World War Two

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

A GI View of Japan (Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

Reporter Robert Shaplen (1917 – 1988) filed this account of how the GIs have reacted to the strangest country they have ever encountered:

Looking at the Japanese, the average GI wonders how they ever managed to prosecute a war in the first place. Everything in Japan, even broken and blasted cities and factories, has a miniature toy-like appearance. Automobiles, the ones that are left, don’t work; trains bear little resemblance to the Twentieth Century Limited or a fast freight back home. The short, slight people are dressed poorly and drably.

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‘The Japanese Try Western Ways” (Weekly News Review, 1954)

There’s a ‘New Look‘ in Japan. It’s come about in the years since World War II and is largely due the result of Western influence brought about by the presence of American soldiers…More and more women are dressing in American-style clothing, although they still prefer the kimono as evening dress. Girls now are given the same education as boys. There is a new school system with grade schools, high schools and colleges modeled somewhat on the American pattern…


Some of the allure attached to the West was a result of theses guys…

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Japanese Nationalists (Pathfinder Magazine, 1949)

This article tells the tale of the Japanese Nationalist Masaharu Kageyama (1910 – 1979), a fellow who, in the political landscape of U.S.-occupied Japan, seemed rather like the late Mussolini of Italy: always remembering the storied past of a Japan that no longer existed. Kageyama was something a flat-Earther, choosing the road of the Japanese Nationalist, he held that Emperor Hirohito was indeed divine and that the Fascist vision of an East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was achievable, even in 1949.

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The German Who Escaped (Collier’s Magazine, 1953)

Read this unbelievable adventure by a former Afrika Korps Panzer Grenadier who, having been captured and subsequently shipped to the U.S., made good his escape from an Illinois prisoner-of-war camp – whereupon he assumed a fake identity and easily acquired a Social Security number. After having rented an apartment and worked several jobs in Chicago, he started a successful business just two years after his escape, married an American woman, sired a daughter – and he might very well have eluded the FBI entirely if he hadn’t insisted all the while on sending foodstuffs to his mother in war-ravaged Germany.

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GI Joe and the Women of Japan… (Pic Magazine, 1952)

Although this article is illustrated with imagery depicting American men and Japanese women appearing to genuinely be enjoying one another’s company, the accompanying text says something quite different. The article centers on the observations of the woman who heads the YWCA in Japan who insists that the vulgar Americans stationed in that country are coercing Japanese women to become prostitutes. The journalist then goes into some detail as to what a big business prostitution in Japan has become and how many illegitimate births have resulted.

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Martha Gellhorn Over Germany (Collier’s Magazine, 1945)

An article by the W.W. II war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (1908 – 1998) who rode with the crew of a P-61C Black Widow Night Fighter one evening as they made their rounds over what remained of Hitler’s Germany:

COLLIER’S girl correspondent sat on a wobbly crate and flew over Germany looking for enemy planes at night. Her nose ran, her oxygen mask slipped off, her stomach got mad, she was scared and she froze. They didn’t down any Germans, but otherwise that’s routine for the Black Widow pilots.

Click here to read additional articles about the war correspondents of the Second World War.


Click here to read Martha Gellhorn’s article about what she saw at Dachau.


Click here to read about the 1943 bombing campaign against Germany.

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Japan and the Road to War (Literary Digest, 1933)

A collection of opinions gathered from the newspapers of the world concerning the belligerency of Imperial Japan and its poor standing in the eyes of the League of Nations:

Feeling grows among the Japanese that events are shaping toward a second world war, with Japan in the position that Germany occupied in 1914…A Canadian Press dispatch from London, in THE NEW YORK TIMES, estimated war supplies sent from England to China and Japan. According to statistics of the British Government for 1932, the largest individual items were 7,735,000 small-arms cartridges for China and 5,361,450 for Japan…Japan also purchased 740 machine guns.


Four years after the Pearl Harbor attack, a Japanese newspaper editorial expressed deep regret for Japan’s aggressiveness in the Second World War, click here to read about it…

Click here to read about a 1925 novel that anticipated the war with Imperial Japan.

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