Articles from 1944
Few Americans realize the deep concern which the Army exercises to determine the exact status of a man reported missing in action, and even fewer are aware of the many complexities that beset the endeavor to track down missing [personnel]… It may be observed, incidentally, that the men reported as ‘missing in action’ has a two-out-of-three chance of being alive, and of turning up eventually.
“Teachers, during the war period, have been undergoing unprecedented, exhausting struggle in the classroom. And in their ranks have been casualties that add up to a dangerous teacher shortage. According to the National Education Association, ‘the economic status of teachers has been pushed back 20 years since Pearl Harbor’… The combination of overwork, underpay and the thanklessness of teaching has created an army of deserters from the profession.”
More on the hard lot of teachers during the war can be read here.
A Turkish diplomat explains all that he saw in the war-weary Berlin of 1944:
“You see children wildly seeking for their mothers, wives wildly seeking for their husbands. Women carry dead children in their arms and children weep beside their dead mothers.
“The divorce rate took a sharp upswing in all the warring countries after World War I, and another rise after this war is already being foreshadowed… Much of the post-war rise in the divorce rate is expected to come from the untying of knots too hastily tied as a result of [the 1941] war hysteria.”
The editors at Yank (an Army possession) seldom wrote about the Marines – and they loved dissing their weekly magazine, The Leatherneck. However, they did recognize an historic moment when they saw one. As remarked in another article on this site, the Navy was the most prejudiced of all the branches of service, and the Marines had previously rejected all Black recruits, but that changed in 1942, and this article served to introduce their readers to this consequential lot. The first African American Marines trained at Camp Montford Point in Jacksonville, NC from August 26, 1942 until the camp was decommissioned in 1949. The greatest number of black Marines to serve in combat during the Second World War was during the Battle of Okinawa (2,000 strong).
In another article on this site, these words were quoted from the captured dispatches of a Japanese general writing to his superiors:
“[The Yank] is a wizard at handling machinery and he can build airfields, roads and advance bases with uncanny speed.”
– he was, of course, referring to the famous Construction Battalions (Seabees) of the U.S. Navy. This article will tell you all about them.
After the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the U.S. Navy believed that the Japanese had lost over half their original strength:
“Naval observers in Washington are exhilarated by the evident extent of the Japanese defeat but, in true Navy tradition, they are being canny about it. It isn’t what we have sunk or disabled [that matters], it’s what is left that can still fight.”
Attached is an interesting article by the noted poet and poetry anthologist, Louis Untermeyer (1885 – 1977). He praised the soldier poets of the First World War and expressed his bafflement concerning the absolute dirth of competent rhyme-slingers in the Second World War:
“Why then, it has been asked again and again, is the poetry of this war so thin, so emotionally anemic, so unrepresentative of the fierce struggle in which the world is engaged? Why has no poet, not even a single poem, emerged to stir the heart and burn into the mind?”
Recalling the general melancholia that descended upon many societies following the slaughterous First World War, a former member of the British Parliament asked whether we should expect the same after an even larger world war.
If you would like to read 1920 article about the disillusioned post-war spirit, click here.
One of the very few escapees from the Treblinka death camp wrote the attached account describing the horrendous moral outrages that he had seen there:
“Experiments were started with the cremation of corpses. It turned out that women burned easier than men. Accordingly, corpses of women were used for kindling the fires… the sight was terrifying, the worst that human eyes have ever beheld.”
“Comparing the American [daylight] raids with the RAF [nighttime] incursions, it was certainly a great shock to Berliners to find their city now open to round-the-clock bombing.”
“We don’t mind the Yanks who come when the sun shines and it’s warm. It’s the Tommies sneaking in at night that we don’t like so much.”
Click here to read about the harried everyday life on a U.S. bomber base in England…
On the very first day of America’s participation in World War II, an African American sailor at Pearl Harbor named Dorrie Miller shot down four enemy planes and saved 12 men from drowning. One would think that this would make the gang on capitol Hill sit up and realize that the war would be shorter if other men of a similar hue could be released upon our enemies, but this was not the case. Very few American blacks were permitted to fight and this article serves as a testimony to their frustration.
A report by a Swiss journalist as to what becomes of the Germans who are left homeless after the bombings:
“In most cities they immediately get 200 marks cash payment. The money is fresh and clean from the press… With cup in hand, the bombed-outers wait in the streets for the army goulash truck to drive up and give them a feed. Sometimes they wait for as much forty-eight hours. People who don’t like or cannot get the army goulash build themselves a fire and cook the horses, dogs and cats that lie around the street…”
Here is a Collier’s profile of U.S. Admiral Raymond Spruance (1886 – 1969):
“Outside Navy circles, very few know much about the man who bosses our task forces in the Pacific and has never lost an engagement. But Admiral Nagano knows of Spruance; so does Tojo – because, if it weren’t for Spruance at Midway, Japanese carriers might now be based at Pearl Harbor.”
“Government movies are now having their greatest boom in history. The boom is tied to the war, but many capital observers believe that it will continue into the post war era, and that the large-scale production of films by the Government telling the people what’s what and how to do it is here to stay.”
The Victory Corps was a voluntary program open to American high school
and college students during the Second World War. It was established in September of 1942 with an eye toward preparing teenagers for military service. Although its primary concern involved weapons training, physical fitness and mathematics, it also had a “farm volunteer” arm, as this article about one branch of the Sacramento Victory Corps makes clear.
America’s foremost authority on lighter-than-air craft, Rear Admiral Charles Rosendahl (1892 – 1977), tells you why this country should build and operated dirigibles if we are to maintain our rightful place in the field of post-war air transportation (they decided to build jets instead).
Launched by air or from catapults posted on the Northern coast of France, the German V-1 “Buzz-Bomb” was first deployed against the people of London on June 12, 1944. Before the V-1 campaign was over 1,280 Britons would fall on greater London. 1,241 of these rockets were successfully destroyed in flight.
Accompanied by a diagram of the contraption, this is a brief article about London life during the “Buzz-Bomb Blitz”. Quoted at length are the Americans stationed in that city as well as the hardy Britons who had endured similar carnage during the Luftwaffe bombing campaigns earlier in the war.
