Coronet Magazine – Page 4 – Old Magazine Articles

What was Yank Magazine?
(Newsweek & Coronet Magazines)

Inasmuch as OldMagazineArticles.com is devoted to archiving the articles from the olde Yank, we are also keen on posting article about the magazine and its editorial policies, for few periodicals said as much about that generation and their lot in the Forties better than Yank. Attached is a photo essay from Coronet Magazine, illustrated with some 23 images, that tell the tale of how that weekly operated.

When W.W. II came to a close Yank Magazine was no more, this article was written –

The Book that Shook the Kremlin
(Coronet Magazine, 1959)

How Pasternak’s Russian novel, Doctor Zhivago (1957), came to be published was not your standard bourgeois affair involving manuscripts sent by certified mail to charming book agents who host long, wet lunches – quite the contrary. As the journalist noted in the attached article: It is an intriguing story involving the duplicity of one Italian communist who gleefully deceived a multitude Soviets favoring that the work be buried forever.

American Fascists Exposed
(Coronet Magazine, 1944)

This is a wonderful read. Writing under the name John Ray Carlson, the journalist Arthur Derounian (1909 – 1991) went under cover into the seedy world of American fascist organizations and discovered that they all spoke with each other. Having impressed the German Bundists, he moved quickly up the ranks of American fascism and was soon given the task of uniting every antisemitic, anti-democratic, pro-fascist clique in the country. Here is a list of some of the groups he was in contact with during his four years in the underground: America First, the American Vigilant Intelligence Federation, American Nationalist Party, Chicago Patriot’s Bureau, New England Christian Front, National Workers League, Detroit Mothers, American Mothers, Yankee Freeman and Mothers of the United States of America. He finally found himself in the company of Lawrence Dennis, a creepy book-worm who was known in those low circles as the dean of American fascism.

Adolf Hitler and the German-Americans
(Coronet Magazine, 1941)

This is a fascinating article not simply for what you’ll learn about Hitler, but for what you’ll additionally learn about the manner in which many Germans tended to view that queerest of hybrids, the German-Americans.

This article was written by Rene Kraus, who had been a German diplomat during the Wiemar Republic and a refugee under Hitler.

Click here to read about the German-Americans who called themselves Nazis.

Click here and you will learn that Kaiser Wilhelm was also bugged by German-Americans.

Tales of the O.S.S.
(Coronet Magazine, 1964)

“He was all in gray: a gray suit and tie, gray hair and blue-gray eyes. He was about 60 years old, I judged, and thus seven or eight years my senior. He was not a military figure – but somewhat pear-shaped, with pudgy hands and a thickset neck. Powerful, I thought, but rather overweight.”
“His voice was a surprise – softspoken, beautifully modulated. ‘I’m Colonel Donovan…'”

Letters from the German Home Front
(Coronet Magazine, 1943)

The misery that lingered over the W.W. II German home front is well documented and many of the issues concerning melancholy, hunger and thirst can be read in the attached assortment of letters that were pulled from the bloodied uniforms of the thousands of dead Nazi soldiers that surrounded the city of Stalingrad in 1943. These personal correspondences by German parents, wives and sweethearts present a thorough look at the dreariness that lingered over the German home front.

The B-17
(Coronet Magazine, 1959)

The B-17 Flying Fortress was the most fabulous combat plane ever built. Like Douglas’ unretireable DC-3 airliner, the B-17 is history written in metal, a pivot of progress which helped influence an entire generation.

Perhaps more than any other plane, the B-17 beat Hitler. Its 640,036 tons of bombs on Europe, nearly the total dropped by all other U.S. planes combined, knocked out much of his industry, oil and railroads… The B-17 unveiled the era of strategic air power and turned man’s eye to the stratosphere and beyond.

Click here to read about the P-47 fighter plane.

Fashion Modeling in the 1940s
(Coronet Magazine, 1944)

Inasmuch as this 1944 article sums up the bygone world of the New York fashion model, the terms heroin chic and bulimia are not found on any of it’s five pages (an over site, no doubt). The Forties were a time when a model would be just as likely to get a booking from a commercial artist as she would a photographer, and, unlike the Twenties and the earliest days of the Thirties, it was a time when a standardized image of beauty was well-established.

– five feet nine inches in height, weight 110 pounds, bust 33, waist 24, hips 34, blonde or a light shade of brown hair. She will have quick, clever eyes and a very expressive face.
Many of the models are bitter, unhappy girls inside. They soon grow disillusioned with their dream of modeling as a gateway to theatrical glory; they learn that their height is against them.

Read about the attack of the actress/models!

A Pat on the Back for the GIs
(Coronet Magazine, 1945)

So they’ve given up.

They’re finally done in, and the rat is dead in an alley back of the the Wilhelmstrasse.

Take a Bow, GI – take a bow, little guy.

Far-flung ordinary men, unspectacular but free, rousing out of their habits and their homes – got up early one morning, flexed their muscles, learned the manual of arms (as amateurs) and set out across perilous oceans to whop the bejeepers out of the professionals.

And they did.

In Search of the Average New Yorker
(Coronet Magazine, 1941)

A well-known writer consulted many different sources about that rarest of species, the New Yorker – he came away with these many different replies:

Yeah. New Yorkers are suckers, all right. They think they are so much smarter than anybody else, but they’re the biggest suckers of them all.

‘Why I Compare LBJ with my Father, FDR”
(Coronet Magazine, 1964)

Doesn’t LBJ remind you of FDR?‘

That’s the question I hear most of these days. He does, and touring through the poverty-stricken states of Appalachia with President Johnson, I saw why.
– so wrote Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. (1914 – 1988) in the attached article that was penned some 23 years after his father’s death.

Killing
(Coronet Magazine, 1944)

A World War Two article by a young Polish guerrilla who graphically explains what it is like to kill a man, an experience he abhors:

…then all at once he gave a shiver and relaxed, I released my grip and he fell to the ground.

Julian Bond
(Coronet Magazine, 1970)

From time to time, certain young politicians suddenly capture the attention of their fellow Americans. One such individual is 30-year-old Julian Bond (1940 – 2015), a Negro legislator in the state of Georgia House of Representatives.

New York Beneath a Bombsight
(Coronet Magazine, 1941)

When this article hit the newsstands, W.W. II was in full swing throughout many parts of Asia, Europe and North Africa. America had not yet committed itself to the war, but the grim, far-seeing souls who ran New York City recognized that it was inevitable – and much to their credit, they had been studying the possibility of New York City air raids since 1939.

Another article about wartime N.Y. can be read here…

Click here to learn about the New Yorkers who volunteered to fight the Germans and Japanese in W.W. II.

Has Germany Forgotten Anne Frank?
(Coronet Magazine, 1960)

In this article the proud father of Anne Frank, Otto Frank (1889 – 1980), explains that by the late Fifties it seemed more and more teenagers were contacting him to say that very few parents or teachers seemed willing to discuss the Nazi years in Germany. These inquiries were too often dismissed as bothersome or simply brushed away with hasty answers like, The Nazis built the Autobahns.

Otto Frank points out that this was not always the case, and goes on to recall that there existed a more sympathetic and regretful Germany for at least a decade after the war. Yet, in 1960 he sensed that there existed a subtle movement to whitewash Hitler; a battle was being waged for the mind of this teenage generation.

From Amazon: A German Generation

Click here to read about the inmate rebellions that took place at Auschwitz, Sobibor and Triblinka.

How Tokyo Learned of Hiroshima
(Coronet Magazine, 1946)

Shortly after Tokyo’s capitulation, an advance team of American Army researchers were dispatched to Hiroshima to study the effects that the Atom Bomb had on that city. What we found most interesting about this reminiscence was the narrative told by a young Japanese Army major as to how Tokyo learned of the city’s destruction:

Again and again the air-raid defense headquarters called the army wireless station at Hiroshima. No answer. Something had happened to Hiroshima…

How I was Saved
(Coronet Magazine, 1951)

No doubt, the most glam passenger to survive the Titanic disaster was the fashion designer Lady Duff-Gordon (1863 – 1935: a.k.a. Lucile). Attached is the great couturier’s account describing the pandemonium she witnessed on deck, the screams heard as Titanic began her plunge and the sun coming up the next morning:

I shall never forget the beauty of that April dawn, stealing over the cold Atlantic, lighting up the icebergs till they looked like giant opals. As we saw other boats rowing alongside, we imagined that most passengers on the Titanic had been saved, like us; not one of us even guessed the appalling truth…

‘Uranium-235: Can It Win the War?”
(Coronet Magazine, 1942)

Three years before terms such as Enola Gay and Atom Bomb would become household words, this five page article appeared in an American magazine informing the folks on the home front that this monstrosity was being developed silently behind the scenes.

We have no doubt that the FBI was knocking at the publisher’s door the very second that the issue appeared on the newsstands.