World War Two – Page 77 – Old Magazine Articles

Eyewitness to Pearl Harbor
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1942)

Attached is an eyewitness account of the Pearl Harbor attack as relayed to family members in a letter written home a few weeks after the assault:

The noise was like ten thousand factories gone nuts….Quicker than I can tell you, a bomb blows up the barracks with the gang in it, a ship explodes in front of me, a hangar goes up in flames…

The very next day President Roosevelt stood before the microphones in the well of the U.S. Capitol and asked Congress to declare war against the Empire of Japan; CLICK HERE to hear about the reactions of the American public during his broadcast…

Pearl Harbor Christmas: A World at War, December 1941

Click here to read about the Battle of Midway.

Eyewitness to Pearl Harbor
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1942)

Attached is an eyewitness account of the Pearl Harbor attack as relayed to family members in a letter written home a few weeks after the assault:

The noise was like ten thousand factories gone nuts….Quicker than I can tell you, a bomb blows up the barracks with the gang in it, a ship explodes in front of me, a hangar goes up in flames…

Pearl Harbor Christmas: A World at War, December 1941

Click here to read about the Battle of Midway.

More Restrictions for 1945
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

The last eight months of the home front saw the suspension of all horse racing (in the interest of preserving tires and gas) and more foods, both delicious and otherwise, became a good deal harder to locate.

During the closing months of the war, the draft pool was increased, as well – click here to read about it.

American Losses at Normandy
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

In the July 22,1944 issue of YANK the editors saw fit to release the numbers of American casualties that were racked-up during the first eleven days of the allied Normandy Invasion. In the fullness of time, the numbers were adjusted to be considerably lower than the 1944 accounting; Pentagon records now indicate 1,465 were killed, 3,184 were wounded, 1,928 were registered as missing, 26 were taken prisoner.
It is interesting to note that YANK did not sugar coat the report.

Of the total US figure, 2499 casualties were from the US airborne troops (238 of them being deaths). The casualties at Utah Beach were relatively light: 197, including 60 missing. However, the US 1st and 29th Divisions together suffered around 2,000 casualties at Omaha Beach.

FDR’s D-Day prayer can be read here

Additional facts and figures about the U.S. Army casualties in June of ’44 can be read in this article.

General Patton’s Prayer for Battle Weather
(Faith Is Power For You, 1950)

The attached paragraphs tell the story of General Patton’s famous prayer for battle weather – who authored it and how many men recited it.

That prayer [and the accompanying Christmas] greeting were typically Patton. They [read as if they] were [pulled] from the Old Testament rather than the New and had the ring of Joshua and David at their militant best.They were not written for a soft time but for their occasion; they were words to make men strong – and they did.

FDR’s D-Day prayer can be read here

Home Front Spy-Hunters
(Coronet Magazine, 1944)

Appearing in 1944, this article listed numerous reports relayed to the FBI by amateur spy-hunters of all the imagined foreign agents who they stumbled upon daily. Some of the accounts ended up being true and lead to actual confessions, but most were just plain silly – either way, the G-men had to investigate each account.

The Last Three Months
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

From inside Germany last week emerged the picture of a state that by all normal standards was in the last stages of dissolution… All signs indicated a physical breakdown perhaps as great as that of France in 1940… Refugees, mostly women and children with blankets around their bodies and shawls on their heads to protect them from the sub-zero weather, queue up for hours outside bakeries to get a loaf of bread. Draftees ride tanks in never-ending columns.

The Women of the U.S. Navy
(Think Magazine, 1946)

The attached is a short article from THINK MAGAZINE that sums up the contributions made by the 87,000 American women of the U.S. Navy during World War II. These women were organized into a body called WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service):

In 500 shore establishments of the United States Fleet, women in navy blue released enough men from non-combatant duty to man all of America’s landing crafts in two important operations: the Normandy landings on D-Day and the invasion of Saipan.

Created July 30, 1942, the Corps completed more than three years of service while the nation was engaged in war. The director was Captain Mildred H. McAfee (1900 – 1994), former president of Wellseley College.

Eleanor Roosevelt on Japanese-American Internment
(Collier’s Magazine, 1943)

In this article, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 – 1962) attempted to play (very politically) both sides of the street, implying on the one hand that the creation of the Japanese-American internment camps seemed a reasonable measure in wartime; but the reader doesn’t have to have a degree in psychology to recognize that she believed otherwise.

An Interview with a Kamikaze Pilot
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

With the fall of imperial Japan, YANK correspondent Robert MacMillan was
one of the very first journalists to interview the Japanese Kamikaze pilot Norio Okamoto, which allowed his readers to gain some understanding as
to how the Kamikaze Corps operated:

Okomoto’s story took all the wind -the Divine Wind – out of the Kamikaze sails. Even the interpreter, a Japanese civilian, was surprised. He had worked for radio Tokyo and while he knew a lot of the propaganda stories were ridiculous, he had believed the Kamikaze legend.

Click here to read articles about post-war Japan.