World War Two – Page 28 – Old Magazine Articles

An Eye-Full of Post-War Tokyo

An eyewitness account of the devastation delivered to Tokyo as reported by the first Americans to enter that city following the Japanese surrender some weeks earlier:

The people of Tokyo are taking the arrival of the first few Americans with impeccable Japanese calm. Sometimes they turn and look at us twice, but they have shown no emotion toward us except a mild curiosity and occasional amusement…They are still proud and a little bit superior. They know they lost the war, but they are not apologizing for it.

Click here to read about the humbled Japan.

Eating Crow
(PM, & Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

Four years after Pearl Harbor, the editors of the Japanese newspaper Asahi gazed out of the windows from their offices and saw the charred remains of their enemy-occupied homeland and recognized that they’d made a fatal mistake:

We once more refresh our horror at the colossal crime committed and are filled with a solemn sense of reflection and self-reproach…

Eating Crow
(PM, & Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

We once more refresh our horror at the colossal crime committed and are filled with a solemn sense of reflection and self-reproach…

H.L. Mencken on the Brain Trust
(Liberty, 1934)

The National Press Club During the War
(Click Magazine, 1943)

Throughout the decades, Washington, D.C. has had more than its fair share of private clubs for journalists – but they all failed for the same reason: each one of them granted credit to their members at the bar. It was not until 1908 that someone got it right – The National Press Club insisted that each ink-slinger pay-as-they-go. As a result, this club has been able to keep their doors open for well over one hundred years. This well-illustrated article explains what an important role the club played during the war years.

-recommended reading:
Drunk Before Noon: The Behind-The-Scenes Story of the Washington Press Corps

Bill Mauldin Of The Stars & Stripes
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

No other cartoonist during the Second World War ever portrayed the American GI so knowingly and with more sympathy than the Stars & Stripes cartoonist Sgt. Bill Mauldin (1921 – 2003), who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartoons in 1945.

Mauldin wrote the attached essay at the end of the war and gave the Yank Magazine readers an earful regarding his understanding of the front, the rear and all the the blessed officers in between

Click here to read a wartime interview with another popular 1940s American cartoonist: Milton Caniff.

Jim Crow and the Draft
(PM Tabloid, 1940)

Wishing to avoid some of the taint of racism that characterized the American military during the First World war, Republican Senator William Barbour (1888 – 1943) announced that he intended to introduce an amendment to the 1940 conscription legislation that would open all branches of the U.S. Military to everyone regardless of skin color. The article goes on to list all the various branches that practiced racial discrimination.

Fighting in Winter
(PM Tabloid, 1942)

Within a few weeks, Winter again will be sweeping down on the greatest battlefield in history… At Leningrad, the Fall rains are almost over. Now comes a month of dangerously dry, clear weather and then the snow. The Moscow zone will be thickly carpeted in white in seven or eight weeks. Allied strategists hope that the second Russian war Winter will bring a repition of the first, when Soviet skill in cold weather fighting finally drove the Nazis back.

Sticking It To Berlin
(Newsweek Magazine, 1943)

[Berlin,] the target of 69 RAF raids so far, [the city] has been hit hard only a few times this year and underwent no raids during 1942. On the morale front it ranks ahead of all other German cities. When the others were raided the outcry of the Germans was bitter but local. When Berlin hit groans rose from all over Germany. If RAF night raiders should raze the capital by fire, as they did Hamburg, the whole German nation would suffer the shock of Berliners… Goebbels begged them to stand up under bombs as stoutly as the British did in 1940.

‘Tanks Spearhead Nazi Offensive”
(PM Tabloid, 1942)

The largest tank battle in history was fought on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. In April of 1943, 6,000 German and Soviet tanks, supported by some 2,000,000 infantrymen, had-at-it near the Russian city of Kursk. This article was written a year before the clash, and it informed the readers that armored engagements were becoming larger and larger with each one.