World War Two

Find old World War 2 articles here. We have great newspaper articles from wwii check them out today!

Manpower Balance
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

General Marshall recalled the decisions made concerning how many American men would be drafted and in what branches of service they would be needed. He recalled the number of divisions each Allied nation raised and how many divisions the Germans and Japanese put in the field. The article also remembers that two thirds of the German Army was deployed along the Eastern front and he wondered what might the Americans have done had Germany defeated the Reds.

It is remarkable how exactly the mobilization plan fitted the requirements for victory. When Admiral Doenitz surrendered the German Government, every American division was in operational theaters.

The German Army of 1945
(U.S. Dept. of War, 1945)

After five and a half years of ever growing battle against ever-stronger enemies, the German Army in 1945 looks, at a glance, much the worse for wear. It is beset on all sides and is short of everything. It has suffered appalling casualties and must resort to old men, boys, invalids and unreliable foreigners for its cannon fodder…Yet this shabby, war-weary machine has struggled on a in a desperate effort to postpone it’s inevitable demise. At the end of 1944 it was still able to mount an offensive calculated to delay for months the definitive piercing of the Western bulwarks of Germany.

Total War
(U.S. Dept. of War, 1945)

The introductory essay from the U.S. War Department’s intelligence manual concerning fascist Germany:

Total war is neither a contemporary invention nor a German monopoly. But total mobilization, in the sense of the complete and scientific control of all the efforts of the nation for the purpose of war, and total utilization of war as an instrument of national policy have been developed to their highest degree by the German militarists.


To gain some understanding of the nature of total war, you might want to click here and read about how the American cosmetics industry of the 1940s was forced to alter their production patters.

A Study of the German Tactical Doctrine
(U.S. Dept. of War, 1945)

A one page study of German World War II tactics that was created by the United States Department of War two months prior to the German surrender:

…the Germans have placed a considerable reliance on novel and sensational weapons such as the mass use of armor, the robot bomb, and the super-heavy tank. Their principal weaknesses in this regard have been their failure to integrate these new techniques with established arms and tactics –German field artillery, for example, did not maintain pace with German armor -and their devotion to automatic weapons at the expense of accuracy.

A Psychological Study of Valor
(Yank Magazine, 1943)

This is yet another excerpt from Psychology for the Fighting Man which addresses a grave concern that has been on the mind of all soldiers from time immemorial: how to be brave and safe?. In simply three paragraphs the psychologists charged with answering this question actually do a pretty feeble job, but they did a fine job summing up the heavy responsibilities that the front-line G.I. had on his mind when great acts of courage were expected of him.

Perhaps one of the most lucid definitions of bravery was uttered by an anonymous soldier from the Second World War who offered that courage is like a bank, with a finite balance; each soldier is allowed to make a small or a large withdrawal from the account and they can do so when ever they wish, but when the account is empty they can’t go to the bank any longer.


Click here to read a psychological study of fear in combat.

Catching Up With Tokyo Rose
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

The Americans arriving in Japan after the surrender proceedings were hellbent on capturing the American traitor who presided over so many disheartening broadcasts — the woman they nicknamed Tokyo Rose:

…one of the supreme objectives of American correspondents landing in Japan was Radio Tokyo. There they hoped to find someone to pass off as the one-and-only Rose and scoop their colleagues. When the information had been sifted a little, a girl named Iva Toguri (Iva Toguri D’Aquino: 1916 – 2006), emerged as the only candidate who came close to filling the bill. For three years she had played records, interspersed with snappy comments, beamed to Allied soldiers on the Zero Hour…Her own name for herself was Orphan Ann.


Toguri’s story was an interesting one that went on for many years and finally resulted in a 1977 pardon granted by one who had listened to many such broadcasts: President Gerald R. Ford (1913-2006), who had served in the Pacific on board the aircraft carrier USS Monterey.

The Advance on the Rhineland and Other Forebodings
(Stage Magazine, 1936)

One of the very few literati who recognized what a German military presence in the Rhineland meant was a one legged American veteran of the last war named Laurence Stallings (1894 – 1968). This article appeared to be about the great benefit afforded to us all by hard working photo-journalists who supplied us daily with compelling images of various far-flung events, but it was in all actuality a warning to our grand parents that the world was becoming a more dangerous place.

I think the unforgettable picture of the month will come from shots stolen near a French farmhouse by Strasbourg, when the French were countering Hitler’s move into the Rhineland…Routine were the crustacean stares of the Italian children in gas masks last week, where they practiced first aid against chlorine and mustard barrages…

Spies Beheaded in Germany
(Literary Digest, 1935)

This magazine article was filed during the suspenseful phony war that was waged between Poland and Germany over the Danzig issue. It reported on the beheading of two German women convicted of spying on behalf of a Polish cavalry officer by the name of Baron Georges Von Sosnowski:

In London, THE NEWS CHRONICLE, Liberal Party organ, declared that the beheading of the two women was ‘disgusting savagery’, and was not the first evidence of ‘a strain of sheer barbarism in the Nazi creed…


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