Articles from 1945
Perhaps one of the first magazine articles about the beautiful actress Martha Vickers (1925 – 1971) who is best remembered by fans for her performance as the fabulously slutty Carmen Sternwood in the 1946 film The Big Sleep.
This article tells the tale of her early days in 1940s Los Angeles and her work as a photographer’s model, which turned more than a few of the crowned heads of Hollywood.
Martha Vickers (Pic Magazine, 1945) Read More »
A YANK staff writer Robert Bendiner (1910 – 2009), summed-up the eventful period that began with the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on
April 12, and ended with the Japanese surrender on August 10, 1945. He pointed out that within that period remarkable changes had been made; not merely the deaths of Hitler, Mussolini and the collapse of Imperial Japan, but it was clear to many that the stage was being set for a new world. The foundations were in place for the creation of a durable world security organization and as if that wasn’t enough, there was a new, hideous weapon called the Atomic Bomb that would cast a long shadow across the land and mark this new era as a unique period in world history.
After a streak like that it would not be surprising if a revulsion against big news should set in. It may well be that people long to pick up a paper in which nothing more cosmic is reported than the city’s reception of a visiting channel-swimmer, and nothing more violent than a tie-up on the Magnolia Avenue trolley line.
Click here to read how British women struggled to understand American slang.
The Last 125 Days of the War (Yank Magazine, 1945) Read More »
A light and breezy review concerning the findings of a U.S. government study regarding the effectiveness of the Allied strategic bombing campaign against Nazi Germany:
…the survey authorities report that although air power might have been more advantageously applied in this case or that, its decisive bearing on the victory was undeniable…At sea, its contribution, combined with naval air power, brought an end to the enemy’s greatest naval threat -the U-boat; on land, it helped turn the tide overwhelmingly in favor of allied ground forces.
Articles about the daily hardships in post-war Germany can be read by clicking here.
Was Allied Air Power Decisive During World War II? (Yank Magazine, 1945) Read More »
G.I. JOE MAGAZINE was established shortly after the war by a shrewd, commerce-driven soul who fully recognized that the American veterans of W.W. II would have a good deal to say about their military hardships, and would need a venue in which to do it. The attached article was written by a veteran who preferred to remain anonymous; the righteous indignation can be keenly sensed in his prose as he explained the three-tiered justice system that he believed to have been built into the offices of the U.S. Army military court system. The first tier meted out soft justice for officers, the second dispensed a harsh justice to White enlisted men, and the bottom tier dished-out a far more vile variety to the American soldiers of African descent.
Read an Article about Racial Integration in the U.S. Military
The Biased Military Courts of the U.S. Army (G.I. Joe Magazine, 1945) Read More »
Neither the prosecution nor the defense wanted Henri Philippe Petain’s oily accomplice to testify in the trial of the old marshal. Both sides feared his slanderous tongue and his slimy skill for wriggling out of blame.
Laval Testifies in the Petain Trial (Newsweek Magazine, 1945) Read More »
You’re damn right those Nisei boys have a place in the American heart, now and forever. And I say soldiers ought to form a pickaxe club to protect the Japanese-Americans who fought the war with us. Any time we see a barfly commando picking on those kids or discriminating against them, we ought to bang them over the head with a pickaxe. I’m willing to be a charter member.
General Joseph W. Stillwell
‘They, Too, Have Fought and Died” (Maptalk, 1945) Read More »
Howard Katzander of YANK filed this short dispatch regarding all that he witnessed following the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Weimer, Germany:
The camp is a thing that has to be seen to be believed, and even then the charred skulls and pelvic bones in the furnaces seem too enormous a crime to be accepted fully. It can’t mean that they actually put human beings –some of them alive –into these furnaces and destroyed them like this.
Buchenwald (Yank Magazine, 1945) Read More »
In the Holy Land are two organizations: the Stern Gang and the NMO, the members of which employ kidnapping, extortion and murder to gain their ends; civil war and independence for Palestine.
In the attached article COLLIER’S MAGAZINE foreign correspondent Frank Gervasi reported on who and what these organizations were.
Zionist Battles in British Palestine (Collier’s Magazine, 1945) Read More »
Here is the first inside story of South America’s leading arms producer, Fritz Mandl (1900 – 1977), who ‘fled’ from Austria with $60,000,000. On the U.S. black list, he has been called ‘one of the most dangerous men in the world’.
Hitler’s Man in Buenos Aires (American Magazine, 1945) Read More »
A heavily illustrated, four page article that served to answer the U.S. serviceman’s questions as to who Harry S. Truman (1884 – 1972) was and why was he deemed suitable to serve as President?
Mr. Truman now occupies the Presidency, of course, because he won the Democratic Vice-Presidential nomination in Chicago last summer. Two things won him the nomination. First was the fact that he alone was acceptable to Mr. Roosevelt and to both the conservative element of the Democratic Party and its liberal wing. The second was the excellent performance of the Truman Committee in the investigation of our government’s spending money for the war-effort…One of the main themes of his campaign speeches last fall was that the U.S. should never return to isolationism.
Click here to read about the busy life of President Franklin Roosevelt.
The New Commander-in-Chief: Harry S Truman (Yank Magazine, 1945) Read More »
