Click Magazine

Articles from Click Magazine

The National Press Club During the War (Click Magazine, 1943)

Throughout the decades, Washington, D.C. has had more than its fair share of private clubs for journalists – but they all failed for the same reason: each one of them granted credit to their members at the bar. It was not until 1908 that someone got it right – The National Press Club insisted that each ink-slinger pay-as-they-go. As a result, this club has been able to keep their doors open for well over one hundred years. This well-illustrated article explains what an important role the club played during the war years.


-recommended reading:
Drunk Before Noon: The Behind-The-Scenes Story of the Washington Press Corps

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PM: the Evening Tabloid (Click Magazine, 1940)

PM (1940 – 1948) was a left-leaning, New York-based evening paper that enjoyed some notoriety across the fruited plane on account of its founding editor, Ralph Ingersoll (1900 – 1985), who liked to believe that his steady mission was to create A tabloid for literates:


Contributors included Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss), I. F. Stone, Ad Reinhardt, J.T. Winterich, Leane Zug‐Smith, Louis Kronenberger and Ben Hecht; the photographs of Margaret Bourke‐White and Arthur Felig (aka Weegee) appeared regularly. Occasional contributors included Erskine Caldwell, Myril Axlerod, McGeorge Bundy, Saul K. Padover, Heywood Broun, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene Lyons, Earl Conrad; Ben Stolberg, Malcolm Cowley.


Preferring to rely more on subscribers than advertisers, PM only lasted eight years.

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Our Worst Enemy: The U-Boat (Click Magazine, 1943)

Attached herein are a few authentic sketches [that] show the nerve center of a captured Nazi sub. accompanied by a few informative paragraphs about the beast:

Every inch of a U-boats space, every one of its 45 men, is utilized to the maximum. Each serves the sub’s principal weapon, the torpedoes which speed toward an objective at 45 knots. New models have one or two guns of 3.5-inch caliber or more which are effective against unarmored ships at ranges up to five miles.

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Life on a U.S. Navy Sub (Click Magazine, 1943)

Illustrated with seven color pictures, this wartime magazine article served to give the folks back home a sense of what an U.S. Navy sub is capable of doing:

With a crew of 44 men, an American submarine in Pacific waters may reasonably hope to sink twenty or more enemy ships before the end of this war… By its very limitations, the submarine offers its crew opportunities to do damage to the enemy which are not given to sailors on other types of vessels. Ninety percent of the time during the war our pig boats (ie. submarines) are looking for the enemy. Cruisers and destroyers, on the other hand must often pass up the privilege of fighting in order to carry out some broad strategy objective; thus convoying, reconnaissance and scouting are a kind of boresome duty the submariner seldom knows.

They are a proud lot, our submarine men, but not boastful. They talk less of their exploits than the public likes. The brass hats apparently have decided to keep it that way.


Click here to read a unique story about the Battle of the Sula Straits…

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The American Home Front Finds Faith Again (Click Magazine, 1942)

By the time this article appeared on the newsstands at the close of 1942, the American people were fully committed to a war on two fronts that quite often was not generating the kinds of headlines they would have preferred to read. Certainly, there was the naval victory at Midway, but the butcher’s bill was high at Pearl Harbor and North Africa and after a thirteen year lull in church attendance, America was once again returning to the church:

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Tin Cans Go to War (Click Magazine, 1945)

This article is accompanied by nineteen pictures illustrating the various ways tin cans are put to use by the American military during W.W.II, and it was printed to show the necessity of full civilian participation along the home front. In order to guarantee that this message would get out to everyone, magazine editors would have been provided with these photographs and an assortment of facts by a government agency called the Office of War Information.

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Meat Rationing Lead To Alternatives (Click Magazine, 1944)

As a result of the rationing of beef some people along the W.W. II home front turned to whale meat as a substitute for beef:

If you walk into a Seattle, Washington butcher shop and ask for a steak, you might be offered a whale steak. No ration points will be required, and the flavor will be somewhere between that of veal and beef. You can prepare your steak just as you would a sirloin, or you can have it ground into whaleburger.



When the U.S. was fighting the First World War, twenty years earlier, it was found that the oil extracted from whales proved useful in the production of explosives.

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Air-Raid Wardens on the Home Front (ClicK Magazine, 1942)

The Congressional Declaration of War was a mere five months old when this photo-essay appeared that documented the earliest days of the American Civil Defense efforts during the Second World War. At this point in the war, the Marines were still three months away from landing on Guadalcanal and the Army wouldn’t be arriving in North Africa for another six months – but the neighborhood volunteers of the Civil Defense seemed to be prepared.

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