“The Reich is being methodically pulverized. The Eighth U.S. Air Force by day and the R.A.F. by night have only begun their deadly round-the-clock job. The coming months will see them unleash a fury that surpasses all the world’s earthquakes.”
“With the double-breasted coat, the single-breasted waistcoat is the rule and to repeat the crossing of lines twice in one suit is an entirely unreasonable exaggeration.”
This is an amazing article that recalls the open-all-night cities that were the B-17 bases in Britain during World War Two. Such were the lives of the ground crews, who worked all night and then found sleep impossible – preferring to stay-up and stare at the skies in anticipation for their returning bombers.
“A crew chief stumbles past you on his way to the hangar. He’s been going seventy-two hours without taking his shoes off; his face is unshaven, and his eyes look like holes burned in a blanket.”
“There is no other country at war with such an enormous gulf in sacrifice between fighting men and civilians. There is no other country where the men at the front have given up everything, while the people at home have given up practically nothing. And the soldiers know it…‘A few bombs would do this country a lot of good.’ I heard that in San Francisco from a curly-headed sailor who had been sunk in the Pacific, and I heard it again in Washington from a corporal who had left his leg on Hill 609. Both added, rather anxiously, that, of course, they wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt.”
A short article by a respected military journalist of the time, Max Werner, on how severely Nazi Germany had been beaten.
Click here to read other articles from 1945.
“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>”
Attached are two articles by American journalist Lowell Thomas (1892 – 1981) regarding all that he witnessed while reporting on General Edmund Allenby’s campaign against Johnny Turk in the Sinai and Palestine Theater during the First World War. This reminiscence was written many years after the war in an effort to make up for the fact that “after eighteen years, no clear-cut account of Allenby’s campaign has been set down.”
Click here to read about Lawrence of Arabia…
Here is an article by a doctor who believed that a modicum of self-knowledge is required before embarking on a diet. It is important to understand why the aspiring dieter overeats in the first place and understands what kind of diet they will be likely to complete successfully:
“Nobody can live on a few shreds of lettuce, a grated carrot and two ounces of boiled asparagus a day, and nobody has to resort to such rigorous tactics.”
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.
Try as they may, the silver-tongued diplomats who rebuked Germany so mercilessly at Versailles in 1919 never could get an apology out of the Kaiser, or Hindenburg or Ludendorff. They just had to sit tight and wait – because in 1923 Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber (1869 – 1952), [alas] speaking in an unofficial capacity as a German, apologized for the whole monkey show: Lusitania, Belgium, etc. Everything comes to those who wait.
Even before the Home Front kicked into high-gear, the men who had been picked up in the 1940 draft were causing real problems in every area where a military training camp could be found. Knowing that the enlistments were soon to grow and these problems would be getting worse, the brass hats joined arms with the town elders to curb the drinking and whoremongering. The cure for these difficulties came in the form of the USO, which would be eatablished before the year was out.
A similar article can be read here.
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.'”
A similar article can be read here.
“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.”
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?”
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.
“What is the reason for Il Duce’s newly acquired antisemitism? Why the new laws degrading the Jews of Italy? There are hardly 60,000 native-born Jews in all Italy. Many Italians have never laid eyes on a Jew. Antisemitism played no part in Italian life until Il Duce determined to banish the Jews into a moral and material ghetto.”
“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.”
“When most of Manhattan is sound asleep, the free-lance photographer Arthur Fellig (1899 – 1968) – better known as Weegee – begins his wide-awake work of catching the city’s nocturnal drama. Weegee sleeps by day and at midnight sets out to cruse the city in his car, equipped with [a] police radio and bought with the proceeds from crime photos. He earned his nickname through his uncanny Ouija Board ability to know about distant happenings and beat others to the scene.”
Click here to read more about New York City.
