Newsweek – Page 3 – Old Magazine Articles

Posters For Encouragement
(Newsweek Magazine, 1942)

There were many varieties of posters to be found on the American home front of W.W. II – most depicting sweaty barrel-chested young men. Yet in the factories another type was prevalent, these were the ones that showed the non-heroic faces of the average American worker. Below these images would be found simple quotes declaring their unique patriotic reasons for laboring on the production lines. This article recalls who dreamed them up and how popular they were.

Adultery on the Home Front
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

The overlords of the Illinois justice system became so fed-up with the growing divorce rate in their state as a result of wives who stepped-out while their husbands were fighting overseas, and they decided to do something about it. The Illinois Attorney General proposed a plan:

Penalties for conviction range from $500 fine or a year in jail or both for the first offense to $3,000 fine or three years in jail or both for a third conviction.

The Addict’s Plight
(Newsweek Magazine, 1942)

The war in the Pacific interrupted the flow of illegal narcotics to the United States. By the Spring of 1942 opioids were becoming scarcer and the prices were predicted to rise. Drug suppliers turned to an untested source closer to home: Latin America.

Click here to read aboutdrug addiction in the Twenties.

A Failed Peace Movement
(Newsweek Magazine, 1944)

We were terribly surprised to learn of a peace movement that existed on the 1944 American home front. Baring an awkward name that was right out of Seventiespeak, Peace Now printed pamphlets that played the class game so prevalent in the other leftist organizations that would come forth twenty years later.

Japan’s War Against The Home Front
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

When World War II was inching toward it’s bloody conclusion, Japan launched its Fu-go Campaign – a project designed to deploy thousands of high-altitude hydrogen balloons armed with incendiary devices. These balloons were to follow the westerly winds of the upper atmosphere, drifting to the west coast of North America where they were expected descend into the forests and explode.

The Japanese home front suffered from tuberculosis – click here to read about it…

D-Day On The Home Front
(Newsweek Magazine, 1944)

By the dawn’s early light America awoke to the knowledge that its D-Day had come. Electricity meters clocked a sudden spurt in kilowatt loads as house lights and radios went on; telephone switchboards jammed as excited householders passed the word along. By morning on June 6, scarcely a family failed to know that the nation’s sons and brothers, husbands and sweethearts were even then storming the beaches of Normandy to begin the Allied liberation of Europe.

Click here to read about D-Day…

The Drive On Berlin
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

– two books from Amazon:Read more …

Living Under the Bombs
(Newsweek Magazine, 1941)

Here is one of the reviews of Pattern of Conquest, a book by Joseph C. Harsch (1905 – 1998) – a CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR correspondent who had been posted to Germany during the earliest years of the war:

Harsch says that German morale is ‘fundamentally unsound’ however, and that it took a bad beating when the RAF first bombed Berlin, which Marshal Goering had said would happen only ‘over his dead body’. (‘Have you heard the news?’ Berliners asked each other, after the first raids. ‘Goering’s dead.’)

Click here to read about the 1943 bombing campaign against Germany.

‘Eighth Over Berlin”
(Newsweek Magazine, 1944)

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.

The Zoot Suit
(Newsweek Magazine, 1942)

This article tells of the origin and fast times of the zoot suit. Although the garment was popularized by Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles, it had it’s origins in Harlem, New York, where it was known as the root suit.

A Patriotic Argument for Shorter Skirts
(Newsweek Magazine, 1941)

Months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Washington was gearing-up for the fight by restricting the availability of certain fabrics to the fashion industry and diverting these materials to the defense industry. This started an open discussion in fashion circles as to whether it would simply be best to raise the hemlines until the national emergency was over.

The Fashion Originators Guild termed shorter skirts silly and added that dresses ‘are just as short today as decency and grace will permit.

The Soviets Bombed Berlin, Too
(Newsweek Magazine, 1941)

This Newsweek article reported on the first Red Air Force bombing raid on the city of Berlin (August 11, 1941). The Soviets kept the pressure up for a few more weeks until their airfield was overrun in September.

Novelty ”Victory Fashion” Makes An Appearance
(Newsweek Magazine, 1941)

It’s hard to believe – but Victory Fashion hit the American home front before it was even called the home front. However by mid-1941 Americans were pretty outraged by fascist aggression: the U-boats, London bombed, Nanking ravaged, France invaded – the list goes on. When this article went to press, we were not in the war but we were firmly on the Allied side. The word victory made its way into fashion circles and the nation’s couturiers began turning out novelty accessories and garments. Even the hairdressers contributed.

The Capture of Laval
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

The game was up. At the Prat de Llobregat airfield outside Barcelona the traitor sat heavily on a camp stool, waiting for the reprieve. It did not come. The Franco government had found Pierre Laval too hot to handle… Laval shrugged: ‘I suppose if Petain can face the music, I can’. But later he shouted: ‘It is unfair… delivering me to my country.’

More about Laval can be read here

The First Wave
(Newsweek Magazine, 1944)

Down ramp!‘ shouted the coxswain from the elevated stern.

Down it came with a clank and splash. Ahead – and it seemed at that moment miles off – stretched the sea wall. At Lieutenant Crisson’s insistence we had all daubed our faces with commando black. I charged out with the rest, trying to look fierce and desperate, only to step into a shell hole and submerge myself in the channel. Luckily my gear was too wet and stinking to put on so I was light enough to come up.

This Newsweek journalist was the only allied war correspondent to have witnessed the derring-do of those in the first wave.

Japan: More power For The Military
(Newsweek Magazine, 1937)

As 1936 came to an end in Tokyo, the aftershocks of the February 26, 1936 failed military coup could still be felt throughout the halls of Japan’s Government. The uprising of the military hardliners resulted in four assassinations and a suicide before the constitutional powers regained control. This article covers a more peaceful dust-up on the Parliament floor – and when it was concluded the Generals had the upper hand.

Still the country’s most privileged class, military leaders – modern equivalent of the Samurai, medieval knights – can exert pressure on the government by reason of a 42-year-old imperial edict: the War and Navy Ministries must be headed by army and navy officers; if either resigns, the Cabinet falls.

The Redhead, The Blonde and the Brunette
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

This brief column tells the story of three women war correspondents who marched at the point of the spear alongside the American infantry in order to report on the collapse of Hitler’s Germany. The correspondents in question were:

• Lee Carson in Remagen

• Iris Carpenter in Remagen

• Ann Stringer in the city of Bonn

The Work Starts
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

As the American occupation forces began to pour in and spread throughout the cities and countryside of Japan, both occupied and occupier slowly get to learn of the other. The cordial attitude of the Japanese leads General MacArthur to conclude that the military presence need not be as large as he had once believed:

Curious and awed, increasingly friendly Japanese flocked to watch what they called the ‘race of giants’ at work.