Articles from Collier’s Magazine
Here is a 1945 article about the Croatian-born American ballerina Mia Slavenska (1916 – 2002) and her popularity. The article divides its column space between telling us about the dancer and providing a brief history of ballet – and how it was once joined at the hip with opera.
These historic pen portraits were compiled and re-worked for publication some fifty years after the San Francisco Earthquake; together they serve to illustrate the collective, yet individual, acts of suffering and heroics that took place April 18, 1906:
On the front steps of an abandoned house she had seen a young Chinese mother nursing a baby. The mother’s face was besmirched, and drawn with weariness. Her own child slept in swaddling blankets beside her. The child on her breast was white.
The triumphs of the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion on the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc on D-Day stand as a testament to the superb combat leadership skills of Lt. Colonel James E. Rudder (1910 – 1970), who is the subject of the attached article. As a participant in the planning the Allied invasion of Normandy, General Omar Bradley recognized that the German heavy guns situated above and between the Omaha and Utah beaches had to be silenced if the landings were to be successful; Bradley selected Rudder and his group to do the job, later remarking that this order was the most difficult he had ever, in his entire career, given anybody.
Written ten years after that historic day, this article is about Rudder’s return to Omaha Beach with his young son, and his recollections of the battle that was fought.
A good read; an even more in-depth study regarding the assault on Pointe du Hoc can be found at Amazon: Rudder’s Rangers.
More about Rangers can be read here…
One of the kindest things you could possibly say about the Nazis is that they were sexists – and if you wanted to back your thesis up with anecdotes, facts and figures, you would read the attached article from 1933:
To say that woman’s place is in the home is understatement, so far as Adolf Hitler is concerned. Certainly she’s not to be allowed in the library. Intellectual life, as well as all business and legal affairs, is a purely masculine enterprise in the Third Reich. And the women, most of them, in hysterical devotion to their leader, obey. Mr. Quentin Reynolds, in a series of brilliant pictures, presents the women of modern Germany; triumphant and desperate.
CLICK HERE to read about the beautiful Blonde Battalions who spied for the Nazis…
The Prince of Wales, to quote a conservative peer of the realm, day by day is getting commoner and commoner. There are even those who consider him a dangerous radical. But that doesn’t bother the prince. Unperturbed, he continues to fraternize with his unennobled subjects and to defend their interests – hotly and sometimes profanely.
An article from the Fall of 1943 that reported on the second campaign fought by the men of the 82nd Airborne Division, the invasion of Sicily:
These air-carried forces were will be in a position to assist seaborne invaders not only by harassing the rear of the foe’s first lines, but by standing in the way of his attempts to bring up his reserves…These men were also to show that an airborne force can assail and capture and enemy’s strategic strong points, can man his bridges and his highways, can dominate his high-banked rivers and fight off his counterattacks.
The seasoned war correspondent explained in the attached article as to why Operation Market Garden was such a disaster (and the censors let him) and why the next ambitious Allied parachute assault, Operation Varsity, would be different. Reminiscing about all that he saw of the famed parachute jump beyond the Rhine prior to being forced to turn-tail and bail out over English-occupied Belgium, he observed:
…the C-46s come in and apparently walk into a wall of flak. I could not see the flak, but one plane after another went down. All our attention was on our own ship. It could blow up in mid-air at any moment. From the pilot’s compartment came streams of stinging smoke.
Perched on the quarter deck of an LST off the coast of one of the American beachheads during the D-Day invasion, COLLIER’S war correspondent, W.B. Courtney, described the earliest hours of that remarkable day:
I stared through my binoculars at some limp, dark bundles lying a little away from the main activities. In my first casual examination of the beach I had assumed they were part of the debris of defensive obstacles. But they were bodies – American bodies.
If you ever wondered how Lucille Ball, Red Skelton, Barbara Stanwyck, Carmen Miranda, Veronica Lake, Charlie McCarthy or Edgar Bergen prepared their respective meals during the bad ol’ days of food rationing during W.W. II – then you’ll get your answer here:
Hollywood has done a complete about-face and banned the lavish, costly dish…. These days when the inhabitants of Glamor Town take off their faces and sit down to dine, the taste may be varied, but every meal is eaten with the full knowledge that a quarter of a pound of butter or a pound of ground steak is just as rare in Hollywood as Wheeling, West Virginia.
The most striking thing about Germany today is its quiet. There is no noise. The people are sullen… There are no parades, no bands, no singing in Germany now. When American internees heard the Allied bombers, saw cities in flames and felt the shock of four-ton bombs, they knew why.
This account of war-torn Germany was written by one of those internees who was incarcerated since December of 1941 and subsequently released in March, 1944.
This Collier’s Magazine article from 1947 was penned by the German-speaking Sigrid Schultz (1893 – 1980) who’s report told on those discontented Germans who enjoyed tweaking the collective noses of the armies that lorded over them – oddly believing that a war between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union was the best answer to their hopes. Elements of the populace spoke openly about the good old days under Hitler and sang the old Nazi anthem, The Horst Wessel Song:
In Munich, the signs on the square named for ‘The Victims of Fascism’ were replaced by signs reading ‘The Victims of Democracy’. The police only acted after a Munich paper front-paged the story.
A similar article from 1951 can be read here…
Read about American censorship in Occupied-Japan…
From a guarded high-walled villa in Alexandria, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni (1895 – 1974), exiled fifty-three year-old Grand son of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem craftily directs the affairs of the 1,200,000 Palestinian Arabs.
In the Mufti’s web, the strands of potential organized resistance include two rival ‘youth organizations’, the al-Najjada and the Al-Futawa and the ‘mobile elements’ of the secret Muslim Brotherhood, which is a sort of Middle Eastern Ku Klux Klan. The precise figures of their strength are elusive, but combined they may comprise something like 50,000 men and boys.
Mohammad Nimr al-Hawari, thirty-eight-year-old leader of the Najjada told me, ‘We believe in force’.
American politician, diplomat and author Brand Whitlock (1869 – 1934) composed this pseudo-medieval verse in which the Ironic Spirit mocks man and his triumphs:
This is thy latest, greatest miracle.
The triumph of thy latest science, art and all
That skill thou’st learnt since forth the Norsemen fared
Across these waters in their cockle shells…
Whitlock is not remembered for his poetry, but rather as the outstanding U.S. Ambassador to Belgium between the years 1913 – 1922. It was there that the man’s mettle was put to the test and was not found wanting.
Frank Vicovari, veteran ambulance driver, was en route to North Africa on a neutral passenger ship called Zam Zam. He was traveling with numerous other men who would serve under his command; there were 21 top of the line ambulances in the hold that would be put to use by Free French forces when they landed. Zam Zam also carried some 200 American missionaries off to spread the good news south of the equator. This article is Vicovari’s account of his life onboard a Nazi raiding vessel after it sank Zam Zam in the South Atlantic. He eloquently describes how efficiently the crew fired upon other non-combatant vessels and, on one occasion, machine-gunned lifeboats.
This 1947 Collier’s article, Heartless Harvest by Howard Whitman makes clear the sad story of migrant agricultural laborers who picked the fruits and vegetables for the Americans of the Forties:
A new crop of Okies, estimated in the millions, is wandering about the country, following the crops they pick. To get their story the author traveled 9,000 miles through 17 states, toiling in the fields. Here he describes working and living conditions you wouldn’t believe could be tolerated in America today.
Combat photographer Joe Dearing, deprived of his camera, endeavored to explain with words all that he had seen while he was embedded with an advancing infantry unit in France.
These assorted color photographs of the Japanese-American internment camp at Manzanar, California helped to illustrate this 1942 COLLIER’S MAGAZINE article by Jim Marshall as to what Manzanar was and was not, who was there and how it operated:
All we can do here is prove that we are good sports and good Americans, and hope that people will respect us and our problems.
The attached 1945 article from COLLIER’S by George Creel (1876 – 1953) was one of the very first pieces of wartime journalism to report on the Nazi atrocities committed in the forest of Babi Yar, just outside Kiev, Ukraine. Under the command of Reichskomissar Erich Koch (1896 – 1986) 33,000 Ukrainian Jews were slaughtered by German soldiers over a five day period during the month of September, 1941; this brief article tells the tale of Ukrainian partisan Yefim Vilkis, who resisted the Nazi occupation and witnessed the massacre.
