1945

Articles from 1945

70,000 American Prisoners of War (PM Tabloid, 1945)

In a manly display of boastful trash-talking a few weeks before VE-Day, the over-burdened P.R. offices of the German high command issued a statement indicating that their military had in their possession some 70,000 U.S Prisoners of war. This was in contrast to the records kept by the Pentagon whose best guess stood in the neighborhood of 48,000.

The statement revealed that 27 of the 78 prisoner of war camps in Germany have been overrun by the Red Army and U.S./British forces, and that 15,000 Yanks have been liberated.

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The Pershing M26 Tank (Yank Magazine, 1945)

Although the the Pershing M26 didn’t get into the fighting in Europe until very late in the game (March, 1945), it was long enough to prove itself. This new 43-toner is the Ordnance Department’s answer to the heavier German Tiger. It mounts a 90-mm high-velocity gun, equipped with a muzzle-brake, as opposed to the 88-mm on a Tiger.

The M26 Pershing tank was the one featured in the movie, Fury (2014).

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One of the First Letters to the Editor in Favor of the Bomb (Yank Magazine, 1945)

Apparently the arguments that we still hear today concerning whether or not use of the Atomic Bomb in 1945 was justifiable popped-up right away. The following is a letter to the editor of Yank Magazine written by a hard-charging fellow who explained that he was heartily sick of reading the

-pious cries of horror [that] come from the musty libraries of well-fed clergymen and from others equally far removed from the war.

One of the First Letters to the Editor in Favor of the Bomb (Yank Magazine, 1945) Read More »

American GIs Meet the Reds on the Elbe (Newsweek & Yank Magazines, 1945)

In late April of 1945, American tank crews south of Torgau (Germany) began to pick up the chattering of Soviet infantry units on their radios – the transmissions were generated by the advanced units of Marshal Konev’s (1897 – 1973) First Ukrainian Army and both the allied units were elated to know that the other was nearby, for it meant one thing: the end of the war was at hand.


Thankfully, Yank‘s correspondent Ed Cummings was with the U.S. First Army when the two groups met at the Elbe River and he filed the attached article.

American GIs Meet the Reds on the Elbe (Newsweek & Yank Magazines, 1945) Read More »

American GIs Meet the Reds on the Elbe
(Newsweek & Yank Magazines, 1945)

In late April of 1945, American tank crews south of Torgau (Germany) began to pick up the chattering of Soviet infantry units on their radios – the transmissions were generated by the advanced units of Marshal Konev’s (1897 – 1973) First Ukrainian Army and both the allied units were elated to know that the other was nearby, for it meant one thing: the end of the war was at hand.


Thankfully, Yank‘s correspondent Ed Cummings was with the U.S. First Army when the two groups met at the Elbe River and he filed the attached article.

American GIs Meet the Reds on the Elbe
(Newsweek & Yank Magazines, 1945) Read More »

VE-Day at the 108th General Hospital (Yank Magazine, 1945)

An eyewitness account accompanied by a wonderful Howard Brodie sketch describing the enthusiastic rush enjoyed by all the wounded GIs in the dayroom at the 108th General Hospital in London:

The war was over, and I was still alive. And I thought of all the boys in the 28th Division band who were with me in the Ardennes who are dead now.

Click here to read a short notice about how Imperial Japan took the news of Germany’s surrender.

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Ukrainian Partisan Witnessed to Nazi Murders at Babi Yar (Collier’s Magazine, 1945)

The attached 1945 article from COLLIER’S by George Creel (1876 – 1953) was one of the very first pieces of wartime journalism to report on the Nazi atrocities committed in the forest of Babi Yar, just outside Kiev, Ukraine. Under the command of Reichskomissar Erich Koch (1896 – 1986) 33,000 Ukrainian Jews were slaughtered by German soldiers over a five day period during the month of September, 1941; this brief article tells the tale of Ukrainian partisan Yefim Vilkis, who resisted the Nazi occupation and witnessed the massacre.

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An Observer on the Russian Front (Collier’s Magazine, 1945)

During the late war period, leftist playwright Lillian Hellman (1905 – 1984), was twice denied permission to travel to war-torn Britain on the grounds that she had been recognized as an active communist. Yet, ironically, those same pencil-pushers in the State Department turned around a few months later and granted her a passport to visit the Soviet Union in August of 1944 – as a guest artist of VOKS, the Soviet agency that processed all international cultural exchanges. It was during this visit that she penned the attached eyewitness account of the Nazi retreat through Stalin’s Russia:

Five days of looking out of a train window into endless devastation makes you sad at first, and then numb. Here there is nothing left, and the eye gets unhappily accustomed to nothing and begins to accept it…


Click here to read a 1939 STAGE MAGAZINE profile of this writer.

An Observer on the Russian Front (Collier’s Magazine, 1945) Read More »