Articles from 1945
The attached article is comprised of numerous war stories from the GIs of the 96th Infantry Division who were assigned the pleasant chore of slugging it out with the Japanese in the Leyte Valley of the Philippines.
Some seven months before Japan quit the war, the anointed heads of the Institute of Pacific Relations convened in Hot Springs, Virginia to discuss what the Allied Occupation of Japan would look like.
Click here to read about August 28, 1945 – the day the occupation began.
Standing before the judges who made up the 11-nation war crimes tribunal in occupied Tokyo, General Hideko Tojo, among 19 other Japanese wartime leaders, put on the show of his life:
Without hesitation, Tojo accepted full blame for plunging Japan into war. But it was, he insisted, a ‘defensive’ war, and ‘in no manner a violation of international law..’
I have visited these [death] camps and I have seen the prisoners and the conditions under which they existed or died. It would be hard, with a mere camera, to overstate the essential horrors of these camps… It is not a pretty site to see – as I did… I fancy that no other generation was ever required to witness horror in this particular shape…
Attached is the U.S. War Department study regarding the tactical uses of German airborne forces throughout the course of the Second World War; from the Battle of Crete to the Battle of the Bulge:
In Russia, the Balkans, and the December 1944 counteroffensive in the Ardennes, units varying in strength from a platoon to a battalion have been landed behind enemy lines to disrupt communications, to seize such key points as railroads, roadheads, bridges and power stations.
Not too long after the close of the war, exiled German author Thomas Mann (1875 – 1955) was invited to return to Germany. Walter von Molo, a German writer, who during the Nazi regime remained and worked in Germany, sent the invitation to Mann as an Open Letter in the name of German intellectuals. Attached an excerpt of the writer’s response.
As a result of the generous proxy-marriage laws allowed by the citizens of Kansas City, Kansas, many young women, feeling the urge to marry their beaus residing so far afield as a result of the Second World War, would board buses and trains and head to that far-distant burg with one name on their lips: Finnegan. This is the story of Mr. Thomas H. Finnegan, a successful lawyer back in the day who saw fit to do his patriotic duty by standing-in for all those G.I.s who were unable to attend their own weddings.
The attached article tells the story of the first Americans to cross the Rhine river into Germany following the capture of the Ludendorf Bridge at Remagen, Germany.
One of the most striking incidents of the first day’s action on the bridge was the way German snipers opened up on their own men who had been taken prisoners. As each batch of PWs was lead across the bridge, a storm of sniper fire from the surrounding hills swept its ranks. Several were killed.
Pictured on page two is a photograph of the first American to make it across: Sgt. Alexander A. Drabik (1910 – 1993) of the 27th Armored Infantry Division.
Click here to read about a popular all-girl band that performed with the USO.
At the time this article went to press the Nazis and their European allies had been defeated and all eyes turned to the Pacific Theater as to when that enemy would also be forced to quit.
Click here to read about a popular all-girl band that performed with the USO.
To mark the 67th birthday of the silent film director D.W. Griffith, the editors of a once illustrious Hollywood literary magazine pasted his famous profile on their magazine cover and devoted four columns to his achievements.
Perhaps one of the first magazine articles about the beautiful actress Martha Vickers (1925 – 1971) who is best remembered by fans for her performance as the fabulously slutty Carmen Sternwood in the 1946 film The Big Sleep.
This article tells the tale of her early days in 1940s Los Angeles and her work as a photographer’s model, which turned more than a few of the crowned heads of Hollywood.
A YANK staff writer Robert Bendiner (1910 – 2009), summed-up the eventful period that began with the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on
April 12, and ended with the Japanese surrender on August 10, 1945. He pointed out that within that period remarkable changes had been made; not merely the deaths of Hitler, Mussolini and the collapse of Imperial Japan, but it was clear to many that the stage was being set for a new world. The foundations were in place for the creation of a durable world security organization and as if that wasn’t enough, there was a new, hideous weapon called the Atomic Bomb that would cast a long shadow across the land and mark this new era as a unique period in world history.
After a streak like that it would not be surprising if a revulsion against big news should set in. It may well be that people long to pick up a paper in which nothing more cosmic is reported than the city’s reception of a visiting channel-swimmer, and nothing more violent than a tie-up on the Magnolia Avenue trolley line.
Click here to read how British women struggled to understand American slang.
A light and breezy review concerning the findings of a U.S. government study regarding the effectiveness of the Allied strategic bombing campaign against Nazi Germany:
…the survey authorities report that although air power might have been more advantageously applied in this case or that, its decisive bearing on the victory was undeniable…At sea, its contribution, combined with naval air power, brought an end to the enemy’s greatest naval threat -the U-boat; on land, it helped turn the tide overwhelmingly in favor of allied ground forces.
Articles about the daily hardships in post-war Germany can be read by clicking here.
G.I. JOE MAGAZINE was established shortly after the war by a shrewd, commerce-driven soul who fully recognized that the American veterans of W.W. II would have a good deal to say about their military hardships, and would need a venue in which to do it. The attached article was written by a veteran who preferred to remain anonymous; the righteous indignation can be keenly sensed in his prose as he explained the three-tiered justice system that he believed to have been built into the offices of the U.S. Army military court system. The first tier meted out soft justice for officers, the second dispensed a harsh justice to White enlisted men, and the bottom tier dished-out a far more vile variety to the American soldiers of African descent.
Read an Article about Racial Integration in the U.S. Military
Neither the prosecution nor the defense wanted Henri Philippe Petain’s oily accomplice to testify in the trial of the old marshal. Both sides feared his slanderous tongue and his slimy skill for wriggling out of blame.
You’re damn right those Nisei boys have a place in the American heart, now and forever. And I say soldiers ought to form a pickaxe club to protect the Japanese-Americans who fought the war with us. Any time we see a barfly commando picking on those kids or discriminating against them, we ought to bang them over the head with a pickaxe. I’m willing to be a charter member.
General Joseph W. Stillwell
Howard Katzander of YANK filed this short dispatch regarding all that he witnessed following the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Weimer, Germany:
The camp is a thing that has to be seen to be believed, and even then the charred skulls and pelvic bones in the furnaces seem too enormous a crime to be accepted fully. It can’t mean that they actually put human beings –some of them alive –into these furnaces and destroyed them like this.
In the Holy Land are two organizations: the Stern Gang and the NMO, the members of which employ kidnapping, extortion and murder to gain their ends; civil war and independence for Palestine.
In the attached article COLLIER’S MAGAZINE foreign correspondent Frank Gervasi reported on who and what these organizations were.
