Athletes Get Older
(Yank Magazine, 1942)
With all the young athletes gone with the draft, the American sports world had to get used to following the contests of men whose careers should have ended some time ago.
1942
Articles from 1942
Building Jeeps in Toledo
(Yank Magazine, 1942)
A nifty article about how well-made Jeeps were, who made them, who tested them and just how popular they were among the Lend-Lease crowd.
GI Food
(American Legion Magazine, 1942)
The attached article originally appeared in a magazine intended for American veterans of the First World War. The author, a veteran as well, compares the slop he was served some twenty years earlier with what the U.S. Army was serving in 1942: he was quite impressed.
Stalin: American Ally
(Liberty Magazine, 1942)
Award winning biographer Emil Ludwig takes a crack at profiling Joseph Stalin for the editors of Liberty Magazine. Stalin is portrayed as a cautious, secretive dictator (aside from this, he was a great guy).
A Marine at Allegator Creek
(Yank Magazine, 1942)
Attached is a 1942 article about Al Schmid (1920 – 1982), who was awarded the Navy Cross for all that he did during the Battle of Allegator Creek (the Marines were the allegators). You’ll remember that slaughterous, one-sided contest from the sixth episode of HBO’s “The Pacific” (2010). Private Schmid was credited with killing 200 Japanese soldiers.
Wainwright of Corregidor
(Newsweek Magazine, 1942)
“Wainwright never had a fighting chance in his last command in the Philippines… But in those last few days he demonstrated his fine soldiery demeanor, leadership, courage, and resourcefulness.”
Last Stand on Corregidor
(Newsweek Magazine, 1942)
“The Fall of Corregidor (May 6, 1942) marked the end of an epic fight that won acclaim from Allied leaders the world over. The most heartfelt tribute came from Gen. MacArthur in Australia: ‘… But through the bloody haze of the last reverberating shot I shall always seem to see the vision of its grim, gaunt and ghostly men, still unafraid.'”
Reasons for Rationing
(American Magazine, 1942)
Attached herein is a fun little chart laying out the reasons why commercial goods on the home front were scarce.
The Growth of the U.S. Navy
(Newsweek Magazine, 1942)
The attached article pertains to the amazing speed at which the U.S. Navy was able to add new fighting ships to the fleet between December, 1941 and December, 1942.
The Home front Knuckles Under
(Collier’s Magazine, 1942)
Having heard from assorted armchair generals, radio oracles and ink-stained bums that the heart of the American home front was not in the fight, journalist Quentin Reynolds bought some train tickets to scour the country and see if it was true.
It wasn’t.
Click here to read about the rationing of makeup.
An American-Style Concentration Camp
(Coronet Magazine, 1942)
An optimistic article from 1942 that asks us to look for the sunny side of the Japanese American internment camps – after all, they never had it so good!
More Letters from the German Home Front
“The information in letters found on the German dead, intimate and personal as it is, leads to some striking deductions.
More Letters from the German Home Front
(American Magazine, 1942)
“The information in letters found on the German dead, intimate and personal as it is, leads to some striking deductions. The people inside Germany hate the war and want it to end. They are tired of hardships, sick of sacrifice. They lament the moral disintegration of their young women; they shudder at air raids; they weep over their dead. But nowhere do they betray the least suggestion of German guilt or regret for horrors which the German armies perpetrate on conquered countries. Hard as is their life, they know neither starvation nor desperation. Nor do they expect Germany to lose the war. To expect them at this time to revolt against Hitler is as futile and puerile to expect the Fuehrer to live up to his promises or the treatise he signs.”
Richard Wright on the Black Home Front
(Coronet Magazine, 1942)
Black author Richard Wright (1908 – 1960) clearly delineated for the readers of Coronet why African American participation in W.W. II was of great importance to the Black community.
Opinions on the Early Home Front
(Newsweek Magazine, 1942)
Newsweek‘s Raymond Moley (1886 – 1975) took a serious look at the year that had just passed, 1941, and concluded that the American people, as a whole, had had embraced the war as their own personal problem. He was impressed with the gravity with which the home front solved the problems that war brought to their doorsteps:
“The pre-Pearl Harbor issue has been liquidated, not because of an act of national will power. It had faded before the immediate tasks of war. The new year brought so many jobs to do, so many problems to grapple with that there was no time to remember 1941… At no time in the year has there been a real failure on the part of Americans to appreciate the gravity of the war job.”
One Year of War
(Newsweek Magazine, 1942)
“In the twelve months since Pearl Harbor the American family has begun
to experience war on the home front. Almost a full year has passed before gasoline rationing was extended to the entire country. More than a year will have passed before meat rationing begins next month. The sugar pinch has been only a gentle nip. The full extent of the fuel shortage has yet to be measured against the severity of the weather. The sign ‘one per customer’ appears on more and more shelves in the corner grocery, but except for extra cups of coffee the average menu isn’t too far from prewar. Thanksgiving of 1942 was hardly less than the usual feast day.”
One Year of Military Expansion
(Newsweek Magazine, 1942)
When President Franklin Roosevelt declared war on December 8, 1941 – he was not the only one to do so; judging by the content of the attached article, and numerous others on this site, 100,000 other Americans did the same thing. This article is about the rapid growth of the United Sates military that took place between December of 1941 through December of 1942 – and boy, did it grow.
The Sherman
(Newsweek Magazine, 1942)
“‘We’re so far ahead of that Heinie in tank design and production that he’s never going to catch us’ – that was the opinion expressed by Major General Levin H. Campbell (1886 – 1976), the War Department’s Ordnance Chief, in an interview in New York last week. He quoted a British officer as saying that the American M-4 General Sherman tank is the ‘answer to a tankman’s prayer.'”