World War Two – Page 38 – Old Magazine Articles

Fresh Meat Delivery System for Italian Troops
(Click Magazine, 1938)

This is a highly amusing collection of photos depicting the seldom remembered Para-Sheep of the Italian Army during their adventures in Ethiopia. It would seem that Italian grunts simply would not stomach canned food the way other infantrymen were able to do at the time and so it was decided that sheep would be individually rigged with parachutes and tossed out of planes, where they would be butchered and cooked by the Mussolini’s finest. The accompanying paragraph explains that even a bull had been air-dropped for the same purpose.
Take a look.

VJ-Day in London
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

…There were crowds in Piccadilly Circus and Leicester and Trafalgar Squares. Quite a few people got rid of their waste paper by throwing it out the windows, a sign that the need for saving such things for the war effort was just about over.

Click here to rrad about VE-Day in London.

VE-Day in London
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Hundreds of GIs were gathered at the Rainbow Corner Red Cross Club in Piccadilly when bundles of Stars and Stripes extras were tossed out free. The paper bore a huge banner headline, ‘Germany Quits!’ and contained the official Ministry of Information announcement which all England had just heard on the air.

News of the Reich’s final and complete surrender found Piccadilly, Marble Arch and other popular intersections jammed with people. At first incredulous, the cautious British worked up to a pitch of demonstrative joy…

Click here to read about VJ-Day in London.

Hiroshima
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Walking into Hiroshima in broad daylight, wearing an American uniform and knowing that you were one of the first Americans the people in that utterly ruined city had laid eyes on since the bombing, was not a comfortable feeling.

After the war it was discovered that one quarter of the Hiroshima dead were Koreans who were there as slave laborers.

The October 3, 1946 issue of the Atlanta Constitution ran a front page headline declaring that Imperial Japan had successfully tested their own Atom Bomb during the summer of ’45. Click here to read more on this topic.

Click here to read General Marshal’s opinions regarding the Atomic Bomb.

The German Portable Pillbox
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

No doubt about it: for the fashionable, young Deutchen Soldaten on the go, the preferred choice in pillboxes is the portable variety! And you’d best believe that when those slide-rule jockeys back in Berlin lent their lobes to what the trendy book-burning crowed in Italy and Russia were saying, they jumped to it and created this dandy, 6,955 pound mobile pillbox that was capable of being planted almost anywhere. Better living through modern design!

The Battle of Berlin
(Newsweek Magazine, 1943)

The long-awaited climax of the great Allied air offensive against Germany came like a thunderclap last week. It was the opening of the Battle of Berlin… According to the [British Ministry of Economic Warfare], the Germans have evacuated nonessential civilians (children, invalids and the aged) just as the British had from London three years before. But all evidence indicated that government officials and essential workers still remained in the German capital.

Berlin police counted 5,680 dead.

More on the bombing of Germany can be read here…

German Half-Tracks and Recon Cars
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

Four pictures and few well-chosen words concerning a German command and reconnaissance car as well as two Nazi half-tracks (one capable of carrying ten men, the other twelve).

Click here to read about the American Army half-tracks.

M8 Greyhound Armored Car
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

Here is the skinny on the Ford Motor Company’s M8 Greyhound Armored Car as it was presented to the olive-clad readers of YANK MAGAZINE in the summer of 1944:

Armored Car, M8, 6×6: the Army’s latest combat vehicle, is a six-wheeled, eight-ton armored job that can hit high speeds over practically any type of terrain. It mounts a 37-mm cannon and a .30-caliber machine gun in a hand-operated traversable turret…

The BMW Motorcycle Examined
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

All global tensions aside, the U.S. Army could not find any faults at all with the motorcycles that BMW was making for Adolf Hitler during World War II. After having spent much time testing and re-testing the thing, they reluctantly concluded, This is as good as any motorcycle in the world (it was probably a bit better…).

Click here to read about the firm belief held by the German Army concerning the use of motorcycles in modern war.

How to Drive W.W. II Axis Vehicles
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

This posting remarks about a number of concerns: assorted factoids about the German PZKW II tank and it’s 1944 down-graded status as an offensive weapon to a reconnaissance car; tips for GIs as to how to drive German vehicles and, finally, the German interest in salvaging tank parts from captured enemy armor:

VJ Day in an American P.O.W. Camp
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

A short column filed by an eye-witness in Manila who described well the profound sense of melancholy that descended upon the W.W. II Japanese prisoners of war when they had learned of the Japanese surrender.

Click here if you would like to read an article about the Japanese surrender proceedings in Tokyo Bay.

Click here to read more articles about the liberation of Paris in 1944.

The Japanese Surrender Proceedings
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

We are gathered here, representatives of the major warring powers, to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored.

Those were the words of General Douglas MacArthur when he opened the Japanese Surrender Proceedings on board the deck of the American battleship, U.S.S. Missouri on the morning of September 2, 1945. This report was filed by Yank correspondent Dale Kramer, who amusingly noted that all concerned were dressed in a manner fitting the occasion, with the exception of the American officers who (oddly) seemed unable to locate their neckties that morning.

Click here if you would like to read about the atomic blast over the Japanese city of Nagasaki.

Click here to read articles about post-war Japan.

Click here to read about August 28, 1945 – the day the American occupation began.

The Enrolled Students at the Internment Camps
(U.S. Government, 1943)

The attached chart shows the total number of elementary and high school students who were enrolled at the ten Japanese-American internment camps during the period leading up to March, 1943.

Who was Kilroy?
(Various Sources, 1945 -7)

The three articles attached herein serve as good examples that illustrate the wide-spread curiosity found in most quarters of the United States as to who was this G.I. who kept writing KILROY WAS HERE on so many walls, both foreign and domestic, during the past three and a half years of war? It was not simply the returning veterans who felt a need to know, but the folks who had toiled on the home front as well.

Is your name Anderson?

Nazi Justice On American Soil
(Newsweek Magazine, 1944)

Here was the first report on the kangaroo courts that were held at frequent intervals in the American POW camps that housed captured German soldiers and sailors. It seems that it was a common practice to level the charge of treason on one of the inmates, put him in the docket where, just like the courts at home, he would fail to present an adequate defense and soon find himself condemned to death by his fellows. Beaten to death by his former compatriots, the corpse would then be presented to the American camp authorities who would see to the burial.

Click here to read about the actual event…

Training Marines in San Diego
(Leatherneck Magazine, 1943)

Originally published in the Stars & Stripes of the U.S. Marine Corps, The Leatherneck, this is an interesting eight page article illustrated with fifteen photographs regarding the dramatic growth in that institution that took place in the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack.

Click here to read a CLICK MAGAZINE article about the Marines of W.W. II.

Articles about the W.W. I Marines can be read HERE…

Read what the U.S. Army psychologists had to say about courage in war.
Read what the editors of YANK MAGAZINE thought about the Marine Corps Magazine, LEATHERNECK…

Read about the Women Marines of W.W. II HERE.

Aerial Gunnery School
(Click Magazine, 1943)

World War II terms such as tail gunner, waist gunner and belly gunner are no longer a part of our vocabulary; they are uttered, if at all, about as often as the word blacksmith. However, since you found this website, there is a good chance that you use these terms more often than most – which means you’ll appreciate the attached color photo-essay from 1943 illustrating how vital W.W. II Allied aerial gunners were in winning the air war over Germany and Japan.

Commercial Profits Generated Within the Camps
(U.S. Government, 1944)

Even under the gloomy conditions of the camps the wheels of commerce continued to turn ~and they turned out an impressive $3,526,851.77! As can clearly be seen in the plans of the camps that are offered on this site, the camps all had commercial districts where the interned families could purchase needed goods and services; the ten Japanese-American internment camps had 160 businesses operating within their gates that managed to employ 1,853 souls. The attached chart from the 1944 records of the War Relocation Authority serves to illustrate the productivity of all these assorted commercial operations that had once thrived in the camps.