World War Two – Page 29 – Old Magazine Articles

The American Invasion of Saipan
(The American Magazine, 1944)

The battle of Saipan spanned the period between June 15 through July 9, 1944. Here is an eyewitness account of the three week battle:

Reveille for the Japanese garrison on Saipan sounded abruptly at five-forty that morning of D-Day minus one, with a salvo from the 14-inch rifles of one of our battleships. Other guns, big and small, joined the opening chorus and from than on we realized why we had stuffed the cotton in our ears. The bass drum jam session was to continue for hours.

The End of the Home Front
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

The word reconversion is a term so odd to our era that my auto-correct insists it is a misspelling – but the word appears more than a few times in the September 3, 1945 issue of Newsweek and it pertains to process of turning the economy (and society) from one centered on war to one that caters to consumers. This article encapsulates the excitement of the previous week when the war was declared over – POWs returned, rationing ended, Lend-Lease completed, nukes created, draft quotas reduced, traitors hanged and the recruits demobilized.

End of the Road for Sgt. John Basilone
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

The first Marine waves that stormed ashore on Iwo Jima included a stalwart young sergeant who stood out as a leader even in that picked group. Handsome, dark-haired, and purposeful, he strode through the surf seemingly oblivious to the enemy’s artillery fire. His eyes focused inland on a spot suitable for his machine-gun platoon… Suddenly, a Jap shell screamed. The sergeant fell. John Basilone, first enlisted Marine in this war to win the Congressional Medal of Honor, was dead.

The Photograph
(Yank Magazine, 1943)

Attached you will find a few well-chosen words about that famous 1943 photograph that the censors of the War Department saw fit to release to the American public. The image was distributed in order that the over-optimistic and complacent citizens on the home front gain an understanding that this war is not without a cost.

A haunting image even sixty years later, the photograph depicts three dead American boys washed-over by the tide of Buna Beach, New Guinea. The photographer was George Strock of Life Magazine and the photograph did it’s job.

Click here to read General Marshall’s end-of-war remarks about American casualty figures.

The French Navy In The Balance
(PM Tabloid, 1940)

Japanese Spies and Their Many Troubles
(PM Tabloid, 1940)

From the 1940 editorial pages of PM came this column by Henry Paynter (1899 – 1960) who wrote amusingly about the many frustrations facing Japanese spies in North America.

The identity of almost every Japanese spy or saboteur has been known to U.S. authorities. Every instruction they have received or sent has been decoded…

At the height of their irritation, they confided in the German Consul-General stationed in San Francisco – only to learn after the war that he was an FBI informant (you can read about him here).

All-In for the Eastern Front
(PM Tabloid, 1942)

In a message to the German Red Cross, Hitler referred to Russia as ‘an enemy whose victory would mean the end of everything’

When Hitler says ‘the end of everything‘ he means the end of Nazism.

The German Eastward Thrust
(PM Tabloid 1941)

Sub-surface evidence that the war on the Russian Front is going into a more crucial phase is mounting… if the present German drive achieves the bulk of its objectives, the Russians will have had some of their resistance power taken away from them. They will not have quite the same communications, the same supply facilities or the same freedom of movement they have had to work with thus far.

Women Worked The Farms
(Click Magazine, 1943)

Although the Selective Service agency granted 4,192,000 draft deferments to farmers throughout the course of World War II, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recognized that this number alone would never be enough to harvest the food necessary to feed both the home front and the armed forces. With this shortage in mind, the Women’s Land Army was created in 1943 to provide that essential farm labor that proved so vital in winning the war. Between the years 1943 and 1945 millions of American women from various backgrounds rolled up their denim sleeves and got the job done. The attached magazine article is one of the first to tell the tale of this organization, and was printed at a time when there were only 60,000 women in the field.<

What The GIs Thought of The Films of the Forties
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

After four hard years of watching sappy Hollywood drivel about the war and the home front, the censorship machine was finally dismantled – which allowed the servicemen to speak their minds about what they REALLY thought about those movies…

More Boys Are Born During War
(Yank & Pic Magazines, 1945)

The fact that more boy babies are born during and immediately after major wars is a phenomenon that was discovered by the underpaid statisticians employed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in 1942. The articles that are attached are but two of what was probably four hundred articles that appeared on the topic that year. The writers and thinkers of the digital age continue studying this actuality – among them is the gang over at Psychology Today who wrote:

Scientists have known for a long time that more boys than usual are born during and after major wars. The phenomenon was first noticed in 1954 with regard to white children born during World War II in the United States. It has since been replicated for most of the belligerent nations in both World Wars. The phenomenon has been dubbed the ‘returning soldier effect.’ There is no doubt that the phenomenon is real, but nobody has been able to explain it. Why are soldiers who return from wars more likely to father sons than other men?

The Brutality of Combat
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1944)

The shock of modern battle is so severe to nervous systems that the hair color of thousands of young men in the Pacific and European theaters of war has turned gray overnight.

Not surprisingly, the young men in question had no interest in resembling their grandfathers
and so the services of a patriotic hair dye manu- facturing firm were secured.

Hispanic Women in the WACs
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

A group of women of Latin-American extraction took the Army oath before more than 6,000 persons in San Antonio’s Municipal Auditorium to become the second section of the Benito Juarez Air-WAC Squadron, named for the hero who helped liberate Mexico from European domination in 1862.

Led by an honor guard from the first Latin-American WAC squadron, the new war-women, marched into the auditorium to be sworn in and to hear words of greeting from Colonel Oveta Culp Hobby (1905 – 1995) and from Mrs. Dwight Eisenhower (1896 – 1979).

The first Hispanic WAC was Carmen Contreras-Bozak.

Click here to read about some of the Puerto Ricans who served with distinction during the war.

From Amazon:
Dressed for Duty: America’s Women in Uniform, 1898-1973

Andrew Higgins: He Made D-Day Possible
(Click Magazine, 1942)

During an informal conversation with his biographer, Stephen Ambrose, Dwight Eisenhower once remarked that it was Andrew Higgins (1886 – 1952) who had won the war for us. Knowing that such words do not flow from the lips of generals easily, Eisenhower went on to explain to Ambrose that if it were not for the creation of Higgin’s landing crafts, the architects of the Allied victory would have had to seize the existing, and well-fortified, harbors of Europe in order to unload their invasion forces – and who knows how the island-hopping war in the Pacific would been fought?

Attached is a five page photo-essay from the Fall of 1942 about the man and his early contributions.

The Birth of the M-1 Garand Rifle
(American Legion Magazine, 1939)

This article was written by the war correspondent Fairfax Downey (1894 – 1990) for a magazine that catered to American veterans of W.W. I, and it seemed that he simply could not contain his enthusiasm for the U.S. infantry’s newest rifle: the M-1 Garand:

What a gun it is! Its nine pound weight swings easily through the manual of arms. The eight-round clip (three more shots than the we used to have with the ’03 Springfield) slips in easily and the breech clicks closed. The old range scale slide has vanished; range and windage adjustments are made simply by turning two knobs… The new semi-automatic means, among other things, that the fire power of troops armed with it has increased at least two and a half times over the old Springfield.

For further magazine reading about John Garand and his rifle, click here.

Boss Man
(The American Magazine, 1944)

Here is a quick look at U.S. Army General Allen W. Gullion (1880 – 1946); he was in charge of every German, Italian and Japanese prisoner held by the American Army during the Second World war (At the time this article appeared there were about 150,000 Germans, 50,000 Italians and only a handful of Japanese).

The Murder of Grefreiter Kunz
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

Accusing one of their fellow inmates of treason (Vaterlandsverrater), a Nazi kangaroo court located in the POW camp in Tonkawa, Oklahoma murdered him. The U.S. Army administrators who run the camp dutifully received the body as if justice had been served, and buried it in the camp graveyard. This article explains how all this came about.

The First Black Fighter Pilots
(The American Magazine, 1942)

This article partially explains the excitement of being a Tuskegee Airman and flying the Army’s most advanced fighters and partially explains what it was like to be a black man in a segregated America:

I’m flying for every one of the 12,000,000 Negroes in the United States. I want to prove that we can take a tough job and handle it just as well as a white man.