World War Two – Page 46 – Old Magazine Articles

The Bombing of Monte Cassino
(Newsweek Magazine, 1944)

The bombing of the Medieval abbey at Montecassino was one of the saddest tactical errors of the Second World War. The decision to bomb the structure was a result an error in translating an intercepted German communique that lead the Allies to believe that there was Nazi battalion contained within the abbey. This was not the case. When the Allies sifted through the rubble they were surprised to find the remains of numerous Italian civilians and very few Germans. The attached article recalls the fantastic view that was enjoyed by the assembled U.S. and British troops as the bombs fell.

The Germans Tried to Secure a Peace
(Confidential Magazine, 1958)

George F. Earle, a former Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania, recalled his days in the White House during W.W. II when a secret German delegation came around wishing to bring an end to the war. Roosevelt rejected the conditions and Earle openly chastised him for it.

Click here to read an assessment of the late-war German soldier…

The Atomic Age Begins – in Hiroshima
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

On Sunday morning, August 5 (Washington time), an American airplane flew over Hiroshima, a Japanese army base [!] on the Inland Sea. It dropped a single bomb. When that missile struck the earth, it blew up in the greatest man-made explosion in the history of the world. The United States had loosed an atomic bomb on Japan.

Click here to read about the invention of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile

Tokyo’s Response to the News of the German Surrender
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

When Tokyo heard that Nazi Germany had cried uncle and surrendered to the Allies on May 8, 1945, the Imperial Japanese spin-machine digested the news and simply decided that it was a non-event.

Articles about the daily hardships in post-war Germany can be read by clicking here.

VE-Day in Germany
(Commonweal, 1945)

In the end, the German soldier faced the greatest ignominy which any soldier can receive. His own people discredited and betrayed him. The people knew the war was lost. They knew too that fanatical resistance meant that their homes and their fields were lost, too. Many an American soldier owes his life (though from the long range point of view, not his gratitude) to the very people who heiled Hitler into power. They would stool-pigeon on those SS troops who remained behind our lines to carry out guerrilla warfare.

Click here to read about the post-war trial of Norway’s Quisling.

VE-Day in Paris
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Eyewitness accounts of all the excitement that was V.E. Day in Paris:

On the Champs Elysees they were singing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,’ and it was a long way even the few blocks from Fouquet’s restaurant to the Arc de Triomphe if you tried to walk up the Champs on VE-Day in Paris. From one side of the broad and beautiful avenue to the other, all the way to the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe in the Place de l’Etoile, there was hardly any place to breathe and no place at all to move. That was the way it was in the Place l’Opera and the Place de la Republique and all the other famous spots and in a lot of obscure little side streets that nobody but Parisians know.

Click here to read about the liberation of Paris.
Click here to read the observations of U.S. Army lieutenant Louis L’Amour concerning 1946 Paris.

VE-Day in Europe
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Assorted reports from various European capitols concerning the capitulation of Hitler’s Germany:

Finally, when Paris believed the news, it was just a big-city celebration –crowds and singing and cheers and lots of cognac and girls. People stopped work and airplanes of all the Allied forces buzzed the Champs Elysees. Pvt. Ernest Kuhn of Chicago listened to the news come over the radio at the 108th General Hospital. He had just been liberated after five months in a Nazi PW camp and he still had some shrapnel in his throat. I listened to Churchill talk, he said, and I kept saying to myself, ‘I’m still alive. The war is over and I’m still alive’ I thought of all the guys in the 28th Division Band with me who were dead now. We used to be a pretty good band.

VE-Day in Four Western American Cities
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

A report from Portland, Oregon, Houston, Texas, Los Angeles and San Francisco, California as to how those cities celebrated the surrender of Germany in May of 1945.

President Truman’s VE-Day Proclamation
(Think Magazine, 1946)

Attached is a page from the Diary of Participation in W.W. II which was compiled by the editors of THINK MAGAZINE; this page contains the printable text of a portion of President Harry Truman’s VE-Day Proclamation of May 8, 1945:

The Allied armies, through sacrifice and devotion and with God’s help, have won from Germany a final and unconditional surrender. The Western world has been freed of the evil forces which for five years and longer have imprisoned the bodies and broken the lives of millions upon millions of free-born men… Much remains to be done. The victory won in the West must now be won in the East…

VE-Day in New York City
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

New Yorkers milled around the Wall Street district and Times Square, and over a loudspeaker Mayor Fiorlello H. LaGuardia told them to behave themselves…

Click here to read about the VJ-Day celebrations around the world.

VE-Day in the U.S. of A.
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

A report from Boston, Atlanta, Baltimore, Cleveland, Minneapolis, St Louis and Springfield (Mass.) as to how VE-Day was celebrated (or not) in these cities:

To get an over-all view of VE-day in America, YANK asked civilian newspapermen and staff writers in various parts of the country to send an eye-witness reports. From these OPs the reports were much the same. Dallas was quiet, Des Moines was sober, Seattle was calm, Boston was staid.

Yamashita Sentenced to Death
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1945)

The article posted herein lists the aleged crimes of General Tomoyuki Yamishita of the Imperial Japanese Army. The article also states the results of his sentencing, death by hanging. Two weeks after the trial he received a stay of execution by the United States Supreme Court.

The Cadet Nurse Corps
(Think Magazine, 1946)

Youngest and largest of the the women’s uniformed services, the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps, has made nursing history in the brief span of it’s existence…the corps includes more than 112,000 women between 17 and 35 who enrolled to help meet the emergency demand for nursing service and at the same time prepare themselves for a post-war profession.

Allied Overoptimism
(United States News, 1944)

The surprise that was Hitler’s December Offensive made many people think that the Allies were losing their edge and relying more on air power than infantry; Allies rather than our own divisions. The Battle of the Bulge shook all Americans out of their complacency.

More on the Battle of the Bulge can be read here…

Hindsight
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

Nobody tried to deny it. The Germans had achieved perhaps the most valuable of military advantages – surprise. How did they do it? [In these two articles] Allied officers gave some obvious reasons, but critics guessed at some that were less obvious.

German and Italian P.o.W.s in America
(United States News, 1945)

By the end of 1944 the P.o.W. population within the U.S. stood somewhere in the neighborhood of 340,000 and was growing at a rate between 25,000 to 30,000 each month. The vast majority of them (300,000) were from the German Army and 51,000 were Italians:

There are reports that these prisoners often are pampered, that they are getting cigarettes when American civilians cannot get them, that they are being served in their camps by American soldiers, that they are often not working at a time when war workers are scarce. The general complaint is that the 46,000 American prisoners in Germany are not faring as well as 3000,000 Germans in this country.

Read about the escaped German POWs who the FBI never found…

‘Nuts”
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

Here is the NEWSWEEK MAGAZINE account of the defense of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge (December 16, 1944 – January 25, 1945). The article opens with a thorough explanation of General McAuliffe’s famous response to the German officers who came in search of an American surrender.

The Defense of Bastogne
(Combat Studies Group, 1986)

Attached is the concluding essay from a U.S. Army report written in 1986 concerning the spirited defense that was offered by the 101st Airborne Division at the Battle of the Bulge.

At Bastogne, well-coordinated combined arms teams defeated uncoordinated armored and infantry forces committed to an unrealistic plan.

Another article about this battle can be read by clicking here…