Find old World War 2 articles here. We have great newspaper articles from wwii check them out today!
In this article, photographer Frederick L. Hamilton recalled his two years in Japan prior to the Pearl Harbor attack; he let’s lose with all he learned concerning how the Japanese perceived the Americans:
They think we are soft, wasteful, irreverent and stupid…Most serious of all to the Japanese is their belief that we have no spiritual quality, no sense of honor.
It’s hard to believe – but Victory Fashion hit the American home front before it was even called the home front. However by mid-1941 Americans were pretty outraged by fascist aggression: the U-boats, London bombed, Nanking ravaged, France invaded – the list goes on. When this article went to press, we were not in the war but we were firmly on the Allied side. The word victory made its way into fashion circles and the nation’s couturiers began turning out novelty accessories and garments. Even the hairdressers contributed.
French collaborator Pierre Laval (1883 – 1945) is remembered as the Nazi tool who presided over France between 1942 and 1944, allowing for the deportation of Jews and French laborers into Germany. On D-Day, Laval stood before the radio microphones cautioning his countrymen not to join in the fight against the German occupiers. His many sins would be known a year later during the liberation of Paris, but this writer was very accurate in cataloging all his many failings, both as a citizen of France and as a Human Being.
Laval was captured in Spain; you can read about that here…
CLICK HERE to read about Laval’s Norwegian counterpart: Prime Minister Vidkun Quisling…
The game was up. At the Prat de Llobregat airfield outside Barcelona the traitor sat heavily on a camp stool, waiting for the reprieve. It did not come. The Franco government had found Pierre Laval too hot to handle… Laval shrugged: ‘I suppose if Petain can face the music, I can’. But later he shouted: ‘It is unfair… delivering me to my country.’
More about Laval can be read here
Down ramp!‘ shouted the coxswain from the elevated stern.
Down it came with a clank and splash. Ahead – and it seemed at that moment miles off – stretched the sea wall. At Lieutenant Crisson’s insistence we had all daubed our faces with commando black. I charged out with the rest, trying to look fierce and desperate, only to step into a shell hole and submerge myself in the channel. Luckily my gear was too wet and stinking to put on so I was light enough to come up.
This Newsweek journalist was the only allied war correspondent to have witnessed the derring-do of those in the first wave.
A fascinating article reporting on the Baby Cage, the Allied prisoner of war camp that held some 7,000 boy soldiers of the German army, ages 12 through 17.
In light of the fact that so manyGerman youths had been indoctrinated from their earliest days in Nazi dogma and then dumbfounded to a far greater degree within the Hitler Jugend system, the Allied leadership post-war government believed that this group needed to be instructed in the ways of tolerance before being let loose into the general population.
Click here to read about the Nazi indoctrination of German youth.
Canadian war correspondent M.H. Halton reported from the Egyptian desert concerning one of modern war’s most dramatic spectacles – [a] battle of tanks in the dark.
– from Amazon: KEY WORDS: Lt General Sir Leslie Moreshead in North Africa 1941,British north african commander Lt General Sir
Major General Lewis E. Brereton (1890 – 1967) is the new commander of the U.S. forces in the Middle East.
A well-illustrated 1944 article by Leonard Lyons pertaining to the assorted wartime experiences of ten American war correspondents:
• Martin Agronsky for NBC News
• Vincent Sheean with The N.Y. Tribune
• Henry Cassidy of the Associated Press
• Bob Casey of the Chicago Tribune
• John Gunther of The Chicago Daily News
• Jack Thompson of The Chicago Tribune
• Cecil Brown of CBS News
• W.L. White of the Associated Press
• Quentin Reynolds of Collier’s Magazine
• Cyrus Schulzberger with the NY Times
Published four months after the above article, here is a similar, well-illustrated piece that lists the names of the photographers and reporters who were killed – and the younger breed of writers and lens-men who took their places.
This brief column tells the story of three women war correspondents who marched at the point of the spear alongside the American infantry in order to report on the collapse of Hitler’s Germany. The correspondents in question were:
• Lee Carson in Remagen
• Iris Carpenter in Remagen
• Ann Stringer in the city of Bonn
Eight months into America’s entry into the war came this article from PM reporting the War Manpower Commission and their data as to how many American women up to that point had stepped up to contribute their labor to the war effort (over 1,500,000):
Women have been found to excel men in jobs requiring repetitive skill, finger dexterity and accuracy. They’re the equals of men in a number of other jobs. A U.S. Employment Service has indicated women can do 80 percent of the jobs now done by men.
At the beginning of World War II, our army was a mixture of callow boys and and domesticated men. The older men were homesick for wives and children…There were plenty of lonely wives, too, and it soon became evident that a fair number of them were committed to the belief that continence was bad for women.
Marriage vows were one of the unsung casualties of the Second World War: by 1944 many married women who hadn’t seen their drafted husbands in years began producing babies; you can read about that here…
In 1943 a woman on the home front introduced a sexual component that she believed would bring an end to the problem of industrial absenteeism – click here to read about her idea…
As the American occupation forces began to pour in and spread throughout the cities and countryside of Japan, both occupied and occupier slowly get to learn of the other. The cordial attitude of the Japanese leads General MacArthur to conclude that the military presence need not be as large as he had once believed:
Curious and awed, increasingly friendly Japanese flocked to watch what they called the ‘race of giants’ at work.
The reforms that were imposed upon Occupied Japan in the Forties and Fifties did not simply come in the form of death sentences for war criminals – but additionally the Japanese came to know the rights and protections that are guaranteed to All Americans under the United States Constitution. For the first time ever Japanese women were permitted to vote, unions were legalized and equality under the law was mandated. This small notice concerned the overthrow of the feudal laws that governed the Japanese tenant farmers.
By the time the war ended the WACs were 100,000 strong –
they had earned 314 medals and commendations, including 23 Legion of Merit awards and fourteen Purple Hearts. Throughout the war, seventeen thousand WACs had served overseas but by Christmas of 1945 their global strength had been cut in half.
When it came across the wire that Fall of 1942 saw the U.S. Navy enlistments increase by 150%, the editors of PM were not slow to dispatch a team down to the induction center to check it out (at 67 Broad St., NYC).
Many, many African-Americans answered the call as well, but with understandable reservations…
More about W.W. II induction can be read here
