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.
Eyewitness To The Battle For France (Collier’s Magazine, 1944) Read More »
Attached is a translation of the text of the Franco-German declaration signed in Paris on December 6, 1938.
Click here to read about the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact.
The French-German Non-Aggression Agreement (Current History, 1938) Read More »
When this article was published the war was over and Paris had experienced her second German-free autumn – but life was still difficult in the city. Coal was still rationed, the lines in the shops were long and the average French child was drastically underweight. NEWSWEEK dispatched two gumshoe reporters to get the full picture for the folks at home (where, happily, rationing had ended the the previous August).
Dreading the Winter (Newsweek Magazine, 1945) Read More »
Attached is a four page article that reported on the deserters of the U.S. Army who organized themselves into Chicago-style gangs in post-occupied Paris, replete with gun-molls, hideouts, fencing contacts and all the trimmings of a third-rate-blood-and-thunder detective story.
The AWOL GIs in the Black Market of Paris (Yank Magazine, 1945) Read More »
Neither the prosecution nor the defense wanted Henri Philippe Petain’s oily accomplice to testify in the trial of the old marshal. Both sides feared his slanderous tongue and his slimy skill for wriggling out of blame.
Laval Testifies in the Petain Trial (Newsweek Magazine, 1945) Read More »
The Nazis quickly extended the dread Nuremberg laws to the occupied territory. Jews lost jobs, businesses, property, liberty, even their lives. They were flung into primitive concentration camps and deported to Polish ghettos. And with them the Nazis brought the usual wave of Jewish suicides.
The Betrayal of French Jewry (Newsweek Magazine, 1942) Read More »
YANK correspondent Saul Levitt was eyewitness to all the merriment that kicked-in when Paris was liberated. Regardless of the gaiety, he could not forget all the American blood that had so liberally been spilled during the previous weeks:
Despite all the bottles of champagne, all the tears, and all the kisses, it is impossible for those of us who are here to forget that we are here for the men of the American divisions who died or were wounded on the way to Paris… for all of those men who started out toward Paris but are not here to see it. We are here for the men of the 48 states who dream of home, and for whom the freeing of Paris is the way home.
Click here to read about the celebrations that took place in Paris the day World War One ended.
Remembering the Americans Who Didn’t Make It to Paris (Yank Magazine, 1944) Read More »
The man who saved France in 1916 was condemned to die for nearly destroying France at Vichy in 1940, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by General Charles de Gaulle.
Pétain was the twelfth marshal of France to be condemned by a French court since 1440. Eight of them were executed.
Pétain: ”Life in Prison” (Maptalk, 1945) Read More »
During the course of the Second World War, Western fiction writer Louis L’Amour (1908 – 1988) served as a U.S. Army lieutenant in a transport unit. He penned this nifty article about 1946 Paris while waiting to return home:
It is cold in Paris now. There are chill winds blowing down those wide streets. The fuel shortage is serious, and will probably continue to be so as transportation is not yet what it should be.
Vivid with historical background, the city somehow remains modern. It has kept step with the world without losing its beauty or its patina…Easy enough when riding along the Rue St. Antoine to forget that where the jeeps and command cars roll now, there were once Roman chariots. No corner of Paris is without its memories.
Louis L’Amour on Post-War Paris (Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1946) Read More »
In Nazi occupied Paris there was a secret underground movie theater (93 Champs Elysees) operating throughout the entire four year period and it charged an excessive sum of francs to gain entry. Guess which Chaplin film was shown?
An Illegal Comedy in Occupied Paris (Yank Magazine, 1945) Read More »
