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Find old World War 2 articles here. We have great newspaper articles from wwii
take a look today!
“Wainwright never had a fighting chance in his last command in the Philippines… But in those last few days he demonstrated his fine soldiery demeanor, leadership, courage, and resourcefulness.”
“The Fall of Corregidor (May 6, 1942) marked the end of an epic fight that won acclaim from Allied leaders the world over. The most heartfelt tribute came from Gen. MacArthur in Australia: ‘… But through the bloody haze of the last reverberating shot I shall always seem to see the vision of its grim, gaunt and ghostly men, still unafraid.'”
Four years after Pearl Harbor, the editors of the Japanese newspaper Asahi gazed out of the windows from their offices and saw the charred remains of their enemy-occupied homeland and recognized that they’d made a fatal mistake:
We once more refresh our horror at the colossal crime committed and are filled with a solemn sense of reflection and self-reproach…
During the closing days of the war in Europe, U.S. Representative Clinton P. Anderson (D. NM. 1890 – 1975) adhered to the many cries of his constituents and looked into the possibility that the American military had abused the trust placed in them concerning allocation of meat.
War Correspondent Ernie Pyle (1900 – 1945) earned his fame by writing about the American Army in North Africa, Italy and France. In April of 1945 he was embedded with the Marines when they invaded Okinawa. To his surprise, sharing foxholes with Marines in Asia was no different from sharing foxholes with GIs in Europe.
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.
“The main Japanese war trials started with the indictment on April 29 of twenty-eight political and military leaders on fifty-five counts charging crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and ‘conventional’ war crimes… The twenty-eight accused war criminals were formally arraigned before an eleven-nation tribunal presided over by Chief Justice Sir William Webb of Great Britain on May 3 and 4.
“Under the supervision of Allied occupation authorities, Japan made more substantial recovery during 1946 than any of the other defeated Axis powers.”
The W.W. II portion of the USO came to a close in 1947. However, it soon started up again when it became clear that the Cold War era draft still required their services.
“In December 1945, SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers) issued a sweeping directive demanding that Japanese peasants be freed from the burden of absentee landlordism, oppressive debt, discriminatory taxation, usury and other evils that had plagued the Japanese peasants for centuries.”
“On June 30, 1946 the central office of the War Relocation Authority [an arm of the Department of the Interior] closed on schedule with substantial completion of its war-time task of providing ‘relocation, maintenance, and supervision’ of the 120,313 persons of Japanese ancestry who were in its custody as a result of the War Department’s evacuation in 1942 of the West Coast. Of this number, 5,981 were born in the ten relocation centers maintained by the Authority.”
In the wake of the SCOTUS opinion, Korematsu v. U.S., some talk could be heard about the return of the Japanese Americans to the previous homes. This article examines the anti-Nisei attitudes in two Western states, California and Oregon. It was the conclusion that the former had become a bit more tolerant and the later a bit worse (sadly the last paragraphs, printed on brittle brown paper, withered away in our hand.)
In 1943, Twentieth Century Fox released a movie that told the story of one of the earlies heroes of the war, The Sullivans. These five Iowa brothers enlisted in the U.S. Navy just three weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack. Assigned to the cruiser Juneau, three were killed that summer during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (1942), and the two others died the next day. The nation as a whole was very moved by this saga and cherished their memory.
“Five unknown actors play the Sullivan lads. And because their faces are fresh and new, they seem amazingly convincing and real.”
War correspondent Martha Gellhorn (1908 – 1998) filed this article concerning her observations and insights gleaned at the Nuremberg Trials:
“The second charge against these twenty-one men was crimes against peace. War is the crime against peace. War is the silver bombers, with the young men in them, who never wanted to kill anyone, flying in the morning sun over Germany and not coming back. War is the sinking ship and the sailors drowning in a flaming sea on the way to Murmansk. War is the casualty lists and bombed ruins and refugees, frightened and homeless and tired to death, on all the roads.”
The Germans we fought in World War Two were very different from the ones we fought twenty-one years earlier.
