1946

Articles from 1946

The Women of the U.S. Coast Guard (Think Magazine, 1946)

From the icy sweeps of Alaska to the tropical Hawaiian Islands, trimly clad girls in the dark blue of the Coast Guard SPARS have served since their organization was founded in 1942 to fill the shore posts of men at sea.

Communications and radio work were an important phase of their duty. Another field in which SPARS were exceptionally active was aviation, with young women in navy blue working in control towers, instructing fledgling fliers via the Link trainer, and parachute riggers…SPARS were also required to familiarize themselves with weapons.

Ranking woman officer is Captain Dorthy C. Stratton (1899 – 2006), Director of the Women’s Reserve, appointed on November 24, 1942).

The Women of the U.S. Coast Guard (Think Magazine, 1946) Read More »

Charles Lindbergh Goes to War (Collier’s Magazine, 1946)

When America entered the Second World War, Charles Lindbergh reached out to President Roosevelt and expressed his desire to serve; in light of the fact that Lindbergh had made numerous trips to Germany and met with Goering on several occasions, the President cordially declined his offer. However, these liaisons did not exclude him from working in the private sector for one of the many defense contractors, which is precisely what he did.

These two articles were written by an Army Air Corps colonel shortly after the war recalling his unexpected brush with Lindbergh when he was serving in New Guinea. The United Aircraft Corporation had hired the Lone Eagle to serve as a technical observer in the Pacific, where he could study the combat performance of the P-38 fighters. The articles served to expose to the American people that Lindbergh had performed a variety of patriotic tasks far beyond his corporate job description:

My God! He shouldn’t go on a combat mission, when did he fly the Atlantic? Must have been in 1927 and he was about twenty-five then. That would make him at least forty-two years old, and that’s too old for this kind of stuff.

Charles Lindbergh Goes to War (Collier’s Magazine, 1946) Read More »

Meet Andrei Gromyko (Collier’s Magazine, 1946)

When this magazine profile of Andrei Gromyko (1909 – 1989) appeared on the newsstands in 1946, the man was already a mainstay in the State Department Rolodex. Anyone who came of age during the Cold War (1947 – 1991) will certainly recognize his name, because as Foreign Minister for the Soviet Union (for 28 years), Gromyko was without a doubt one of the architects of the Cold War.


The attached article outlines Gromyko’s career highlights up to the Summer of 1946 when he was posted as the first Soviet Ambassador to the newly established United Nations.

Meet Andrei Gromyko (Collier’s Magazine, 1946) Read More »

FDR’s Doctor Speaks (Collier’s Magazine, 1946)

Published ten months after the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, Vice-Admiral Ross T. McIntire, Surgeon General of the U.S. Navy, reminisced about Roosevelt’s illness and his observations of the man:

The Pearl Harbor attack put a pressure on the President that never lifted.


With the flower of American youth fighting and dying on land and sea, he looked on any sparing of himself as a betrayal…


From Amazon:


FDR’s Deadly Secretstyle=border:none

FDR’s Doctor Speaks (Collier’s Magazine, 1946) Read More »

FDR’s Doctor Speaks (Collier’s Magazine, 1946)

Published ten months after the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, Vice-Admiral Ross T. McIntire, Surgeon General of the U.S. Navy, reminisced about Roosevelt’s illness and his observations of the man:

The Pearl Harbor attack put a pressure on the President that never lifted.


With the flower of American youth fighting and dying on land and sea, he looked on any sparing of himself as a betrayal…


From Amazon:


FDR’s Deadly Secretstyle=border:none

FDR’s Doctor Speaks (Collier’s Magazine, 1946) Read More »

One Year After the War (Collier’s Magazine, 1946)

An anonymous opinion piece that was published in the August 24, 1946 issue of COLLIER’S MAGAZINE in which the writer expressed his astonishment in finding that peacetime, after such a hard-fought victory, should seem so anti-climactic:

Consumers goods are so scarce everywhere that all major countries are suffering more or less inflation. A wave of big strikes in this country earlier this year slowed production badly, so that it seems impossible for us to freeze our own relatively mild inflation at its present point.

One Year After the War (Collier’s Magazine, 1946) Read More »

Smellivision Arrives (Pathfinder Magazine, 1946)

Technology blogs on the net have users who frequently post the question When will T.V. be able to ‘broadcast’ smells?: the ability existed as early as 1946 – but there was no interest – or so this article has lead us to believe:

Optimistic scientists visualized the day when television sets would come equipped with 200 to 300 different smells. (Aromas are automatically concocted by chemicals in the set, mixed by radio-remote-control from the studio.) Faint nostrils quavered at the thought of several odors on the same program…

Smellivision Arrives (Pathfinder Magazine, 1946) Read More »