Written by Andy Rooney, this three column article concerned the seldom remembered efforts of a French airborne battalion that jumped into Brittany on D-Day in order to disrupt German communications.
Click here to read more about W.W. II parachute infantry…
Click here to read about the first American Paratrooper.
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.
There’s a ‘New Look‘ in Japan. It’s come about in the years since World War II and is largely due the result of Western influence brought about by the presence of American soldiers…More and more women are dressing in American-style clothing, although they still prefer the kimono as evening dress. Girls now are given the same education as boys. There is a new school system with grade schools, high schools and colleges modeled somewhat on the American pattern…
Some of the allure attached to the West was a result of theses guys…
A veteran of the U.S. First Division, Sixteenth Infantry, tells the chilling story of that rainy night in November, 1917, when the first German raid upon the American trenches took place:
It was on that night that Company F took over its first front line position, received its baptism of fire, bore the brunt of the first German raid and lost the first American troops killed and captured in the World War.
…two hundred and forty Bavarians, the widely advertised cut-throats of the German Army, hopped down on us. The first raid on American troops was in full swing. They had crawled up to our wire under cover of their artillery barrage and the moment it lifted were right on top of us.
The U.S. Army would not launch their own trench raid for another four months.
This article tells the tale of the Japanese Nationalist Masaharu Kageyama (1910 – 1979), a fellow who, in the political landscape of U.S.-occupied Japan, seemed rather like the late Mussolini of Italy: always remembering the storied past of a Japan that no longer existed. Kageyama was something a flat-Earther, choosing the road of the Japanese Nationalist, he held that Emperor Hirohito was indeed divine and that the Fascist vision of an East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was achievable, even in 1949.
This article charts the decline of Latin as an academic study in American schools. The disappearance of Latin began in the Thirties and steadily snowballed to such a point that by 1952 its absence was finally noticed.
Is Latin on its way out in high schools? The answer is a confident ‘NO.’
It’s hard to see how it can go any lower,’ declares Dr. John F. Latimer, head of Latin studies
at George Washington University.
Read this unbelievable adventure by a former Afrika Korps Panzer Grenadier who, having been captured and subsequently shipped to the U.S., made good his escape from an Illinois prisoner-of-war camp – whereupon he assumed a fake identity and easily acquired a Social Security number. After having rented an apartment and worked several jobs in Chicago, he started a successful business just two years after his escape, married an American woman, sired a daughter – and he might very well have eluded the FBI entirely if he hadn’t insisted all the while on sending foodstuffs to his mother in war-ravaged Germany.
Although this article is illustrated with imagery depicting American men and Japanese women appearing to genuinely be enjoying one another’s company, the accompanying text says something quite different. The article centers on the observations of the woman who heads the YWCA in Japan who insists that the vulgar Americans stationed in that country are coercing Japanese women to become prostitutes. The journalist then goes into some detail as to what a big business prostitution in Japan has become and how many illegitimate births have resulted.
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.
A mob of French-Canadian youths surged through Montreal with skull-and-crossbones sign [that read]: Are We Cannon fodder? Do We Want Conscription? No! Quebec province seethed with rage at Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s decision to send draftees overseas.
Their father’s resisted the draft some twenty years earlier…
Lieutenant Colonel Richard Mangrum, USMC, was a seasoned veteran in the Cactus Air Force that fought the good fight at Henderson Field from Guadalcanal in 1942:
For eight weeks the author and his fellow pilots shared the primitive life of the other Marines at Henderson Field. Some portion of his squadron was almost constantly in the air, attacking enemy reinforcements.
A collection of opinions gathered from the newspapers of the world concerning the belligerency of Imperial Japan and its poor standing in the eyes of the League of Nations:
Feeling grows among the Japanese that events are shaping toward a second world war, with Japan in the position that Germany occupied in 1914…A Canadian Press dispatch from London, in THE NEW YORK TIMES, estimated war supplies sent from England to China and Japan. According to statistics of the British Government for 1932, the largest individual items were 7,735,000 small-arms cartridges for China and 5,361,450 for Japan…Japan also purchased 740 machine guns.
Four years after the Pearl Harbor attack, a Japanese newspaper editorial expressed deep regret for Japan’s aggressiveness in the Second World War, click here to read about it…
Click here to read about a 1925 novel that anticipated the war with Imperial Japan.
2013 marked the 100th year since the first film was made in Hollywood, and in that time one American neighborhood more than any other has consistently supplied the film and television industry with a seemingly inexhaustible pool of talent: Brooklyn, New York. From Clara Bow in the era of silent film to Gabby Sidibe in the digital – the talented sons and daughters of Brooklyn have made their way West and we have all been the beneficiaries.
Show me a good fellow backstage, and I’ll show you a lousy actor onstage famously stated W.C. Fields. The author, former Hollywood press agent David Hanna, proves the comedian’s point with numerous anecdotes drawn from both Broadway and Hollywood.
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.
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.
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.
Another look at the M-2 Half Track and the training of their five-man crews at Fort Hood, Texas. We got a kick learning that these men were not simply trained to fire their 37 and 75 mm. mounted guns, but also instructed in all other manner of tank fighting methods:
Another little trick they master is the construction of a sticky grenade; a white sock filled with TNT, soaked in heavy axle grease to triple it’s detonating power. This sticks like glue; and if it explodes near the tank’s ventilators — that’s all, brother.
Click here to read about the TD units that fought at the Battle of the Bulge.
