World War Two

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

American GIs Meet the Reds on the Elbe
(Newsweek & Yank Magazines, 1945)

In late April of 1945, American tank crews south of Torgau (Germany) began to pick up the chattering of Soviet infantry units on their radios – the transmissions were generated by the advanced units of Marshal Konev’s (1897 – 1973) First Ukrainian Army and both the allied units were elated to know that the other was nearby, for it meant one thing: the end of the war was at hand.


Thankfully, Yank‘s correspondent Ed Cummings was with the U.S. First Army when the two groups met at the Elbe River and he filed the attached article.

American GIs Meet the Reds on the Elbe
(Newsweek & Yank Magazines, 1945) Read More »

VE-Day at the 108th General Hospital (Yank Magazine, 1945)

An eyewitness account accompanied by a wonderful Howard Brodie sketch describing the enthusiastic rush enjoyed by all the wounded GIs in the dayroom at the 108th General Hospital in London:

The war was over, and I was still alive. And I thought of all the boys in the 28th Division band who were with me in the Ardennes who are dead now.

Click here to read a short notice about how Imperial Japan took the news of Germany’s surrender.

VE-Day at the 108th General Hospital (Yank Magazine, 1945) Read More »

Ernest Hemingway of Time Magazine (Coronet Magazine, 1953)

Some wise old wag once opined that by the time W.W. II came along, Hemingway was far too fascinated by his own public image to have ever been an effective war correspondent. However, it should be remembered that he had looked war in the face on many occasions – the Second World War was the seventh conflict that he witnessed as a war reporter. Prior to working as a war correspondent for Time and Collier’s during the Second World War, Hemingway had written for a number of other outlets in six other conflicts.

Ernest Hemingway of Time Magazine (Coronet Magazine, 1953) Read More »

Ukrainian Partisan Witnessed to Nazi Murders at Babi Yar (Collier’s Magazine, 1945)

The attached 1945 article from COLLIER’S by George Creel (1876 – 1953) was one of the very first pieces of wartime journalism to report on the Nazi atrocities committed in the forest of Babi Yar, just outside Kiev, Ukraine. Under the command of Reichskomissar Erich Koch (1896 – 1986) 33,000 Ukrainian Jews were slaughtered by German soldiers over a five day period during the month of September, 1941; this brief article tells the tale of Ukrainian partisan Yefim Vilkis, who resisted the Nazi occupation and witnessed the massacre.

Ukrainian Partisan Witnessed to Nazi Murders at Babi Yar (Collier’s Magazine, 1945) Read More »

An Observer on the Russian Front (Collier’s Magazine, 1945)

During the late war period, leftist playwright Lillian Hellman (1905 – 1984), was twice denied permission to travel to war-torn Britain on the grounds that she had been recognized as an active communist. Yet, ironically, those same pencil-pushers in the State Department turned around a few months later and granted her a passport to visit the Soviet Union in August of 1944 – as a guest artist of VOKS, the Soviet agency that processed all international cultural exchanges. It was during this visit that she penned the attached eyewitness account of the Nazi retreat through Stalin’s Russia:

Five days of looking out of a train window into endless devastation makes you sad at first, and then numb. Here there is nothing left, and the eye gets unhappily accustomed to nothing and begins to accept it…


Click here to read a 1939 STAGE MAGAZINE profile of this writer.

An Observer on the Russian Front (Collier’s Magazine, 1945) Read More »

The Siege Of Leningrad (Collier’s Magazine, 1944)

Reporting by radio from the city of Moscow, the celebrated Russian poet Vera Inber (1890 – 1972) gave an account of the difficult life lived by the civilians of Leningrad when the Nazi war machine laid siege to that city between September 8, 1941 through January 27, 1944:

I will never forget the winter of 1941 – 42, when the bread ration was 4.4 ounces daily – and nothing else but bread was issued. In those days, we would bury our dead in long ditches – common graves. To bury your dead in separate graves, you needed fourteen ounces of bread for the gravedigger and your own shovel. Otherwise, you would have to wait your turn for days and days. Children’s sleighs served as hearses to the cemetery.

The Siege Of Leningrad (Collier’s Magazine, 1944) Read More »

The Segregated U.S. Army (Coronet Magazine, 1960)

Here is a segment from a longer article that tells the sad story about racial segregation in the U.S. Armed Forces. The small portion that is attached here tells of a secret group of fifty army researchers who were dispatched to the European front and

interviewed thousands of [White] soldiers about their attitudes toward Negro platoons fighting experimentally within their divisions.

Their findings proved that to these front-line respondents, the experimental platoons were truly their equal. In 1948 this research was showed to President Truman, who signed Executive Order 9981, thus bringing to an end racial segregation within the ranks of the U.S. Military.

The U.S. Navy was the biggest offender

The Segregated U.S. Army (Coronet Magazine, 1960) Read More »

African-Americans in Hawaii (Yank Magazine, 1943)

Colonel Chauncey Hooper was a World War I veteran; of African-American stock, he had served with the Harlem Hellfighters (the 369th Regiment, 93rd Division). When 1943 came along, he could be found as an army colonel in Hawaii, lording over a regiment of colored New Yorkers calling themselves Hooper’s Troopers. This article is by no means about Hooper as much as it concerns the high number of Harlem Jazz musicians who served under his command


Dorie Miller was an African-American hero during the Second World War, click here if you would like to read about him.

African-Americans in Hawaii (Yank Magazine, 1943) Read More »