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Here is the NEWSWEEK MAGAZINE account of the defense of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge (December 16, 1944 – January 25, 1945). The article opens with a thorough explanation of General McAuliffe’s famous response to the German officers who came in search of an American surrender.
Attached is the concluding essay from a U.S. Army report written in 1986 concerning the spirited defense that was offered by the 101st Airborne Division
At Bastogne, well-coordinated combined arms teams defeated uncoordinated armored and infantry forces committed to an unrealistic plan.
Another article about this battle can be read by clicking here…
As the Battle of the Bulge reached its conclusion and the Germans resumed their retreat, British General Bernard Law Montgomery (1887 – 1976) held a press conference in which he praised the fighting abilities and the leadership skills of all those Americans who resisted the German onslaught in the Ardennes:
But when all is said and done, I shall always feel that Rundstedt was really beaten by the good fighting qualities of the American soldier…
Here is a short column that lists the impact that the American counterattack wrought upon the German forces as a result of their winter offensive during the Battle of the Bulge – no explanation was given as to how this information was attained.
The story of the German master spy who grimly plotted for sixteen years to destroy the pride of the British Navy…
We cannot conduct a Gallup poll in Germany, but we can find out by other opinion polls and from other inquiring reporters what the average German is thinking. Our reporters are the Nazis themselves. The poll is tallied daily at short-wave listening stations, among them that of the Columbia Broadcasting System. The C.B.S. corps of engineers monitors and records and interprets the voices of the enemy.
The Nazi propaganda here analyzed is a record of Nazi failure to keep the German people from thinking ‘non-German’ thoughts and failure to prevent the record from being known.
This article is illustrated with fourteen W.W. II photographs.
Assorted yarns told by liberated Allied soldiers as to the types of games played in Japanese prison camps between bouts of malaria, dysentery and gangrene:
We had a big fellow with us in camp, a guy named Chris Bell, who was 6 feet 2 and the rocky sort. The Jap guards were having a wrestling tournament at the guardhouse and they wanted Bell to come down and wrestle one of those huge sumo men. These sumo wrestlers weigh about 300 pounds and are very agile…
This was NOT the first time that a Japanese baseball team had faced Americans.
Click here to read about that game.
Suggested Reading:
POW Baseball in World War II: The National Pastime Behind Barbed Wire
Click here to read more about W.W. II prisoners of war… KEY WORDS: Forgotten Story from Yank Magazine 1942,general rommel
For the 417,034 Axis prisoners of war in this country, the War Department last week had word that repatriation was in sight. The 362,170 Germans and 49,784 Italians definitely would be home by early Spring; the 5,080 Japanese, as soon as General of the Army MacArthur was ready to receive them.
Although the attached cartoon illustrations from Volkischer Beobacher depicts a German soldier using a Panzerfaust anti-tank weapon, the intended readership was actually the old men and under-age boys who made up the out-gunned and under-manned Volkssturm militia units at the close of the war. The panzerfaust (tank fist) has been characterized as the first expendable anti-tank RPG. Also included in this file is the U.S. Army study concerning this weapon.
The Battle of the Ardennes was practically over. The salient which once poked 52 miles into Belgium from the German frontier had been ground down to a nub by last week…. The German retreated slowly and in good order. In the sleet and fog of the Ardennes they pulled back their armor and other vehicles while their artillery and infantrymen put up stiff rearguard actions.
When this article was published the war was over and Paris had experienced her second German-free autumn – but life was still difficult in the city. Coal was still rationed, the lines in the shops were long and the average French child was drastically underweight. NEWSWEEK dispatched two gumshoe reporters to get the full picture for the folks at home (where, happily, rationing had ended the the previous August).
Attached is a four page article that reported on the deserters of the U.S. Army who organized themselves into Chicago-style gangs in post-occupied Paris, replete with gun-molls, hideouts, fencing contacts and all the trimmings of a third-rate-blood-and-thunder detective story.
Written by Andy Rooney, this three column article concerned the seldom remembered efforts of a French airborne battalion that jumped into Brittany on D-Day in order to disrupt German communications.
Click here to read more about W.W. II parachute infantry…
Click here to read about the first American Paratrooper.
Reporter Robert Shaplen (1917 – 1988) filed this account of how the GIs have reacted to the strangest country they have ever encountered:
Looking at the Japanese, the average GI wonders how they ever managed to prosecute a war in the first place. Everything in Japan, even broken and blasted cities and factories, has a miniature toy-like appearance. Automobiles, the ones that are left, don’t work; trains bear little resemblance to the Twentieth Century Limited or a fast freight back home. The short, slight people are dressed poorly and drably.
There’s a ‘New Look‘ in Japan. It’s come about in the years since World War II and is largely due the result of Western influence brought about by the presence of American soldiers…More and more women are dressing in American-style clothing, although they still prefer the kimono as evening dress. Girls now are given the same education as boys. There is a new school system with grade schools, high schools and colleges modeled somewhat on the American pattern…
Some of the allure attached to the West was a result of theses guys…
This article tells the tale of the Japanese Nationalist Masaharu Kageyama (1910 – 1979), a fellow who, in the political landscape of U.S.-occupied Japan, seemed rather like the late Mussolini of Italy: always remembering the storied past of a Japan that no longer existed. Kageyama was something a flat-Earther, choosing the road of the Japanese Nationalist, he held that Emperor Hirohito was indeed divine and that the Fascist vision of an East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was achievable, even in 1949.
