1945

Articles from 1945

VE-Day in the U.S. of A. (Yank Magazine, 1945)

A report from Boston, Atlanta, Baltimore, Cleveland, Minneapolis, St Louis and Springfield (Mass.) as to how VE-Day was celebrated (or not) in these cities:

To get an over-all view of VE-day in America, YANK asked civilian newspapermen and staff writers in various parts of the country to send an eye-witness reports. From these OPs the reports were much the same. Dallas was quiet, Des Moines was sober, Seattle was calm, Boston was staid.

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Big Trouble in Little Cuba (Collier’s Magazine, 1945)

The attached article is about the controversial Cuban President Ramón Grau San Martin (1887 – 1969) and his struggle with the radical elements within Cuba. This COLLIER’S MAGAZINE piece will give you an understanding that the roots of communism on that Caribbean island have a longer history than you might have supposed; when it first appeared on the newsstands in 1945, Fidel Castro (1926 – 1916) was a still a law student.


In 2011 Castro confessed in an interview with an American reporter that the Cuban model [of Communism] had not been successful.

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German and Italian P.o.W.s in America (United States News, 1945)

By the end of 1944 the P.o.W. population within the U.S. stood somewhere in the neighborhood of 340,000 and was growing at a rate between 25,000 to 30,000 each month. The vast majority of them (300,000) were from the German Army and 51,000 were Italians:

There are reports that these prisoners often are pampered, that they are getting cigarettes when American civilians cannot get them, that they are being served in their camps 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 3000,000 Germans in this country.


Read about the escaped German POWs who the FBI never found…

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Kind Words from Field Marshall Montgomery (Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

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…

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