World War Two – Page 2 – Old Magazine Articles

Linda Darnell Downsizes
(Collier’s Magazine, 1943)

Everyone on the home front was used to making sacrifices, and Hollywood star Linda Darnell (1923 – 1965) was no exception:

“Allowances must be made for Linda Darnell who has been sorely tried. Instead of six servants, she now has two – and she hears strange sounds from the kitchen that convince her she will soon be alone. Her chauffer has been drafted; her butler is working at Lockheed. Her flower gardens are a wreck because the Japs who once tended them are in internment camps… ‘Why, this gas rationing… it’s worse than being bombed!'”

The Pampered Axis Prisoners
(United States News, 1945)

“There are reports that these prisoners are often pampered, that they are getting cigarettes when Americans civilians cannot get them, that they are being served by American soldiers, that they are often not working at a time when war workers are scarce. The general complaint is that the 46,000 American prisoners in Germany are not faring as well as the 300,000 Germans in this country.”

The Growth of the U.S. Navy
(Newsweek Magazine, 1942)

The attached article pertains to the amazing speed at which the U.S. Navy was able to add new fighting ships to the fleet between December, 1941 and December, 1942.

The Home front Knuckles Under
(Collier’s Magazine, 1942)

Having heard from assorted armchair generals, radio oracles and ink-stained bums that the heart of the American home front was not in the fight, journalist Quentin Reynolds bought some train tickets to scour the country and see if it was true.

It wasn’t.

Click here to read about the rationing of makeup.

An American-Style Concentration Camp
(Coronet Magazine, 1942)

An optimistic article from 1942 that asks us to look for the sunny side of the Japanese American internment camps – after all, they never had it so good!

A Great Cheer from Coast to Coast
(PM Tabloid, 1945)

An anonymous reporter relays all that came across his desk in the way of wild victory celebrations on VJ Day. Spread out over 14 paragraphs are eyewitness accounts of the pandemonium that spread across the nation when the news arrived that the war was over.

More Letters from the German Home Front

“The information in letters found on the German dead, intimate and personal as it is, leads to some striking deductions.

More Letters from the German Home Front
(American Magazine, 1942)

“The information in letters found on the German dead, intimate and personal as it is, leads to some striking deductions. The people inside Germany hate the war and want it to end. They are tired of hardships, sick of sacrifice. They lament the moral disintegration of their young women; they shudder at air raids; they weep over their dead. But nowhere do they betray the least suggestion of German guilt or regret for horrors which the German armies perpetrate on conquered countries. Hard as is their life, they know neither starvation nor desperation. Nor do they expect Germany to lose the war. To expect them at this time to revolt against Hitler is as futile and puerile to expect the Fuehrer to live up to his promises or the treatise he signs.”

Richard Wright on the Black Home Front
(Coronet Magazine, 1942)

Black author Richard Wright (1908 – 1960) clearly delineated for the readers of Coronet why African American participation in W.W. II was of great importance to the Black community.

Opinions on the Early Home Front
(Newsweek Magazine, 1942)

Newsweek‘s Raymond Moley (1886 – 1975) took a serious look at the year that had just passed, 1941, and concluded that the American people, as a whole, had had embraced the war as their own personal problem. He was impressed with the gravity with which the home front solved the problems that war brought to their doorsteps:

“The pre-Pearl Harbor issue has been liquidated, not because of an act of national will power. It had faded before the immediate tasks of war. The new year brought so many jobs to do, so many problems to grapple with that there was no time to remember 1941… At no time in the year has there been a real failure on the part of Americans to appreciate the gravity of the war job.”

One Year of War
(Newsweek Magazine, 1942)

“In the twelve months since Pearl Harbor the American family has begun
to experience war on the home front. Almost a full year has passed before gasoline rationing was extended to the entire country. More than a year will have passed before meat rationing begins next month. The sugar pinch has been only a gentle nip. The full extent of the fuel shortage has yet to be measured against the severity of the weather. The sign ‘one per customer’ appears on more and more shelves in the corner grocery, but except for extra cups of coffee the average menu isn’t too far from prewar. Thanksgiving of 1942 was hardly less than the usual feast day.”

”The New Order” in Japan
(Collier’s Magazine, 1941)

After reading this 1941 article you will come away with a full understanding as to how misguided Imperial Japan was to enter into a war with the United States and the British Empire. At the time of the printing, Japan had been engaged in its second war with a very underdeveloped China; even though Japan had held the momentum in that war, it had still driven the Japanese into a life of highly uncomfortable rationing, which would only get worse as their new war expanded.

The Axis PR Machine and the Pearl Harbor Attack
(PM Tabloid, 1941)

“The German and Italian propaganda ministries did their customary sister act today, shrieking in unison that it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who started the war in the Pacific. But they didn’t accuse the President of bombing Pearl Harbor.”

The Nation’s Capital as ‘Boomtown’
(American Legion Magazine, 1943)

“Every day in Washington, and twice on Sundays, there will be parades. You love parades. You’ll never get tired of turning out for bands, even though they always stop playing just as they get opposite you…. Anyhow, there will always be the feel of parades in Washington, and the echoes of martial music, and the sight of waving flags. Where else, oh where elese, could they sing so fervently God Bless America?”

One Year of Military Expansion
(Newsweek Magazine, 1942)

When President Franklin Roosevelt declared war on December 8, 1941 – he was not the only one to do so; judging by the content of the attached article, and numerous others on this site, 100,000 other Americans did the same thing. This article is about the rapid growth of the United Sates military that took place between December of 1941 through December of 1942 – and boy, did it grow.

The Sherman
(Newsweek Magazine, 1942)

“‘We’re so far ahead of that Heinie in tank design and production that he’s never going to catch us’ – that was the opinion expressed by Major General Levin H. Campbell (1886 – 1976), the War Department’s Ordnance Chief, in an interview in New York last week. He quoted a British officer as saying that the American M-4 General Sherman tank is the ‘answer to a tankman’s prayer.'”

Fort Des Moines
(Liberty Magazine, 1942)

“When recruits in the new Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps – commonly dubbed WAACS – reported for training at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, women for the first time in American history became members of Uncle Sam’s Army.”

(The title concerning “the first woman in the Uncle Sam’s Army” is believed to go to a lass named Deborah Sampson who served in George Washington’s army in 1781, under the name “Robert Shurtliff”.)

Berliners Under the Bombs
(Liberty Magazine, 1944)

A Turkish diplomat explains all that he saw in the war-weary Berlin of 1944:

“You see children wildly seeking for their mothers, wives wildly seeking for their husbands. Women carry dead children in their arms and children weep beside their dead mothers.