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.
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 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!’
This 1917 article listed the known body count of dead poets who were rotting away in no-man’s land. A number of the scribes are unknown in our era; among the prominent names are Alan Seeger, Julian Grenfel and Rupert Brooke.
Printed in a popular U.S. magazine, it appeared on the newsstands the same week that Wilfred Owen, the most well known of World War I poets, was discharged from Craiglockhart Hospital, where he first resolved to write poetry about his experiences in the war.
With the publishing of the first part of his autobiography, Reveries Over Childhood and Youth, W.B. Yeats (1865 – 1939) got some attention in the American press. Here is a small notice from an American society magazine which praises his ability as an artist to influence other writers, such as George Bernard Shaw, John M. Synge, George Moore and Dr. Douglas Hyde.
Katherine Stinson (1891-1977) wants to carry letters up to Third Army. By the time Stinson (a.k.a. the Flying Schoolgirl) had applied for the job of carying the mail to the occupying 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…
In 1918 the small town of Umatilla, Oregon held their elections. There was one ticket composed entirely of men and another entirely of women: every man lost. The Mayor of Umatilla was soundly defeated by his wife.
Attached herein is the story of that unique contest from a time when women were denied the vote.
Written as a companion piece for The Spirit of the War at Eton, the article gives an moving account as to how the war affected life on campus while Britain was taking such tremendous losses.
A hand tinted colour photograph depicting a French biplane in pursuit of a German Taube.
By enlarge, this article is a mildly technical piece that compares the German sniper scopes used during W.W. I to those of the British; happily, the amusing part of this essay is contained in the opening paragraph in which a British Tommy returning from the front, is quoted as exclaiming:
German snipers are better shots than the English because their rifles have telescopic sights that are illuminated at night.
One year after the First World War reached it’s bloody conclusion, Admiral German Grand Admiral Alfred Von Tirpitz (1849 – 1930) was in a frenzy writing his wartime memoir in order that it arrive at the printing presses before his critics could do the same. One of his most devoted detractor was a naval advocate named Captain Persius who had been riding Tirpitz as early as 1914 for failing to fully grasp the benefits of the U-boat. In 1919 Captain Persius took it upon himself to widely distribute a pamphlet titled, How Tirpitz Ruined the German Fleet, which was reviewed in this article.
Tirpitz never realized the power of the submarine… Tirpitz was building Dreadnoughts when he should have been concentrating on submarines, and what is worse was building them with less displacement than the British, less strongly armed and of lower speed.
In 1920 the representatives from the victorious nations who convened at Versailles demanded that Kaiser Wilhelm, Admiral Tirpitz and an assortment of other big shots be handed over for trial – click here to read about it.
Additional data regarding the 1917 Draft and how the first one million inductees measured-up physically:
The first adequate physical survey in half a century was made possible when the Selective Service system brought before medical examiners some ten million men. Of the 2,510,000 men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one 730,000 (29 percent) were rejected on physical grounds.
We found it interesting to learn two facts from this article; the first being that the highest number of acceptable draftees were from the countryside and the second involved the malady of flat feet -which effected one out of every five American men at that time.
This article written by Edwin A. Goewey and illustrated by C. Leroy Baldridge (1889 – 1977) reported on how America’s granite youth was chiseled into fighting trim at the Long Island training camps at Upton and Mineola. Reference is made to the contributions made by Father Francis Duffy and Major-General J. Franklin Bell.
Click here to read about the AEF officer training at Plattsburg, New York.
Click here to read some statistical data about the American Doughboys of the First World War.
Two articles from 1917 heaped praise upon the laureled cranium of the British war correspondent Philip Gibbs (1877 – 1962). Having written diligently for the readers of the DAILY MAIL and DAILY CHRONICLE, who were also anticipating his book THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME (1917), Gibbs was admitted to the VANITY FAIR Hall of Fame (for whatever that was worth at the time):
He has been able to bring the wide, modern, romantic outlook to bear in his survey and analysis of fighting and the conditions of fighting…He is a war-correspondent of a ‘new dispensation’, giving ‘not a realistic or a melodramatic vision of war, but a naturalistic vision’.
At the close of hostilities in 1918, Philip Gibbs was filled with disgust concerning his cooperation with the censors and would begin writing NOW IT CAN BE TOLD (1920), in which he angrily names the bunglers in command and admits that he wrote lies all through the war.
Attached is a small piece that explains how the draft of 1917 was conducted. Illustrated with three charts, this article provides the number of males in the U.S. at that time (54,000,000), how many had registered under the Selective Service Act (26,000,000), the percentage of the whole number who had never registered and how the onslaught of the influenza epidemic had effected the W.W. I draft.
In the fall of 1917 the first half million came rapidly. During the winter the accessions were relatively few, and those that did come in were largely used as replacements and for special services.
Will Any of These Pictures be Turned to the Wall? asked the editors of VANITY FAIR shortly after the outbreak of the W.W. I. On the attached pages are photographic portraits of the potentates representing the assorted combatant nations; French President Raymond Poincare was the only elected official to be included among the royals. Pictured are Austria’s Emperor Franz Joseph, Britain’s King George V, Germany’s Willhem II, Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, Peter of Serbia and Albert, King of the Belgians.
Assorted black and white illustrations depicting an variety of French artillery pieces from the years 1916 and 1917; among them is a railway gun, Obusier de 520
Click here to learn about the timing fuses designed for W.W. I shrapnel shells.
