World War Two

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

VJ Day in New York City
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

…On, on, on it went into the night and the next night as the biggest city in the world went its way toward picking up the biggest hangover in its history. It was a hangover few would ever regret.


Click here if you would like to read an article about the VE Day celebrations in Europe.


Click here if you would like to read about the VE Day celebrations in the United States.

Mine-Detecting Dogs
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

A short paragraph about the M-Dogs of the American Army during the Second World War and how they were trained to locate both plastic and metallic mines during the course of the war.

An additional paragraph can be read about the Hollywood starlet who volunteered her dog for military service, only to be informed that the pooch had given the last full measure on behalf of democracy and a grateful nation.

Click here to read an article about re-educating the captured German boys of the war.

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The Battle for Aachen
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

An eye-witness account of the first major American battle to be fought on German ground during World War II. Aachen, the Westernmost city in Germany was defended by some 44,000 men of the Wehrmacht as well as assorted elements of the First SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Division which combined to offer a stubborn defense that lasted nineteen days. This article, written by Bill Davidson, who witnessed the most vicious kind of street combat, believed that the battle for Aachen was simply a re-staging of the battle of Stalingrad and he supports this point throughout the article:

Godfrey Blunden,the Australian war correspondent, was here in Aachen…he was immediately struck by the similarity between the two battles. ‘There is is the same house-to-house and room-to-room fighting, the same combat techniques, the same type of German defense.’


Years later, historian Stephen Ambrose remarked that the Battle of Aachen was unnecessary.

She Worked The Graveyard Shift
(The American Magazine, 1943)

Thousands of American girls are traveling the same road as 21-year-old Dorthy Vogely, our new Cover Girl this month. No longer do they live at home waiting for a nice young man. Instead they’ve gone on their own to help win the war…

Hollywood During the Second World War
(Yank, 1945)

This is a swell article that truly catches the spirit of the time. You will read about the war-torn Hollywood that existed between the years 1941-1945 and the movie shortage, the hair-pin rationing, the rise of the independent producers and the ascent of Van Johnson and Lauren Becall:

Lauren, a Warner Brothers property, is a blonde-haired chick with a tall, hippy figure, a voice that sounds like a sexy foghorn and a pair of so-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it eyes

Mention is also made of the hiring of demobilized U.S. combat veterans to serve as technical assistants for war movies in such films as Objective Burma.

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German Choices In 1940
(Click Magazine, 1940)

Attached is a Phoney War magazine article by Major General George Ared White (1880 – 1941) in which he mused wistfully (as Oregon men are wont to do) as to all the various horrible choices that were spread before Herr Hitler in the early months of 1940. The General believed that France’s Maginot Line was impregnable and he did not think that Hitler would commit to such an undertaking.

One Year After the War
(Collier’s Magazine, 1946)

An anonymous opinion piece that was published in the August 24, 1946 issue of COLLIER’S MAGAZINE in which the writer expressed his astonishment in finding that peacetime, after such a hard-fought victory, should seem so anti-climactic:

Consumers goods are so scarce everywhere that all major countries are suffering more or less inflation. A wave of big strikes in this country earlier this year slowed production badly, so that it seems impossible for us to freeze our own relatively mild inflation at its present point.

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Verdun, 1944
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

The contested forts of Verdun (Battle of Verdun, 1916), Fort Douamont, Fort Souville and Fort Vaux, were little more than storage sheds to the American army of World War Two; and during the four years of German occupation, the forts played a similar roll for the German army as well. This is a neat article that briefly touches on the importance of these structures during the previous war and what kind of flotsam and jetsam the GIs were able to find as they wandered about the forts (like a W.W. I skeleton). Of particular interest was a wall that was covered with the names of various combatants from all sides and from both wars:

The American names are big and black and seem to blot out the others. One of them says:

Austin White, Chicago, Ill., 1918 and 1944.

This is the last time I want to write my name here.

Click here to read more magazine articles about the African-American efforts during the First World War.

A Post-War Interview With Ike
(Yank, 1945)

This is a conversational General Eisenhower article that primarily concerns the plans for the Allied occupation of Germany, coupled with every American soldier’s wish to simply get in boats and go home:

I’m just as bad off as any GI today, General Eisenhower said quietly. I don’t want to be here. I’m 54 years old and I lead a kind of lonely life.


The third paragraph makes reference to a pretty British secretary named Lt. Kay Summersby.


Recommended Reading: Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight Eisenhower_by_Kay Summersbystyle=border:none

VJ Day in New Orleans
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

In a city prone to revelry, New Orleans had prematurely celebrated the end of World War Two on three previous occasions; not willing to go down that path a fourth time, the residents were in a state of disbelief when the news of the Japanese surrender began to circulate all over again. However, when it was understood that this time the rumor proved true everyone seemed grateful for the rehearsal time.

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Iva Toguri of California
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Throughout the course of the war in the Pacific, there were as many as twelve Japanese female radio commentators broadcasting assorted varieties of demoralizing radio programming to the American and Allied forces from Japan. However the Americans knew nothing of this collective and simply assumed that all the broadcasts were hosted by one woman, who they dubbed, Tokyo Rose.


The story told in this article begins in the late summer of 1945 when:

…one of the supreme objectives of American correspondents landing in Japan was Radio Tokyo. There they hoped to find someone to pass off as the one-and-only Rose and scoop their colleagues. When the information had been sifted a little, a girl named Iva Toguri (Iva Toguri D’Aquino: 1916 – 2006), emerged as the only candidate who came close to filling the bill. For three years she had played records, interspersed with snappy comments, beamed to Allied soldiers on the Zero Hour…Her own name for herself was Orphan Ann.

Proclamation Number 2525
(U.S. Government Document, 1943)

Signed by President Roosevelt on December 7, 1941, Proclamation 2525 enabled the U.S. government to relocate anyone it chose from all areas believed to be of military value.

…the President makes public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of of the hostile nation or government, being of the age of fourteen years and upward, who shall be within the United States and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies.





Dance at Tule Lake.

A Word on the American M-1 Garand Rifle
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Kind words regarding the M-1 Garand rifle were written in a 1945 report by the Department of the Army; it was widely believed in those circles that this American weapon was one of the primary advantages that lead to victory.

Click here to read about the mobile pill boxes of the Nazi army.

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The Doodlebug Tank?
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

That crack team of linguists who loaf-about our Los Angeles offices here at OldMagazineArticles.com have assured us that the Doodlebug was not the name assigned by the Nazi engineers for this minute, remote-control tank that made it’s appearance on the Anzio beachhead in 1944, but rather a NICKNAME that was authored by the stalwart G.I.s who opposed it. The gizmo packed with explosives in order to destroy Allied tanks.


Click here to read about the Patton Tank in the Korean War…

Dogs Used in the Rescue of Downed Pilots
(Collier’s, 1945)

The use of animals in war is as old as war itself; but the concept of kicking dogs out of perfectly good aircraft so they might be able to parachute onto snowy hilltops and deliver aid to wounded combatants dates to World War II. This printable Collier’s Magazine article tells the story of the Parapups:

Completely G.I., the dogs have service records, serial numbers, enlistment papers and shots against disease. Sentimentalists along the Alaska Division even proposed that they be authorized to wear Parawings after five jumps.

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