By the time this letter was written in 1917, Seigfreid Sassoon and Wilfred Owen would have found very little common ground with it’s author. However the letter is remarkable for it’s eloquence and passion in support of the war.
Attacking across a 125 mile front, the Chinese Army launched their spring offensive on May 17, 1951; unable to make any advances, they retired two weeks later, leaving behind some 80,000 dead.
The Communist hit first on the east central front. A quick rout of two ROK divisions caught the U.S. 2nd Division, commanded by Major General Clark Ruffner, in a dangerous pocket with their east flank exposed…One officer called the Red onslaught ‘an astounding demonstration. They wade right through macine gun or artillery fire. The bodies pile up and they walk right over the bodies and the pile of bodies gets higher.’
Younger brother Alexander hated dashing, erratic Crown Prince George (1887 – 1972), darling of the Serbian people, so he framed him as a loony, got him exiled, and in due course became King instead. George made the mistake of writing an insulting letter and going back home on the heels of it. Now, in a remote Yugoslavian villa, surrounded by trees, hedges, and mustachioed detectives, the Serbian Bad Boy lives in solitary confinement, doing mathematical problems to keep from getting bored.
A 1938 article which gave a brief account of the incarcerated Crown Prince George of Serbia. As the above makes clear, he was judged insane and locked up between the years 1925 through 1939. He was set free by the Nazis during their brief occupation of that country.
Click here to read about the 1922 discovery of King Tut’s tomb.
Katherine Stinson wants to carry letters up to Third Army.
By the time Katherine Stinson (1891 – 1977, a.k.a. the Flying Schoolgirl) had applied for the job of carrying the mails to the occupying American forces in post-war Germany, she already had the distinction of being the fourth American woman to earn a pilot’s license and the first woman to ever deliver air-mail for the U.S. Post Office. She didn’t get the job…
Storming the Skies : The Story of Katherine & Marjorie Stinson , Pioneer Women Aviators
&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
Premier Vyacheslav M. Molotov (1890 – 1986) pictured the Soviet Union as a lusty young giant strong enough to defend itself from both the East and the West in the keynote speech of the Seventh All Union Congress of Soviets, the Soviet Parliament.
In proof of this claim it was shown that in the last two years the Soviet Government had increased the strength of the Red Army from 562,000 men in 1932 to 940,000 in 1934.
Read about all the various international treaties that the Soviet Union violated…
Joseph Cummings Chase (1878 – 1965) was an American painter who’s name is not likely to be associated with World War I artists but, like Sir William Orpen, he had a comfortable place within fashionable circles and he, too, was commissioned to paint portraits of the anointed within his nations military establishment. This article appeared in 1942 and primarily concerns the W.W. I portrait that Chase painted of Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur during the closing days of the war:
Joseph Cummings Chase is without doubt one of the world’s greatest portrait painters, and as luck would have it, he was in Paris when World War I began, at which time the Government commissioned him to paint the Distinguished Service Cross men, both enlisted men and officers, wherever he could catch up with them; some in dugouts, some in trenches, and some behind the lines.
Click here to see a few trench war images by German Expressionist Otto Dix.
Click here to read a 1942 article by Rockwell Kent on the proper roll of American artists during wartime.
A few words on the water colors that John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1925) made in 1917 which pictured the Villa Viscaya in Miami, Florida. The paintings were later purchased by the Worcester Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Hollywood scribe Wilbur Morse, Jr. wrote this 1939 magazine profile of Jimmy Stewart (1908 – 1997). At the time of this printing, Stewart had dozens of stage credits and had been working in films for only four years; one year later he would be awarded an Oscar for his performance in PHILADELPHIA STORY:
Booth Tarkington might have created Jim Stewart. He’s ‘Little Orvie and Billie Baxter’ grown up ‘Penrod’ with a Princeton diploma.
The appeal of James Stewart, the shy, inarticulate movie actor, is that he reminds every girl in the audience of the date before the last. He’s not a glamorized Gable, a remote Robert Taylor. He’s ‘Jim’, the lackadaisical, easy-going boy from just around the corner.
Jerome K. Jerome (1859 – 1927) was a British author and playwright from one of the sillier tribes who is best remembered for his humorous travelogue Three Men in a Boat (1889). In the attached interview, the humorist laments that the novels in his day (as opposed to our own) so seldom inspire any real use of the mind:
Books have become the modern narcotic. China has adopted the opium habit for want of fiction. When China obtains each week her ‘Greatest Novel Of The Century’, her ‘Most Thrilling Story Of The Year’, her ‘Best Selling Book Of The Season’ the opium den will be no more needed.
From Amazon: Three Men in a Boat
What was called a Japanese ‘Monroe Doctrine for Asia’ whereby Japan would wield dominance there, especially in Chinese affairs, was announced last April, and drew the immediate attention of the world’s press.
In the last days of this January a following-up of this intention was seen in a series of talks at Nanking between Chiang Kai-shek, President and Generalissimo of the Nationalist Government of China, and Lieutenant-General Soshiyuki Suzuki, Japanese military representative at Shanghai; and among Akira Ariyoshi, Japanese Minister to China, and General Chiang and Premiere Wang Ching-wei.
A profile of the twenty-eight year old artist Isamu Noguchi (1904 – 1988).
Here is a paragraph about the school of dance that was maintained by Isadora Duncan in Rye, New York; the notice is illustrated by three stunning photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864 – 1952) depicting thirteen young girls in Grecian attire.
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.
Read what the U.S. Army psychologists had to say about courage.
Strong arguments were put to verse by the popular song writer Howard Dietz (1896 – 1983) as to why the up-town theater crowd had it all wrong.
The picture theater is always dark
So things you throw won’t hit the mark.
The actor in the movie play
Can’t hear the things you often say.
The spoken drama’s always longer;
The movie hero’s always stronger.
Click here to read more comparisons between film and stage.
Photographic portraits of the six sons and one daughter of the German Kaiser. The sons pose polished, varnished and bemedaled as the military fops they were trained to be: Born in a palace; in a barracks bred. The journalist points out that even Wilhelm’s one daughter served as a Colonel in an elite cavalry regiment.
Click here to read about the royal princess colonels of of the pre-war period.
While so many European men were suffering on the Somme and at Verdun, some American fellows were having a swelligant time on the golf links; beautifully attired in linen golf clothes that are pictured in the accompanying attachment.
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.
