The Cold War

Find old cold war articles here. We have free newspaper articles from the 1950s cold war check them out today!

‘Uncle Ho Strikes Back” (Pathfinder Magazine, 1950)

Three years before the total French withdrawal from Vietnam, this one Frenchman summed up his comrade’s frustrations concerning their battles against the Viet Minh:

We can’t win a guerrilla war unless we have the support of the people. Frankly, we have not got it. Hitler or the Russians could conquer this country in two months with mass executions, wholesale reprisals and concentration camps. To fight this war and remain humanitarian is difficult.

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The Kaesong Cease-Fire (Time Magazine, 1951)

The Korean War peace negotiations that took place at Kaesong during August of 1951 are remembered as one of the many failed peace conferences to be convened during the course of that war. The talks were broken off early as a result of a series of U.N. raids that were launched in two different enemy held positions – in addition to an nighttime airstrike that almost decimated the grounds where the talks were being held. The U.N. negotiators were especially frustrated with the fact that the Communists wished that both armies adhere to the 38th Parallel as the post-war border; exactly where the war began.

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The March from Chosin to the Sea (Pathfinder Magazine, 1950)

This is an eyewitness account of the fortitude and endurance exhibited by the freezing members of the 1st Marine Division as they executed their highly disciplined 100 mile march from the Chosin Reservoir to the Korean coastline – inflicting (and taking) casualties all the while. The account is simply composed of a series of diary entries – seldom more than eight sentences in length recalling that famous fighting retreat in the frozen Hell that was Korea. The journalist’s last entry points out that the number of Marine dead was so high, we need never think of the Battle of Tarawa as the bloodiest engagement in Marine history.

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The Early CIA (Coronet Magazine, 1951)

The CIA is a young and relatively untested child in the strange world of intelligence. The enemy dourly accuses it of ‘Black Warfare.’ But there is definite proof of its success. Radio Moscow never misses a chance to scream shrilly of ‘the extended spy network of the Wall Street mercenaries.’

The CIA formula avoids the fog of rumor that fills any world capital, and goes straight to the hard facts of the enemy’s economy, production, transportation, raw materials and manpower. A modern war must be organized, much of it in the open, long in advance. Guns must be manufactured; munitions, food, and raw materials stockpiled; railways and roads expanded and soldiers trained. The allocation of scarce Soviet-controlled steel is far more important than the minutes of the Politburo.


In 1958, Fidel Castro wrote an article for an American magazine in which he thoroughly lied about his intentions; click here to read it.

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Peace At Last (Newsweek, Quick Magazine, 1953)

While the fighting raged on the central front the negotiators at Panmunjom rapidly approached an agreement on armistice terms. The July 19th (1953) agreement was reached on all points by both sides. The next day liaison and staff officers began the task of drawing up the boundaries of the demilitarized zone… At 1100 hours on July 27, Lieutenant General William K Harrison, Jr., the senior United Nations delegate to the armistice negotiations, signed the armistice papers. At the same time the senior enemy delegate, General Nam Il, placed his signature on the documents.

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The Cold War Began with Igor Gouzenko (Coronet Magazine, 1953)

On September 5, 1945, N.K.V.D. cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko (1919 – 1982) severed ties with his masters at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa and high-tailed it over to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with tales of extensive Soviet espionage throughout all of North America. The news of this defection and the intelligence he delivered sent shock waves throughout Washington, London, Moscow, and Ottawa – historians insist that this was the event that sparked the Cold War and altered the course of the Twentieth Century.

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A Rift in the Containment Policy (Pathfinder Magazine, 1950)

Washington’s growing distaste for the Chinese Nationalist dictator Chiang Kai-shek was reaching fever-pitch that last week in January, 1950, when President Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson (1893 – 1971) presented the administration’s Asia policy:

No official military aid for Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist government, either on the island of Formosa [Taiwan] or anywhere else.

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‘This I Saw In Korea” (Collier’s Magazine, 1952)

Those darn misogynists in Washington fell asleep at the switch again when they appointed a woman to fill the number two spot at the Department of Defense. The woman in question was Anna Rosenberg (1902 – 1983), an experienced and well-respected hand in the Nation’s Capital who served in that post between 1950 and 1953. During the middle of the war she paid a visit to the American military installations in Korea and wrote warmly about all that she had seen.

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The First 365 Days of the Korean War (Pathfinder Magazine, 1951)

When the Korean War began during the summer of 1950 many Americans were wondering aloud Is this the beginning of W.W. III? One year later they were relieved to find that it was not a world war, but the butcher’s bill stood at 70,000 U.S. casualties and still there was no end in sight. This article examines these first 365 days of combat, taking into account all losses and gains.

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