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.
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.
Forty years ago the Boston publisher, Phillips, with the assistance of that famous coterie of American writers that included Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Whittier, Holmes, Motley, Quincy, Parker, Cabot and Underwood launched
The Atlantic Monthly
It was Holmes who named the magazine, and it was he, probably, more than any other, who assured its success… The prime object of The Atlantic was in the beginning and has continued to be the making of American literature, ‘to hold literature above all other human interests.’
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…
Published in the Stars & Stripes issue marked August 19, 1944 (the official date of the Paris liberation) was the attached notice concerning the hasty disappearance of the Nazi-collaborators who lorded over the French during the occupation:
Laval, Darnand and other Vichyites fled from Paris to Metz, according to a United Press report quoting a French resistance leader who reached the British front from Paris. The whereabouts of Marshal Petain were not known.
Two Yank Magazine reporters rode into Paris behind the first tank of the Second French Armored Division, following the story of the city’s liberation in their recently liberated German jeep. Here is a picture of Paris and the reaction of Parisians to their first breath of free air in four years.
As they caught site of the American flag on our car, people crowded around and almost smothered us with kisses…
Click here to read about the fall of Paris…
The capital of France, as of September 1944, is not the same nervous, triumphant paradise city that it was when the Allies first made their entry.
The welcome has died down. When you enter the town, today, whether on foot or in a car, everyone is glad to see you, but there are no more mob scenes of riotous greeting exploding around each jeep. Shows are opening again, and the people are beginning to breathe easier…On the other side, Parisians appear as a very grateful but proud and self-reliant population.
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:
Sgt. Henry Wheeler of Youngstown, N.Y., said, ‘The wind-up was pretty much what we expected. ‘Ike’ didn’t have anything to do with those phonies until they were ready to quit. Then he went in and told them to sign up. And what does he do as he comes out of the meeting? He shakes hands with the first GI he comes to.
Click here to read about the fall of Paris…
One of Hitler’s refugees from Warsaw recalled the terror of the Nazi attack on her city:
In a mad panic I ran through streets that were a sea of flames, dragging by the hand my two children, aged eight and three. I have seen wounded and dead. I lost many friends and all my belongings. I was a refugee. And for months I suffered hunger and cold… I can still see myself pressed against the wall, holding the children tight, and waiting, waiting for the bomb to crash…
Click here to read about the fall of Paris…
This is a great article, penned by an American correspondent who had actually sat face-to-face with Hitler on numerous occasions. He tells the reader many of his observations concerning the man’s personality, expressions and what he has observed regarding the German people:
I have presented [in this article] the essential psychological and material factors in Hitler’s conviction that he will still win the war. There were signs even while I was still in Germany that the German people have given up the dream of a ‘total victory’ to follow their total war.
More about Adolf Hitler can be read here…
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.
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…
Click here to read about the fall of Paris…
Attached is an article by the noted war correspondent Frederick Palmer (1873 – 1958) who observed the French and British as they attempted to hold-off the Nazi juggernaut of 1940. In this article, Palmer referred a great deal to walking this same ground with the American Army during the 1914 – 1918 war just twenty-one years earlier; he found the French to be confident of a decisive victory. The column is complemented by this 1940 article which reported on the wonders of Blitzkrieg and the fall of France.
Click here to read the observations of U.S. Army lieutenant Louis L’Amour concerning 1946 Paris.
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.
Click here to read about the fall of Paris…
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!
Click here to read about the fall of Paris…
For twenty years Paula Hitler lived in a Vienna garret, never hearing from [her] lost brothers, Gustav and Adolf… When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, he at last wrote to [her]. Paula, embittered by his long desertion and the loss of her youth, declared that he was no longer her brother. She gave out an interview revealing that their father was an illegitimate child. The Fuehrer’s emissaries told her to keep quiet, she refused. But finally when Hitler came as ruler to Vienna, there was a reconciliation, and family Anschluss.
Click here to read about the fall of Paris…
The capture of the Eternal City – first Axis capital to fall to the Allies – came on the 275 day of the Italian invasion and realized the political and psychological objective of the entire campaign. Yet, for the Allied Armies, the fall of Rome was rather the beginning than the end of the job. Paced by the air forces, without a pause the troops rolled on through the city and across the Tiber in a drive aimed at smashing completely the retreating German forces.
This short notice from a 1944 issue of the U.S. Army’s Yank Magazine can be printed or read on screen if you prefer; the article is accompanied by a photo of Lew Ayres (1908 – 1996: Ayres is best remembered for his performance in All Quiet on the Western Front) wearing his Army togs while performing his tasks as a chaplain’s assistant on Wake Island (New Guinea).
‘I am still a conscientious objector to war,’ Ayres says. He went to a camp for conchies at Wyeth, Oregon early in 1942 but volunteered a short time later for medical service. After training as a hospital ward attendant and then becoming an instructor at Camp Barkley, Texas, the ex-movie actor shipped overseas as a staff sergeant.
Click here to read more about American conscientious objectors in W.W. II.
