1945 – Page 21 – Old Magazine Articles

When the U.S. Home Front Found Out About Nazi Atrocities
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

The editors of YANK reported that the week of VE Day the

…first-run movie houses showed films of a kind seldom if ever seen by American audiences. The films, made for the most part by the U.S. Army signal corps, showed piles of human bones, mass graves and beaten, starving men who looked more like corpses than human beings…Homefronters sat in shocked silence, broken now and then in by low gasps.

Marlene Dietrich Did Her Bit
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

A post-game interview with Hollywood star Marlene Dietrich (1901 – 1992) concerning all the many places throughout the European Theater of Operations that she performed before Allied audiences, at times performing very close to the German front line.

Marlene Dietrich’s only daughter, Maria Riva Dietrich (b. 1924), wrote that her mother, feeling a deep sense of pity and gratitude, made love to a very large number of front line soldiers.

Click here to read about the woman who entertained the U.S. troops during the First World War.

When General Eisenhower Came Home
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

The General had seen welcomes in Paris and London and Washington and New York, but he got the warmest reception of all when he hit his boyhood home town, little Abilene, Kansas.

As soon as the Eisenhower party was seated a gun boomed and the parade began. It wasn’t a military parade. It told the story of a barefoot boy’s rise from fishing jaunts on nearby Mud Creek to command of the Allied expeditionary force that defeated Fascism in Western Europe.

In 1944, a class of sixth graders wrote General Eisenhower and asked him how they can help in the war effort; click here to read his response…

Wartime Brooklyn
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

A four page article regarding the city of Brooklyn, New York during the Second World War – make no mistake about it: this is the Brooklyn that Senator Bernie Sanders inherited – it isn’t far from the N.Y. borough named Queens, where numerous Communists resided.

• Almost half the penicillin that was produced in the United States came out of Brooklyn

• Forty Five percent of of the Brooklyn war plants were awarded the Army and Navy E or the M from the Maritime Services

• Throughout the war, the ranks of the U.S. Armed Services were swollen with Brooklyn sons and daughters, 280,000 strong.

Click here to read an article about one of New York’s greatest mayors: Fiorello LaGuardia.

Angela Lansbury Arrives in Hollywood
(Rob Wagner’s Script, 1945)

Those sly dogs at SCRIPT MAGAZINE! They printed the smiling mug of the twenty-five year-old Angela Lansbury (b. 1925) on the cover of their rag, briefly praising her for being the youngest performer to have ever been nominated for an Academy Award (she soon won the 1944 Best Supporting Actress statue for Gaslight), and ran a profile of the lass on a page eight article that was misleadingly titled Our Cover Girl, only to devote 85% of the columns to an illustrious forebear.

Chinese Slave Labor Under The Boot of Japan
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1945)

By 1945 the Japanese Army was beginning to see the writing on the wall insofar as their occupation of China was concerned. With the collapse of Germany they knew they could expect the Soviets to attack at any time – this foreboding inspired them to corral greater numbers of hapless Chinese and force them to build barricades in order to postpone the inevitable.

Radar and the Allied Victory
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Two months after the Fascists cried uncle and raised their white flag, this article went to press that was filled with two pages-worth of previously classified information as to the important roll that British and American radar played in winning the war. It was 1945 articles like this in which the world finally learned why the German submarine blockade of Britain proved to be so unsuccessful, why the London blitz was such a devastating blow to the Luftwaffe and how the Allied navies succeeded in getting so many convoys across the North Atlantic.

Medal of Honor for Pvt. Lloyd C. Hawks
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1945)

Lloyd Cortez Hawks (1911 – 1953) was a U.S. Army private and a recipient of the United States military’s highest decoration for valor — the Congressional Medal of Honor. Hawks performed his celebrated acts of derring-do while serving as a medic attached to the 30th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Division outside of Carano, Italy.

Scenes from Bastogne
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

YANK correspondent, Sergeant Ed Cunningham, filed this report concerning all that he saw during the earliest stages of the German counter-attack in Bastogne; some Americans were leaving, some were staying, new ones were arriving – and all the while the Belgian townsfolk watched in confusion and hoped for the best.

‘The Nisei Problem”
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

An interesting article, written with a sense of embarrassment regarding the injustice done to the Japanese-Americans, and published a few weeks shy of VJ-Day. The article reports on how the former internment camp families were faring after they were released from their incarceration. 55,000 Japanese-Americans chose to remain in the camps rather than walk freely among their old neighbors; one man, Takeyoshi Arikawa, a former produce dealer, remarked:

I would like to take my people back home, but there are too many people in Los Angeles who would resent our return. These are troubled times for America. Why should I cause the country any more trouble?

Important references are made concerning those families who had lost their young men serving in the famed 442 Regimental Combat Team: a U.S. Army unit composed entirely of Nisei that was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation for it’s fortitude displayed in Italy, France and Germany.

VJ Day in New York City
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

…On, on, on it went into the night and the next night as the biggest city in the world went its way toward picking up the biggest hangover in its history. It was a hangover few would ever regret.

Click here if you would like to read an article about the VE Day celebrations in Europe.

Click here if you would like to read about the VE Day celebrations in the United States.

Hollywood During the Second World War
(Yank, 1945)

This is a swell article that truly catches the spirit of the time. You will read about the war-torn Hollywood that existed between the years 1941-1945 and the movie shortage, the hair-pin rationing, the rise of the independent producers and the ascent of Van Johnson and Lauren Becall:

Lauren, a Warner Brothers property, is a blonde-haired chick with a tall, hippy figure, a voice that sounds like a sexy foghorn and a pair of so-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it eyes

Mention is also made of the hiring of demobilized U.S. combat veterans to serve as technical assistants for war movies in such films as Objective Burma.

When New York City Mourned F.D.R.
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

With the exception of the attached piece, there is no magazine article in existence that illustrated so clearly the soul-piercing pain that descended upon the city of New York when the word got around that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died. YANK correspondent Bill Davidson walked from one neighborhood to the next recording much of what he saw:

Nowhere was grief so open as in the poorest districts of the city. In Old St. Patrick’s in the heart of the Italian district on the lower East Side, bowed, shabby figures came and went, and by the day after the President died hundreds of candles burned in front of the altar. ‘Never’ a priest said ‘have so many candles burned in this church’.
A woman clasped her 8-year-old son and said, ‘Not in my lifetime or in yours will we again see such a man.’

A Post-War Interview With Ike
(Yank, 1945)

This is a conversational General Eisenhower article that primarily concerns the plans for the Allied occupation of Germany, coupled with every American soldier’s wish to simply get in boats and go home:

I’m just as bad off as any GI today, General Eisenhower said quietly. I don’t want to be here. I’m 54 years old and I lead a kind of lonely life.

The third paragraph makes reference to a pretty British secretary named Lt. Kay Summersby.

A Profile of George Lansbury
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1945)

The attached article is disguised as a Hollywood fluff piece about actress Angela Lansbury (b. 1925), who at that time was about to earn her first and only Academy Award, but journalist Peter Churchill devoted the majority of column space to the life and career of her socialist grandfather George Lansbury (1859 – 1940), one time Member of Parliament and star of the British Labor Party:

Old George was born, bred, lived and died among the poor of London, and never had any money, and yes, that goes for the time he was a member of His Britanic Majesty’s Cabinet, too. But the folks down at the less desirable parts (we don’t talk of slums) of the Bow and Bromley district of London where he lived could tell you what a difference it made to have a Cabinet Minister for a neighbor.

Click here to read George Lansbury’s account of time he met Lenin…

You Might Also Want to Read an Article About Lady Nancy Astor, M.P.

Click here to read about an American woman who grew heartily sick of the socialists who loitered on every street corner during the Great Depression…

A Profile of George Lansbury
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1945)

Click here to read George Lansbury’s account of time he met Lenin…

You Might Also Want to Read an Article About Lady Nancy Astor, M.P.

Click here to read about an American woman who grew heartily sick of the socialists who loitered on every street corner during the Great Depression…

VJ Day in New Orleans
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

In a city prone to revelry, New Orleans had prematurely celebrated the end of World War Two on three previous occasions; not willing to go down that path a fourth time, the residents were in a state of disbelief when the news of the Japanese surrender began to circulate all over again. However, when it was understood that this time the rumor proved true everyone seemed grateful for the rehearsal time.

Iva Toguri of California
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Throughout the course of the war in the Pacific, there were as many as twelve Japanese female radio commentators broadcasting assorted varieties of demoralizing radio programming to the American and Allied forces from Japan. However the Americans knew nothing of this collective and simply assumed that all the broadcasts were hosted by one woman, who they dubbed, Tokyo Rose.

The story told in this article begins in the late summer of 1945 when:

…one of the supreme objectives of American correspondents landing in Japan was Radio Tokyo. There they hoped to find someone to pass off as the one-and-only Rose and scoop their colleagues. When the information had been sifted a little, a girl named Iva Toguri (Iva Toguri D’Aquino: 1916 – 2006), emerged as the only candidate who came close to filling the bill. For three years she had played records, interspersed with snappy comments, beamed to Allied soldiers on the Zero Hour…Her own name for herself was Orphan Ann.