1945

Articles from 1945

World War II Fabric Rationing in the United States (Yank Magazine, 1945)

This illustrated article appeared in Yank Magazine during March of 1945 and explained fully what fabric rationing was and how the American home front fashion consumer was affected:

The absence of cuffs and vests aside, pre-war styles in men’s clothing are still obtainable. A man can get plaids, stripes, herringbones and all sorts of weaves in brown, blue, gray and all the various pastel shades. …Women generally have had to make great changes in their dressing habits. In the first place the shortage of rubber has raised hell with the girdle, or foundation garment..


Click here to read more about fashion on the W.W. II home front…


Read a 1940s fashion article about fabric restrictions and the War Production Board.

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Adultery on the Home Front (Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

The overlords of the Illinois justice system became so fed-up with the growing divorce rate in their state as a result of wives who stepped-out while their husbands were fighting overseas, and they decided to do something about it. The Illinois Attorney General proposed a plan:


Penalties for conviction range from $500 fine or a year in jail or both for the first offense to $3,000 fine or three years in jail or both for a third conviction.

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A W.W. II Draft Board (Yank Magazine, 1945)

When Michael Campiseno turned 18, he was pulled out of his senior class in Norwood High School and drafted. Mike was sore. He swore that if he ever returned, he’d throw his discharge papers on the desk of the board chairman and say, ‘Now, ya sonuvabitch, I hope you’re satisfied!’


Here is the skinny on Draft Board 119 of Norwood, Massachusetts – an average draft board that sent 2,103 men off to war (75 of them never returned).

A W.W. II Draft Board (Yank Magazine, 1945) Read More »

Japan’s War Against The Home Front (Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

When World War II was inching toward it’s bloody conclusion, Japan launched its Fu-go Campaign – a project designed to deploy thousands of high-altitude hydrogen balloons armed with incendiary devices. These balloons were to follow the westerly winds of the upper atmosphere, drifting to the west coast of North America where they were expected descend into the forests and explode.


The Japanese home front suffered from tuberculosis – click here to read about it…

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Dachau (Collier’s Magazine, 1945)

Attached is Martha Gellhorn’s (1908 – 1998) very disturbing eyewitness account of the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau, Poland:

Nothing about war was ever as insanely wicked as these starved and outraged naked, nameless dead. Behind one pile of dead lay the clothed healthy bodies of the German guards who had been found in this camp. They were killed at once by the prisoners when the American Army entered.


The man primarily responsible for delivering the innocent into the ovens of the death camps was Obergrupenfuehrer Albert Ganzenmüller click here to read about him…

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Manhattan During Wartime (Yank, 1945)

This is a three page article concerning the city of New York from Yank‘s on-going series, Home Towns in Wartime.

The Yank correspondent, Sanderson Vanderbilt, characterized Gotham as being overcrowded (in 1945 the population was believed to be 1,902,000; as opposed to the number today: 8,143,197) and I’m sure we can all assume that today’s New Yorkers tend to feel that their fore-bearers did not know the meaning of the word.

New York was the home base of Yank Magazine and this article presents a young man’s view of that town and the differences that he can recall when he remembers it’s pre-war glory (Sanderson tended to feel that the city looked a bit down-at-the-heel).

Click here if you would like to read an article about the celebrations in New York the day World War Two ended.
Read a Vanity Fair article about New York during W.W. I


Click here to read about the first NYC air-raid wardens of 1942.

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The Capture of Laval (Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

The game was up. At the Prat de Llobregat airfield outside Barcelona the traitor sat heavily on a camp stool, waiting for the reprieve. It did not come. The Franco government had found Pierre Laval too hot to handle… Laval shrugged: ‘I suppose if Petain can face the music, I can’. But later he shouted: ‘It is unfair… delivering me to my country.’


More about Laval can be read here

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The Age Progression of President Lincoln (Coronet Magazine, 1945)

Ever since the age of photography began, one of the semi-official pastimes of the American people involves taking note of the rapid facial decay of their assorted presidents while in-office – and as the collected photographic portraits of Abraham Lincoln clearly indicate, no one will be naming a skincare product after him any time soon, however, the aging process that effected his face so dramatically has been the subject of Lincoln admirer’s through the years, and some are collected in the attached article.

The Age Progression of President Lincoln (Coronet Magazine, 1945) Read More »

German Boy Soldiers in Captivity (Yank Magazine, 1945)

A fascinating article reporting on the Baby Cage, the Allied prisoner of war camp that held some 7,000 boy soldiers of the German army, ages 12 through 17.

In light of the fact that so manyGerman youths had been indoctrinated from their earliest days in Nazi dogma and then dumbfounded to a far greater degree within the Hitler Jugend system, the Allied leadership post-war government believed that this group needed to be instructed in the ways of tolerance before being let loose into the general population.


Click here to read about the Nazi indoctrination of German youth.

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