1945

Articles from 1945

Wartime Brooklyn (Yank Magazine, 1945)

A four page article regarding the city of Brooklyn, New York during the Second World War – make no mistake about it: this is the Brooklyn that Senator Bernie Sanders inherited – it isn’t far from the N.Y. borough named Queens, where numerous Communists resided.


• Almost half the penicillin that was produced in the United States came out of Brooklyn

• Forty Five percent of of the Brooklyn war plants were awarded the Army and Navy E or the M from the Maritime Services

• Throughout the war, the ranks of the U.S. Armed Services were swollen with Brooklyn sons and daughters, 280,000 strong.


Click here to read an article about one of New York’s greatest mayors: Fiorello LaGuardia.

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Angela Lansbury Arrives in Hollywood (Rob Wagner’s Script, 1945)

Those sly dogs at SCRIPT MAGAZINE! They printed the smiling mug of the twenty-five year-old Angela Lansbury (b. 1925) on the cover of their rag, briefly praising her for being the youngest performer to have ever been nominated for an Academy Award (she soon won the 1944 Best Supporting Actress statue for Gaslight), and ran a profile of the lass on a page eight article that was misleadingly titled Our Cover Girl, only to devote 85% of the columns to an illustrious forebear.

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Chinese Slave Labor Under The Boot of Japan (Pathfinder Magazine, 1945)

By 1945 the Japanese Army was beginning to see the writing on the wall insofar as their occupation of China was concerned. With the collapse of Germany they knew they could expect the Soviets to attack at any time – this foreboding inspired them to corral greater numbers of hapless Chinese and force them to build barricades in order to postpone the inevitable.

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Radar and the Allied Victory (Yank Magazine, 1945)

Two months after the Fascists cried uncle and raised their white flag, this article went to press that was filled with two pages-worth of previously classified information as to the important roll that British and American radar played in winning the war. It was 1945 articles like this in which the world finally learned why the German submarine blockade of Britain proved to be so unsuccessful, why the London blitz was such a devastating blow to the Luftwaffe and how the Allied navies succeeded in getting so many convoys across the North Atlantic.

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‘The Nisei Problem” (Yank Magazine, 1945)

An interesting article, written with a sense of embarrassment regarding the injustice done to the Japanese-Americans, and published a few weeks shy of VJ-Day. The article reports on how the former internment camp families were faring after they were released from their incarceration. 55,000 Japanese-Americans chose to remain in the camps rather than walk freely among their old neighbors; one man, Takeyoshi Arikawa, a former produce dealer, remarked:

I would like to take my people back home, but there are too many people in Los Angeles who would resent our return. These are troubled times for America. Why should I cause the country any more trouble?


Important references are made concerning those families who had lost their young men serving in the famed 442 Regimental Combat Team: a U.S. Army unit composed entirely of Nisei that was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation for it’s fortitude displayed in Italy, France and Germany.

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When New York City Mourned F.D.R. (Yank Magazine, 1945)

With the exception of the attached piece, there is no magazine article in existence that illustrated so clearly the soul-piercing pain that descended upon the city of New York when the word got around that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died. YANK correspondent Bill Davidson walked from one neighborhood to the next recording much of what he saw:

Nowhere was grief so open as in the poorest districts of the city. In Old St. Patrick’s in the heart of the Italian district on the lower East Side, bowed, shabby figures came and went, and by the day after the President died hundreds of candles burned in front of the altar. ‘Never’ a priest said ‘have so many candles burned in this church’.
A woman clasped her 8-year-old son and said, ‘Not in my lifetime or in yours will we again see such a man.’

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A Post-War Interview With Ike (Yank, 1945)

This is a conversational General Eisenhower article that primarily concerns the plans for the Allied occupation of Germany, coupled with every American soldier’s wish to simply get in boats and go home:

I’m just as bad off as any GI today, General Eisenhower said quietly. I don’t want to be here. I’m 54 years old and I lead a kind of lonely life.


The third paragraph makes reference to a pretty British secretary named Lt. Kay Summersby.


Recommended Reading: Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight Eisenhower_by_Kay Summersbystyle=border:none

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