World War Two

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

The Americans Who First Crossed the Rhine
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

The attached article tells the story of the first Americans to cross the Rhine river into Germany following the capture of the Ludendorf Bridge at Remagen, Germany.

One of the most striking incidents of the first day’s action on the bridge was the way German snipers opened up on their own men who had been taken prisoners. As each batch of PWs was lead across the bridge, a storm of sniper fire from the surrounding hills swept its ranks. Several were killed.


Pictured on page two is a photograph of the first American to make it across: Sgt. Alexander A. Drabik (1910 – 1993) of the 27th Armored Infantry Division.

Click here to read about a popular all-girl band that performed with the USO.

Home Front Feminism
(Collier’s Magazine, 1943)

1940s feminism bares no resemblance to the take-no-prisoners feminism of today. This is made clear in the attached article by Amaran Scheinfeld (1900 – 1979), a writer, whose book Women and Men (1944), as stated by the New York Times, foreshadowed many issues of the feminist movement. The primary difference between the two lay in the fact that seventy-five years ago it was believed that it was nature that had established many of the rolls played by the (two) genders.

The Last 125 Days of the War
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

A YANK staff writer Robert Bendiner (1910 – 2009), summed-up the eventful period that began with the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on
April 12, and ended with the Japanese surrender on August 10, 1945. He pointed out that within that period remarkable changes had been made; not merely the deaths of Hitler, Mussolini and the collapse of Imperial Japan, but it was clear to many that the stage was being set for a new world. The foundations were in place for the creation of a durable world security organization and as if that wasn’t enough, there was a new, hideous weapon called the Atomic Bomb that would cast a long shadow across the land and mark this new era as a unique period in world history.

After a streak like that it would not be surprising if a revulsion against big news should set in. It may well be that people long to pick up a paper in which nothing more cosmic is reported than the city’s reception of a visiting channel-swimmer, and nothing more violent than a tie-up on the Magnolia Avenue trolley line.

Click here to read how British women struggled to understand American slang.

Was Allied Air Power Decisive During World War II?
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

A light and breezy review concerning the findings of a U.S. government study regarding the effectiveness of the Allied strategic bombing campaign against Nazi Germany:

…the survey authorities report that although air power might have been more advantageously applied in this case or that, its decisive bearing on the victory was undeniable…At sea, its contribution, combined with naval air power, brought an end to the enemy’s greatest naval threat -the U-boat; on land, it helped turn the tide overwhelmingly in favor of allied ground forces.

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

The 101st Division at 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 Divisionstyle=border:none at the Battle of the Bulge.

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


Click here to read more about W.W. II parachute infantry…


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

D-Day Plus Ten With the 82nd Airborne
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

The battle of the hedgerows as experienced by the paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division:

They all had been fighting since D-Day. Compared with the obstacles at the beginning of their drive, the hill they had just taken was only a minor deal, but it was no push-over. At some places, one paratrooper told me, the fighting was so close the Krauts didn’t even bother to throw their grenades, they just handed them over to us.

The Biased Military Courts of the U.S. Army
(G.I. Joe Magazine, 1945)

G.I. JOE MAGAZINE was established shortly after the war by a shrewd, commerce-driven soul who fully recognized that the American veterans of W.W. II would have a good deal to say about their military hardships, and would need a venue in which to do it. The attached article was written by a veteran who preferred to remain anonymous; the righteous indignation can be keenly sensed in his prose as he explained the three-tiered justice system that he believed to have been built into the offices of the U.S. Army military court system. The first tier meted out soft justice for officers, the second dispensed a harsh justice to White enlisted men, and the bottom tier dished-out a far more vile variety to the American soldiers of African descent.


Read an Article about Racial Integration in the U.S. Military

Jane Anderson of Georgia
(Coronet Magazine, 1943)

Jane Anderson began broadcasting from Berlin on April 14, 1941. When Nazi Germany declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941 American citizens were repatriated from Germany but Anderson chose to remain.
She broadcast Nazi propaganda by way of a short wave radio for the German State Radio’s U.S.A. Zone, the Germans named her ‘The Georgia Peach’. Her programs regularly heaped high praise upon Adolf Hitler and ran ‘exposés’ of the ‘communist domination’ of the Roosevelt and Churchill administrations. She conducted numerous on-air interviews, the most famous among them was of her co-worker, the British traitor William Joyce. When Berlin fell she was on the run up until April of 1947, when she was caught in Salzburg, Austria and placed in the custody of the U.S. military.

Towards a Nuclear Strategy
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1949)

Here is the Pathfinder Magazine article about Air University; established in 1946 by the U.S. Department of War in order to train senior American Air Force officers to serve as strategic thinkers in the realm of national security. In 1949 that meant conceiving of ways to implement a successful strategy in which the Soviet Union would be defeated with nuclear weapons:

At AU’s apex is the Air War College. To its senior officer-students the question of destroying an enemy’s will to resist is grimly real. Killing ten million citizens of an enemy nation is no haphazard problem to the Air War College. In the statistics of modern war, a loss of approximately 4% of a nation’s population saps its will to resist…


Six months after this article was first read, the Soviets tested their first Atomic bomb; click here to read about that event.

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