After four hard years of watching sappy Hollywood drivel about the war and the home front, the censorship machine was finally dismantled – which allowed the servicemen to speak their minds about what they REALLY thought about those movies…
The fact that more boy babies are born during and immediately after major wars is a phenomenon that was discovered by the underpaid statisticians employed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in 1942. The articles that are attached are but two of what was probably four hundred articles that appeared on the topic that year. The writers and thinkers of the digital age continue studying this actuality – among them is the gang over at Psychology Today who wrote:
Scientists have known for a long time that more boys than usual are born during and after major wars. The phenomenon was first noticed in 1954 with regard to white children born during World War II in the United States. It has since been replicated for most of the belligerent nations in both World Wars. The phenomenon has been dubbed the ‘returning soldier effect.’ There is no doubt that the phenomenon is real, but nobody has been able to explain it. Why are soldiers who return from wars more likely to father sons than other men?
The shock of modern battle is so severe to nervous systems that the hair color of thousands of young men in the Pacific and European theaters of war has turned gray overnight.
Not surprisingly, the young men in question had no interest in resembling their grandfathers
and so the services of a patriotic hair dye manu- facturing firm were secured.
Two years ago when the men began to drop out of the industrial world at the call to the colors their women associates gradually slipped into their places, and in the majority of cases effectively filled them… Those men have now nearly all come back to claim their old, or better jobs. What of the girl, then, in the soldier’s job? What is she going to do?
The crusading spirit that Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to summon up in the minds of Government employees at the outset of his first administration, and again in the years that followed, now is vanishing. The spirit and imagination of Mr. Roosevelt brought into public service would not have been there.
It was this quality that captured the enthusiasm of engineers like J.A. Krug; of lawyers like Oscar S. Cox, Ben Cohen and Thomas Corcoran; of economists like Robert Nathan, Launchlin Curie, Leon Henderson and Isadore Lubin.
This article was written by the war correspondent Fairfax Downey (1894 – 1990) for a magazine that catered to American veterans of W.W. I, and it seemed that he simply could not contain his enthusiasm for the U.S. infantry’s newest rifle: the M-1 Garand:
What a gun it is! Its nine pound weight swings easily through the manual of arms. The eight-round clip (three more shots than the we used to have with the ’03 Springfield) slips in easily and the breech clicks closed. The old range scale slide has vanished; range and windage adjustments are made simply by turning two knobs… The new semi-automatic means, among other things, that the fire power of troops armed with it has increased at least two and a half times over the old Springfield.
For further magazine reading about John Garand and his rifle, click here.
By the time this small paragraph appeared in the 1922 pages of Confederate Veteran Magazine the vast majority of their readership was living on their Confederate pensions. This article serves to remind the subscribers that there were numerous faithful Negroes who were also deserving of same. The author recounts a few stories of the devotion he witnessed.
Here is the 1922 review of Ulysses by James Joyce as it appeared in the NEW YORK TIMES:
Before proceeding with a brief analysis of Ulysses and comment on its construction and its content, I wish to characterize it. Ulysses is the most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the Twentieth Century.
An interview with Joyce can be read here…
Attached is a Vanity Fair article printed a few months after the Lusitania sinking in which the journalist listed the many and myriad explanations as to why this event was such a departure from the traditions of naval warfare set in place by John Paul Jones, Admirals Nelson and Dewey.
Click here to read read a 1919 German condemnation of Admiral Von Tirpitz.
An article by the admired British war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett (1881 – 1931) concerning those aspects of the 1914 war that combined to make the entire catastrophe something unique in human history:
Everything has changed; uniforms, weapons, methods, tactics. Cavalry had been rendered obsolete by trenches, machine guns and modern artillery; untrained soldiers proved useless, special battalions were needed on both sides to fight this particular kind of war that, in no way, resembled the battles your father or grand-fathers had once fought.
A good read.
Click here to read about the fashion legacy of W.W. I…
To read about one of the fashion legacies of W.W. II, click here…
