,000) were from the German Army and 51,000 were Italians:
"There are reports that these prisoners often are pampered, that they are getting cigarettes when American civilians cannot get them, that they are being served in their camps by American soldiers, that they are often not working at a time when war workers are scarce. The general complaint is that the 46,000 American prisoners in Germany are not faring as well as 3000,000 Germans in this country."
"In a land where white is the color of mourning and black is the color of ceremony, where newspapers are read from right to left, this may have been a logical strategy. It was annunciated last week by the head of the Japanese government, Premiere Kantaro Suzuki... The upside-down Japanese mind could make the cost of conquest terribly expensive in American lives."
The war was over when the U.S. Army Ordnance Department began snooping around all the assorted ÜBER-secret weapons labs and work shops where the pointiest headed Nazis were developing some truly far-seeing weaponry, inventions that they were never able to perfect (thankfully).
One of the most striking aspects of the attached article is the part when you recognize that it was the Nazi scientists who first conceived of such space-based weaponry as the "Star Wars" technology that was ushered in during the Reagan presidency (i.e.: the "Strategic Defense Initiative"). While in pursuit of their nefarious tasks, these same scientists also conceived of harnessing the powers of the sun in order to advance Hitler's queer vision of the perfect world.
Click here to read about the firm belief held by the German Army concerning the use of motorcycles in modern war.
Appearing in various magazines and newspapers on the 1945 home front were articles and interviews with assorted "experts" who predicted that the demobilized military men would be a burden on society. They cautioned families to be ready for these crushed and broken men, who had seen so much violence and had inflicted the same upon others, would be maladjusted and likely to drift into crime. In response to this blarney stepped Frances Langford (1913 – 2005), the American singer. She wrote in the attached article that she had come to know thousands of soldiers, sailors airmen and Marines during the course of her tours with the USO and that the nation could only benefit from their return.
In our day, the significance of the 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima is often dismissed as a campaign that should never have been waged; be that as it may, the following attachment is the U.S. Government explanation as to why the invasion of Iwo Jima was an essential part of the American strategy to invade Japan. Although you won't find the information in this particular YANK article, the Marine and Army units that were to play leading rolls in the Japanese invasion were already selected and were at this point in training for the grim task before them (had it not been for the deployment of the Atomic Bombs, which hastened an end to the hostilities and saved hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides).
A one and a half page study on the training of the W.W. II German soldier - the soldier's oath and the rigorous system of discipline that he had to adhere to. Also discussed is the German salute ("Heil..."), and the German Army's understanding of soldierly duty.
Also discussed the German Army's alternate pledge penned especially for atheists.
"The man who saved France in 1916 was condemned to die for nearly destroying France at Vichy in 1940, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by General Charles de Gaulle."
"Pétain was the twelfth marshal of France to be condemned by a French court since 1440. Eight of them were executed."
The attached article is about the controversial Cuban President Ramón Grau San Martin (1887 - 1969) and his struggle with the radical elements within Cuba. This COLLIER'S MAGAZINE piece will give you an understanding that the roots of communism on that Caribbean island have a longer history than you might have supposed; when it first appeared on the newsstands in 1945, Fidel Castro (1926 - 1916) was a still a law student.
In 2011 Castro confessed in an interview with an American reporter that the "Cuban model" [of Communism] had not been successful.
Nine Americans recalled witnessing the deliberate torture and killing of American prisoners of war by their Japanese captors on the Pacific island of Palawan.
"The American began begging to be shot and not burned. He screamed in such a high voice I could hear him. Then I could see the Jap pour gasoline on one of his feet and burn it, and then the other. He collapsed..."
An eyewitness account accompanied by a wonderful Howard Brodie sketch describing the enthusiastic rush enjoyed by all the wounded GIs in the dayroom at the 108th General Hospital in London:
"The war was over, and I was still alive. And I thought of all the boys in the 28th Division band who were with me in the Ardennes who are dead now."
Click here to read a short notice about how Imperial Japan took the news of Germany's surrender.
"After years of material shortage, the accent is definitely on the feminine, with all of its flounces... A look at all the collections shows that black is the outstanding color for afternoon and dinner. Drapings, wrappings and swathings that girdle the hips are the outstanding line. The favored fabrics are velvet , velveteen, corduroy (used horizontally, as are other striped materials) monotone tweeds, Kashas (a twill-weave fabric of wool mixed with Cashmere), and some Scotch plaids."
As far as we know, this 1945 page from YANK was the first article to tell the tale of the incredible Herbert Zipper (1904 - 1997); a story that began in Austria during the Anschluss (1938), carried on through two German concentration camps (Dachau and Buchenwald), continued through to Paris, Manila, and an Imperial Japanese detention center after which the story concludes with Dr. Zipper happily conducting his orchestra in a post-war concert before the victorious American Army.
This story was told in the highly celebrated 1995 documentary film, "Never Give Up: The 20th-Century Odyssey of Herbert Zipper" (American Film Foundation Production). This is a good read; it is a remarkable World War Two story about a rebellious soul with a lot of guts.
This YANK reporter, Sergeant Barrett McGurn, was amused by the seemingly aloof Arthur E. Dubois, who at the time was serving as Chief of the Heraldic Section, U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps in Washington, D.C. During his tenure in this office, DuBois had much to do with the design of American military insignia, medals and decorations. He was one of the designers involved in the creation of the Distinguished Flying Cross (1927) as well as the campaign ribbons that support both the Good Conduct Medal (1941) and the American Defense Service Medal (1942). Throughout much of the late twenties and thirties he was involved in some of the design of numerous uniform insignia for both officers and enlisted men, as William K. Emmerson makes clear in his book, Encyclopedia of United States Army Insignia and Uniforms
.
An article by the W.W. II war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (1908 - 1998) who rode with the crew of a P-61C Black Widow Night Fighter one evening as they made their rounds over what remained of Hitler's Germany:
"Collier's girl correspondent sat on a wobbly crate and flew over Germany looking for enemy planes at night. Her nose ran, her oxygen mask slipped off, her stomach got mad, she was scared and she froze. They didn't down any Germans, but otherwise that's routine for the Black Widow pilots."
Click here to read additional articles about the war correspondents of the Second World War.
Click here to read Martha Gellhorn's article about what she saw at Dachau.
Click here to read about the 1943 bombing campaign against Germany.
"American troops in Germany last week hit the Nazi death camp belt, an area that revealed such horrors - the bodies of thousands of Allied prisoners shot, starved, beaten and burned to death - that even the cynics of the civilized world now could not fail to be convinced of the truth of German atrocities."
"Reich Marshall Hermann Goering, No. 2 Nazi, wanted by civilization as directly responsible for the torture and death of millions innocent men, women and children, is well and not unhappy...Goering seemed delighted with his captivity and appeared unaware that he may be tried as a major war criminal."
"One of the most familiar human sounds in any Central Pacific operation is a rasping, oath-throwing voice with a rich Scandinavian accent which booms out over the loudspeaker on the invasion beaches. The voice threatens, gives orders with no reservations, pleads and intimidates. It is the voice of a Navy captain, Carl E. (Squeaky) Anderson, the force, or senior, beachmaster - the man who unloads the ships and keeps the supplies (all 64,000 tons) rolling in."
"Iwo Jima, he says, is the worst beach he's ever had anything to do with."
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875 - 1961) had much to say as to how the German people could come to terms with all the dreadful acts that were committed in their name during the previous 12 years.
"[The German] will try frantically to rehabilitate himself in the face of the world's accusations and hate - but that is not the right way. The only right way is his unconditional acknowledgement of guilt... German penitence must come from within."
"Although the the Pershing M26 didn't get into the fighting in Europe until very late in the game (March, 1945), it was long enough to prove itself. This new 43-toner is the Ordnance Department's answer to the heavier German Tiger. It mounts a 90-mm high-velocity gun, equipped with a muzzle-brake, as opposed to the 88-mm on a Tiger."
The M26 Pershing tank was the one featured in the movie, Fury (2014).
In light of the fact that all Army personnel would be issued $300 with their honorable discharge papers, the fashion editor for Esquire Magazine, Henry Jackson, decided to moonlight at Collier's in order to provide some solid fashion-tips on how best to spend that hard-earned cash.
Here is an account by a war correspondent who was a part of the Allied advance through Germany. He filed this chilling report about the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Nordhausen:
"No one who saw the charnel house of Nordhausen ever will be able to forget the details of that horrible scene... The Yanks stood there stunned and silent,"
Here are a few fast facts about the African-Americans who served in the U.S. Army during the Second World War (it should be noted that the record keeping in 1945 was not nearly as accurate as they had hoped; the number of Black servicemen and women was way off compared to what is known today. Pentagon figures today number W.W. II African-American service at 1.2 million).
Those councilors who advised FDR on all matters African-American were popularly known as "the Black Brain Trust"...
"The German soldier is one of several different types depending on whether he is a veteran of 4 or 5 years, or a new recruit. The veteran of many fronts and many retreats is a prematurely aged, war weary cynic, either discouraged and disillusioned or too stupefied to have any thought of his own...The new recruit, except in some crack SS units, is either too young or too old and often in poor health."
"...you think it's easy for a guy my age not to be in the Army? You think I'm having a good time? Every place I go people spit on me..."
So spake one of the 4-F men interviewed for this magazine article when asked what it was like to be a twenty-year-old excused from military service during World War Two. This article makes clear the resentment experienced at the deepest levels by all other manner of men forced to soldier-on in uniform; and so Yank had one of their writers stand on a street corner to ask the "slackers" what it was like to wear "civies" during wartime.
Read about the 4-F guy who creamed three obnoxious GIs. Click here to read an article about a World War Two draft board.
This column concerns Jackie Robinson's non-professional days in sports; his football seasons at Pasadena Junior College, basketball at UCLA and the Kansas City Monarchs. Being an Army publication, the reporter touched upon Robinson's brief period as a junior officer in the 761st Tank Battalion.
"Boston's peace celebration exploded suddenly after the official news of Japanese surrender poured out of the countless radios. All morning and afternoon while many other cities were already wildly celebrating, the Hub, with true New England caution, waited soberly for confirmation."
"But the staid attitude was swept away...The most general impulse seemed to be to shout, sing and hug passers-by. For men in uniform the celebration seemed to be more of a kissing fest than anything else..."
A well illustrated magazine article which relays the tale of two Marines who were captured at the fall of Corregidor in 1941 and spent the remainder of the war in a Japanese prisoner of war camp on the island of Honshu, Japan. The two men told Yank correspondent Bill Lindau all about their various hardships and the atrocities they witnessed as well as the manner in which their lot improved when their guards were told that Japan had surrendered.
Click here to read an article about the American POW experience during the Korean War.
Click here if you would like to read about a World War One German P.O.W. camp.
This 1945 article by George Creel reported on the brave and selfless acts of Robert D. Maxwell (1920 - 2019):
"COURAGE, like everything else, has its kinds of degrees. No one would detract a hair's weight from the bravery of the firing line, but in battle there is the heartening touch of a comrade's shoulder, the excitement of the charge, and the 50-50 chance of coming out alive. All these aids are lacking in those epic instances where men make death a deliberate choice...one example that stands out for sheer drama and sustained fortitude is that of Technician Fifth Grade Robert D. Maxwell, who covered a German hand grenade with his body, smothering the explosion that would have killed every member of his group."
Maxwell survived his wounds; seven months later he was awarded the Medal of Honor for his courage. He currently reside in Oregon.
The attached 1945 article from Collier's by George Creel (1876 – 1953) was one of the very first pieces of wartime journalism to report on the Nazi atrocities committed in the forest of Babi Yar, just outside Kiev, Ukraine. Under the command of Reichskomissar Erich Koch (1896 – 1986) 33,000 Ukrainian Jews were slaughtered by German soldiers over a five day period during the month of September, 1941; this brief article tells the tale of Ukrainian partisan Yefim Vilkis, who resisted the Nazi occupation and witnessed the massacre.
"Europe's displaced Jews in camps in Germany do not wish to return to their own countries, said Dr. Israel Goldstein of the American Jewish Conference, at a press conference yesterday."
"'Seventy-five to 90 percent make Palestine their first choice,' he declared."
A U.S. Government study regarding the conscription policies of the German Army during World War II. Attention is paid to the development of this policy from it's earliest days in 1935, when the draft was introduced, to the "total mobilization" scheme that followed the battle of Stalingrad.
Click here to read about the German concept of Blitzkrieg.
Some four months after VJ-Day U.S. Fleet Admiral Ernest King (1878 – 1956) gave a post-game summary of the Navy's performance in his third and final report for the Department of War:
• Biggest factor in this victory was the perfection of amphibious landings
• Hardest Pacific battle: Okinawa invasion
• American subs sank at least 275 warships of all types
• Of the 323 Japanese warships lost, the U.S. Navy claimed 257 (figure disputed by Army Air Corps)
Two black and white photographs of the World War II German M.G. 34 (maschinengewehr 34) as well as some fast-stats that were collected by President Roosevelt's Department of War during the closing days of the conflict.
This was an unusual article for Yank to run with but it is a wonderful read nonetheless. The column concerns fashion as a reliable barometer of societal direction and starts out with a quote from Basil Liddell-Hart (1895 – 1970) on this issue. The writer then goes to the author and all-around fashion philosopher, Elizabeth Hawes (1903 - 1971) who proceeded to speak thoughtfully on the topic of fashion in wartime. Hawes remarked that the clothing of the leaders can be read as an indicator of forthcoming events.
CLICK HERE to read about the beautiful "Blonde Battalions" who spied for the Nazis...
We have no idea who Tom O'Reilly was - beyond what can be immediately conjectured, that he was a staff columnist with PM, and so admired that they thought it a grand idea to clean him up and send him off to see Nazi Germany in its death throes. O'Reilly had a very candid, off-the-cuff manner of writing, which came across as quite humorous when he explains how unimpressed he was with General Patton's dramatic appearance.
Remarkable for lacking bravado and deeds of cunning daring-do, this is a war story about two hapless GIs of the 84th Division who got themselves captured and, do to a heavy U.S. artillery barrage (that served as a backdrop throughout much of the story), were able to escape and allude further incarceration. The German officers who (briefly) lorded over these men are beautifully painted as dunderheads that will surely amuse. Wandering in a southerly direction through the frost of Belgium, they make it back to their outfits in time for a New Year's Day supper.
Click here if you would like to read about a World War One German P.O.W. camp.
This was more than likely the very first mainstream magazine article to address the vital contributions that the Office of Strategic Service made in beating the Axis powers. It appeared on the newsstands just about six weeks after the end of the Second World War and lists various key operations and triumphs that had heretofore been secret.
A four page article regarding the city of Brooklyn, New York during the Second World War - make no mistake about it: this is the Brooklyn that Senator Bernie Sanders inherited - it isn't far from the N.Y. borough named Queens, where numerous Communists resided.
• Almost half the penicillin that was produced in the United States came out of Brooklyn
• Forty Five percent of of the Brooklyn war plants were awarded the Army and Navy "E" or the "M" from the Maritime Services
• Throughout the war, the ranks of the U.S. Armed Services were swollen with Brooklyn sons and daughters, 280,000 strong.
Click here to read an article about one of New York's greatest mayors: Fiorello LaGuardia.
General Marshall listed a number of clear advantages that the American G.I. had over his German and Japanese counterpart: the M-1 Garand semi-automatic rifle, the jeep and the two-and-a-half ton truck ("Deuce and a half"):
"It is interesting to trace the planning and decisions that gave us the Garand rifle and the tremendous small arms fire-power that went with it, noting especially that the War Department was strenuously opposed."
Written by war correspondent Walter Davenport some thirteen months prior to taking the helm as editor-in-chief at Collier's Magazine, this article gives the reader a sense as to what D-plus-one looked like from the fifty yard line at the Battle of Iwo Jima (Operation Detachment: February 19 – March 26, 1945):
"There is no Jap navy here to stop us; no Jap air force, either... So you see Jap? On our way up here to Iwo we flew over more supply ships, more cargo carriers. Those decks carry concrete mixers, Diesel-powered road crushers and rollers. There aren't many cliffs on Iwo to hide out in, Jap! You can't live for weeks in the crevices of Suribachi. You can't grow gardens on that rock. So, while you can still see, look down at what we're seeing: An American city, a harsh, womanless city is moving in on you."
Davenport's observations were no doubt a comfort to the Collier's readers on the home front, but post-war accounting revealed that one quarter of the U.S. Navy's losses took place at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Click here to read a unique story about the Battle of the Sula Straits...
"Neither the prosecution nor the defense wanted Henri Philippe Petain's oily accomplice to testify in the trial of the old marshal. Both sides feared his slanderous tongue and his slimy skill for wriggling out of blame.
The American magazines and newspapers of late April and early May, 1945, were all about the end of the German Army and now its time to clobber the Japanese. The attached article, from May 6, addressed the subject that this would not be an easy task. If the Atom Bomb hadn't come along, the Pentagon believed the war would have gone on for another two or three years, and the Japanese were determined to fight until the end:
"The influential Tokyo paper Sangyo Kezei said editorially on April 30: 'Japan will fight on regardless of any sudden changes in Europe.'"
Here are two Yank Magazine articles from the same issue that report on the all-black combat units that fought the Germans on two fronts in Europe: one organization fought with the Seventh Army in France and Germany, the other fought with the Fifth Army through Italy:
"Hitler would have a hemorrhage if he could see the white boys of the 411th Infantry bull-sessioning, going out on mixed patrols, sleeping in the same bombed buildings, sweating out the same chow lines with the Negro GIs."
Click here to read about the African-American efforts during the First World War.
As if Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Nordhausen and Bergen-Belsen weren't bad enough - in late April, 1945, advancing Soviet infantry reported that:
"The Red Army had found a concentration camp for children at Konstantinov, beyond Lodz in central Poland...There were 862 children in the camp, all Russian, White Russian and Ukrainian."
An irate editorial concerning the 1945 trial of French General Henri Philippe Pétain (1856 – 1951).
"Whoever is managing the current spectacle in Paris desires us to think that the Petain trial is a revolutionary trial. The thesis is that the whole French nation has risen against the politicians who did not prepare for the war, against the Marshal who signed the the armistice, collaborated with the Germans and betrayed France. And so that trial is not a search for truth, it is a public exposure of truth, it is a simple demonstration...Look at them: Daladier, Reynaud, Weygrand - how they fight each one against the other. Because it is not just Petain who is guilty. It is Petain's trial. But it is also the trial of all the witnesses... Everyone is guilty."
If you've been looking for a manifesto that would serve as a document of intention for the entire mass of Americans who make up "the Greatest Generation", you might have found it.
While the other articles on VJ-Day on this site illustrate well the pure joy and delight that was experienced by so many that day, this editorial cautions the G.I. readers to remember all that they have learned from the war while laying the groundwork for the policy that would check Soviet expansion all over the globe.
"Men slept on their rifles to keep them from freezing. On bitter mornings they urinated down the barrels of automatic weapons to thaw them out... Some Yanks cut holes in their sleeping bags, wearing them underneath their overcoats and knee-length snow capes while sleeping and fighting."
In 1944, Karl Jay Shapiro (1913 – 2000) was pulling in the big-bucks as a U.S. Army Private stationed in New Guinea, but unlike most of the khaki-clad Joes in at least a ten mile radius, Shapiro had two volumes of poetry under his belt (Person Place and Thing and "Place of Love") in addition to the memory of having been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In this short interview, he explains what a poet's concerns should be and offers some fine tips for younger poets to bare in mind.
A year latter, while he was still in uniform, Shapiro would be awarded the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for poetry
The article posted herein lists the aleged crimes of General Tomoyuki Yamishita (1885 - 1946) of the Imperial Japanese Army. The article also states the results of his sentencing, death by hanging. Two weeks after the trial he received a stay of execution by the United States Supreme Court. He was finally hanged on February 23, 1946.
During the Spring of 1946, the Japanese general behind the Bataan Death March was tried and executed, you can read about that here.
"In two full-dress interviews in Paris and Washington, General Dwight D. Eisenhower talked about some of the high spots of the campaign for Europe and about certain post-VE-Day questions. It's been generally agreed that the interviews were pretty historic. Here are highlights of the general's talks to the press in the two Allied capitals..."
Clike here to read about General Eisenhower and the German surrender.
This chronicle on the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald was written by the senior American officers of the Displaced Persons Division, U.S. Group Control Council for the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces of the U.S. Department of War. It explains when and why the "camp" was created, who it was intended to incarcerate and how many.
Not too long after the close of the war, exiled German author Thomas Mann (1875 – 1955) was invited to return to Germany. Walter von Molo, a German writer, who during the Nazi regime remained and worked in Germany, sent the invitation to Mann as an "Open Letter" in the name of German intellectuals. Attached an excerpt of the writer's response.
Luftwaffe Diva Hanna Reitsch (1912 – 1979) sitting under the bright lights of her interrogators cursed the name of Hermann Goring who rejected her plan to fly bomb-laden aircraft into the hulls of the Allied
ships sitting off the Normandy coast on June 6, 1944.
Merchant Marine William T. Mitchell, having been locked-up for three and half years in a Japanese POW camp, recalled those terrible days intermittently as he explains what it was like to return to a changed America. One of the amusing stories concerned a time when his captors assembled the camp to announce [falsely] that movie stars Judy Garland and Deanna Durbin had been killed:
"The Nips had lied to us, and I fell for it. You believe anything - almost - when you're cut off from your home."
"The first Marine waves that stormed ashore on Iwo Jima included a stalwart young sergeant who stood out as a leader even in that picked group. Handsome, dark-haired, and purposeful, he strode through the surf seemingly oblivious to the enemy's artillery fire. His eyes focused inland on a spot suitable for his machine-gun platoon... Suddenly, a Jap shell screamed. The sergeant fell. John Basilone, first enlisted Marine in this war to win the Congressional Medal of Honor, was dead."
Who knows, perhaps the author of Bad Day at Black Rock, Howard Breslin, had read this striking bit of fiction from YANK MAGAZINE and felt such a deep sense of social injustice that it inspired him to write his novel about anti-Isei mob violence. Either way, this very moving, two column piece is a fictional account about the pathetic homecoming experienced by a member of the Nesei packed 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
It was written by YANK MAGAZINE's Len Zinberg (1911-1968; a.k.a. Ed Lacy, a.k.a. Steve April); by that time, Zinberg was already an experienced writer with impressive credits and the magazine was lucky to have him. His writings at YANK helped to open the door at THE NEW YORKER, where much of his work was to be seen following the end of hostilities.
A 1945 Collier's Magazine article about Yvonne De Carlo (a.k.a. Lilly Munster: 1922 – 2007) that appeared shortly after her first big break in Hollywood, Salome, Where She Danced. At the time of this interview the actress had well-over fifteen minor films on her resume but the journalist chose to claim that Salome was her first, just for the unbelievable glamor of it all; he also chose to shave three years off her age.
"Yvonne De Carlo was born twenty years ago in Vancouver, British Columbia...She was a featured dancer at Earl Caroll's and earned the undying respect of the producer by tipping the scales at a svelte 115 pounds, standing on the runway at a mere 5 feet four inches, and by displaying an 11 -/2 -inch neck, a 36 bust, a 24 waist, 32 hips a 7 1/2 -inch ankle, and 15 2/3 -inch wrist."
When World War Two finally reached it's end, the small, quiet and usually well-behaved city of Washington, D.C. gave a big sigh of relief, forgot about "Robert's Rules of Order" for the day and shrieked with joy:
"One officer, standing in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House, waved a fifth of Rye at arms length, repeatedly inviting passers-by to "have a drink on the European Theater of Operations."
Click here if you would like to read an article about 1940s fabric rationing and the home front fashions.
Here is an interview with the American P.O.W.s who were strong enough to survive the abuses at the Japanese Prison Camp at Cabanatuan (Luzon, Philippines).These men were the survivors of the infamous Bataan Death March:
"You were on the Death March?" somebody asked him.
"Is that what they call it?...Yes, we walked to Capas, about 65 miles. Three days and three nights without food, only such water as we could sneak out of the ditches. We were loaded into steel boxcars at Campas, 100 men to a car - they jammed us in with rifle butts..."
The rescue of these men by the 6th Ranger Battalion (U.S. Army) was dramatized in a 2005 television production titled "The Great Raid".
Click here if you would like to read more about the 6th Rangers and the liberation of the Cabanatuan P.O.W. camp.
A review of the Stuart Davis (1892 – 1964) retrospective that opened at New York's Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 1945. The artist referred to his influences:
"In my own case I have enjoyed the dynamic American scene for many years, and all my pictures (including the ones I painted in Paris) are referential to it. They all have their originating impulse in the impact of [the]contemporary American environment."
Writing about the bitter fighting on Okinawa some years after the war, Marine veteran Eugene Sledge remarked that he and his comrades had been reduced to "Twentieth Century savages". Much of what he said is confirmed in the attached Yank article from 1945 that clearly illustrated the terror that was experienced by G.I.s and Marines on that island after the sun went down.
This is a three page article concerning the city of New York from Yank's on-going series, "Home Towns in Wartime".
The Yank correspondent, Sanderson Vanderbilt, characterized Gotham as being "overcrowded" (in 1945 the population was believed to be 1,902,000; as opposed to the number today: 8,143,197) and I'm sure we can all assume that today's New Yorkers tend to feel that their fore-bearers did not know the meaning of the word.
New York was the home base of Yank Magazine and this article presents a young man's view of that town and the differences that he can recall when he remembers it's pre-war glory (Sanderson tended to feel that the city looked a bit "down-at-the-heel").
"The Manhattan Project" was the code name given to the allied effort to develop the Atomic Bomb during World War Two. The research and development spanned the years 1942 through 1946 and the participating nations behind the effort were the Unites States, Great Britain and Canada. Within the United States, there were as many as three locations where the Manhattan Project was carried out however this article concerns the goings-on at the uranium-enrichment facilities in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The article presents the point of view of your basic PFC on the base; how he had to maintain the necessary secrecy, what was it like living among such a plethora of pointy-headed slide-rule jockeys and how grateful they were to be living the comfortable life, while so many other draftees fared so poorly.
"A bitter indictment of the International Red Cross Committee for its failure to tell the world what it knew about barbarous conditions in the prison camps of Nazi Germany, at a time when public indignation might have eased the tragic plight of millions, appears in the May issue of the magazine Jewish Frontier, out today."
At the time this article went to press the Nazis and their European allies had been defeated and all eyes turned to the Pacific Theater as to when that enemy would also be forced to quit.
Click here to read about a popular all-girl band that performed with the USO.
YANK correspondent Dewitt Gilpin visited the Omaha and Utah beaches exactly one year after the 1944 Normandy Invasion. The journalist interviewed some American D-Day veterans as well as members of the local French population who recalled that bloody day -while others simply tried to forget.
"Landing to the left of the Rangers on Omaha was the 116th Infantry of the 29th Division. Their 1st Battalion came in over a beach that had more dead men on it than live ones."
Written for those far-flung, home-sick Brooklynites of yore who were cast hither and yon in order to repel the forces of fascism, this two page article from 1945 is illustrated with seven pictures of a Brooklyn that had been out of sorts since the close of the 1944 baseball season, when the Dodgers had finished 42 games behind.
Admiral Marc Mitscher (1887 – 1947), U.S.N., remarked in the attached article that Kamikaze attacks may be a menace, but only ten percent of them manage to get through.
Kind words regarding the M-1 Garand rifle were written in a 1945 report by the Department of the Army; it was widely believed in those circles that this American weapon was one of the primary advantages that lead to victory.
Click here to read about the mobile pill boxes of the Nazi army.
In a manly display of boastful "trash-talking" a few weeks before VE-Day, the over-burdened P.R. offices of the German high command issued a statement indicating that their military had in their possession some "70,000" U.S Prisoners of war. This was in contrast to the records kept by the Pentagon whose best guess stood in the neighborhood of 48,000.
"The statement revealed that 27 of the 78 prisoner of war camps in Germany have been overrun by the Red Army and U.S./British forces, and that 15,000 Yanks have been liberated."
"Wherever they have fought in this war, the Japs have shown an amazing aptitude for the queer and fantastic. They have staged solemn funeral processions in the midst of hot battle. They have blown themselves to bits with hand grenades, have stabbed themselves with daggers, sabers, bayonets and even with scythes. They plunged forward in stupidly blind Banzai charges. They have danced wildly atop ridges while exposed to American fire. And they have directed artillery action while lounging in hammocks."
Here is a short column that lists the impact that the American counterattack wrought upon the German forces as a result of their winter offensive during the Battle of the Bulge - no explanation was given as to how this information was attained.
The first use of napalm in the Second World War was by the U.S. Army Air Corps flying over Germany. This article reported that it was used by Navy over Saipan, the Army over Tinian and the Marines over Peleliu:
"Now it is possible to tell one of the more dramatic fire-bomb stories: [During an eight day period] last October, on a section of Peleliu no bigger than a city block, the Death Dealer Squadron of the Second Marine Air Wing dropped more than 32,000 gallons of flaming gasoline on Jap cave positions and wiped them out."
Click here to read about one of the greatest innovations by 20th Century chemists: plastic.
"A group of women of Latin-American extraction took the Army oath before more than 6,000 persons in San Antonio's Municipal Auditorium to become the second section of the Benito Juarez Air-WAC Squadron, named for the hero who helped liberate Mexico from European domination in 1862."
"Led by an honor guard from the first Latin-American WAC squadron, the new war-women, marched into the auditorium to be sworn in and to hear words of greeting from Colonel Oveta Culp Hobby (1905 – 1995) and from Mrs. Dwight Eisenhower (1896 – 1979)."
It is our wish to successfully give utterance to the true feelings from each era that we are able to represent on this website; for this reason, we posted the attached column by Max Lerner (1902 - 1992), in which he expresses his excitement as to how great it was to be alive in one of the Allied nations at the time of Hitler's demise.
"The two big fascist leaders in whose shadow our whole generation has lived - Mussolini and Hitler - are now lying dead amidst the ruins of their empires, one following the other in the space of a few days...We are not only the anvil. We are the hammer. To know that is to grow in stature in a great time."
A heavily illustrated, four page article that served to answer the U.S. serviceman's questions as to who Harry S Truman (1884 – 1972) was and why was he deemed suitable to serve as President?
"Mr. Truman now occupies the Presidency, of course, because he won the Democratic Vice-Presidential nomination in Chicago last summer. Two things won him the nomination. First was the fact that he alone was acceptable to Mr. Roosevelt and to both the conservative element of the Democratic Party and its liberal wing. The second was the excellent performance of the Truman Committee in the investigation of our government's spending money for the war-effort...One of the main themes of his campaign speeches last fall was that the U.S. should never return to isolationism."
Click here to read about President Franklin Roosevelt.
An illustrated wartime study by the United States Department of War explaining the German Gewehr 98 and the Gewehr 41: their caliber, weight, range and over-all length.
We highly recommend that you watch the film clip linked below for additional information.
When this article was published the war was over and Paris had experienced her second German-free autumn - but life was still difficult in the city. Coal was still rationed, the lines in the shops were long and the average French child was drastically underweight. NEWSWEEK dispatched two gumshoe reporters to get the full picture for the folks at home (where, happily, rationing had ended the the previous August).
In the aftermath of World War II Germany found themselves occupied by four armies; in the attached article General Eisenhower explained what the policy of the German occupation was to be:
"'His idea is that the biggest job for right now is riding herd on the rehabilitation of Germany's political and economic structure...We are working toward a government of Germany by the Germans under the supervision of the Allied General Control Council,' he said. "The government will pass more and more under German civil control. At first we'll have to look down the German's necks in everything they do."'
Within the moldy, dank confines an abandoned brewery located within the walls of Metz, a troupe of exhausted GIs stumbled upon a German general who was earnestly hoping to avoid capture.
"He turned out to be Major General Anton Dunckern, police president of Metz and Gestapo commander for Alsace-Lorraine. He's the first big Gestapo man we've taken; he ranks close to Himmler and is one of the prize catches of the war."
for U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson concerning the progress and general status of the American Army through the period beginning on July 31, 1943 through June 30, 1945.
; and as the news spread throughout all of John Bull's island that help had arrived and the first guy had a German surname, the Brits (always big fans of irony) had a good laugh all around.
founded a curious institution that they called "Celebrity Services, Inc." in 1938 - figuring, as they did, that
was released shortly before the war ended and was praised by General Eisenhower for being the best war movie he had ever seen. Directed by William Wellman, the film was applauded by American combat veterans of the time for it's accuracy - in their letters home, many would write that Wellman's film had brought them to tears. The movie was based on the war reporting of Ernie Pyle as it appeared in his 1943 memoir, 
. Although it is not mentioned here, Pyle himself had spent some time on the set as a technical adviser, and the film was released two months after his death.
and "Place of Love") in addition to the memory of having been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In this short interview, he explains what a poet's concerns should be and offers some fine tips for younger poets to bare in mind. A year latter, while he was still in uniform, Shapiro would be awarded the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
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and "Place of Love") in addition to the memory of having been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In this short interview, he explains what a poet's concerns should be and offers some fine tips for younger poets to bare in mind.
, Howard Breslin, had read this striking bit of fiction from YANK MAGAZINE and felt such a deep sense of social injustice that it inspired him to write his novel about anti-Isei mob violence. Either way, this very moving, two column piece is a fictional account about the pathetic homecoming experienced by a member of the Nesei packed 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
