Find old World War 2 articles here. We have great newspaper articles from wwii check them out today!
With the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, United States and Japanese carrier strength became nearly equal. At the same time the news that the Japanese advance was creeping down the Solomons and commencing the construction of an airfield on Guadalcanal made it advisable to undertake a limited offensive in the South Pacific.
Read about the Battle of Leyte Gulf…
An brief article by a former Chief of Naval Operations (1930 – 33), Admiral William V. Pratt praising the Pacific naval strategy of Fleet Admiral Nimitz.
General Sir Thomas A. Blamey, Australian commander of Allied ground forces in the Southwest Pacific, declared the Japs have massed 200,000 first-line troops on the approaches to Australia and might be expected to launch an offensive at any time.
April 1917 was Britain’s blackest month in the [First] World War… March 1941 seemed in many ways another grim month like April, 1917, perhaps even worse. Once more Britain faced peril on the sea – a danger which struck home deeper than any defeat of their armies on foreign soil… Not only German U-boats but German battle cruisers have crossed to the American side of the Atlantic and have already sunk some of our independently routed ships not sailing in convoy. They have sunk ships as far west as the 42nd meridian of longitude.
This is a short anecdote that recalled a slice of life on board a USN troop ship as it ferried men from one bloody atoll to the next. The two speaking parts in this drama were both officers who butted heads regularly until they understood that what united them was the welfare of the
dying young men returning from the beaches who had given their last full measure.
To read articles about W.W. II submarines, Click here.
An interesting W.W. II story was passed along by actor, announcer, producer and screenwriter John Nesbitt (1910 – 1960), who is best remembered as the narrator for the MGM radio series Passing Parade. Five months after the end of the war, Nesbitt relayed to his audience that during the Battle of the Bulge, U.S.-born Nazi agents, having been ordered to kill General Eisenhower, did not even come close to fulfilling their mission, suffered incarceration among other humiliations – all due to a lack of knowledge where American comic strips were concerned. Read on…
The American army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground rests on 72,962 acres in Aberdeen, Maryland. Since 1917 it has been the one spot where the U.S. Army puts to the test both American and foreign ordnance and in 1944 the gang at Aberdeen got a hold of a 61 1/2 ton German battle-wagon, popularly known as the Tiger Tank (PZKW-VI). This is a nicely illustrated single page article that explains what they learned.
For further reading about the Tiger Tank, click here.
Attached is the sweetest conte crayon illustration ever to depict a Tiger tank is accompanied by some vital statistics and assorted observations that were recorded by the U.S. Department of War and printed in one of their manuals in March of 1945:
This tank, originally the Pz. Kpfw. VI, first was encountered by the Russians in the last half of 1942, and by the Western Allies in Tunisia early in 1943…
Click here to read about the German King Tiger Tank.
Click here to read a 1944 article about the Tiger Tank.
Merchant Marine William T. Mitchell, having been locked-up for three and half years in a Japanese POW camp, recalled those terrible days intermittently as he explains what it was like to return to a changed America. One of the amusing stories concerned a time when his captors assembled the camp to announce [falsely] that movie stars Judy Garland and Deanna Durbin had been killed:
The Nips had lied to us, and I fell for it. You believe anything – almost – when you’re cut off from your home.
That administering government agency charged with the management of the Japanese-American internment camps was the War Relocation Authority
…I’m putting it mildly when I say that it makes my blood boil…We shall fight this injustice, intolerance and un-Americanism at home! We will not break faith with those who died…We have fought the Japanese and are recuperating to fight again. We can endure the hell of battle, but we are resolved not to be sold out at home.
The attached article is a swell piece of journalism that truly catches the spirit of home front America. You will read about the war-weary Hollywood that existed between the years 1941-1945 and the movie shortages, the hair-pin rationing, the rise of the independent producers and the ascent of Van Johnson (4-F slacker) 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
Another article about wartime Washington can be read here… Click here to read about the end of the Great Depression…
Washington, D.C. has always been described as a pretty dull place and the only ones who ever seem to feel differently must have had a good deal of experiences in far worse locations. In this case, I am referring to Iowa and the war-torn portions of the South Pacific, which are the only two locations this YANK journalist had ever called home; so he liked Washington just fine. The author in question, Sergeant Merle Miller (1919 – 1986), does not ramble on about historic bone-yards or any other pedantic clap-trap, but rather presents useful information that a G.I. can apply to his life:
Of course, getting a fair date while you’re in town is no problem. A Canadian newspaperman recently discovered that, judging from ration-book requests, there are 82,000 single girls of what he called the right marrying age of 20 to 24 in town, and only 26,000 men of the same age Therefore, he concluded, a girl has only about a 30-percent chance of getting a husband — or, for that matter, a date
The missing period at the close of the article, I assume, is due entirely to war-time shortages.
To read about the VJ-Day celebrations in Washington, click here.
By the time this article appeared on paper, the defeated Germans had been living among the soldiers of four different military powers for two years: the British, the French, the Russians and the Americans – each army had their own distinct personality and the Teutonic natives knew them well. With that in mind, an American reporter decided to put the question to them as to what they thought of these squatters – what did they like most about them and what did the detest most about them?
The Germans did not truly believe that the Americans were there friends until they proved themselves during the Berlin Blockade; click here to read about that…
Even though the war had ended some four months earlier, the American people were still receiving envelopes from the Department of War about the deaths and maimings of their sons when this article appeared.
These columns reported that peacetime took some getting used to, but day by day, the nation was slowly swinging into its post-war stride.
What if the Atomic Bomb had never been invented? When would the war have ended?
Articles about the daily hardships in post-war Germany can be read by clicking here.
If you’ve been looking for a manifesto that would serve as a document of intention for the entire mass of Americans who make up the Greatest Generation, you might have found it.
While the other articles on VJ-Day on this site illustrate well the pure joy and delight that was experienced by so many that day, this editorial cautions the G.I. readers to remember all that they have learned from the war while laying the groundwork for the policy that would check Soviet expansion all over the globe.
During the Summer of 1943, James F. Byrenes, FDR’s Director of the Office of Economic Stabilization, gave a report on the wartime production output for that period. 1943 proved to have been a turning point for the Allied war efforts on both fronts.
A day by day account by Private George Groh, a member of the 101st Airborne, who joined the 1944 Normandy Invasion as a glider-infantryman.
