Articles from 1942
At Stalingrad the imitative appears to be slowly shifting into the hands of the Russians…The Russian attack was reported to be growing in vigor and German counterthrusts were repulsed with heavy losses.
When a 22-year-old expectant father wrote to President Roosevelt complaining that he’d been unemployed for four months, FDR wasted little time in contacting one of his alphabet agencies and seeing to it that the gent was offered a defense job.
Before the era of the World Wide Web, intelligence agencies had to rely on their own flunkies to gather all meteorological information they could find about a particular weather system; this explains why so many Axis spies were found with weather data among their possessions.
A 1942 article about Mexican film comedian Mario Moreno (1911 – 1993) who was widely known and loved throughout Latin America and parts of the West as Cantinflas, the bumbling cargador character of his own creation. Born in the poorest circumstances Mexico could dish-out, Mario Moreno achieved glorious heights in the entertainment industry; by the time he assumed room temperature in the early Nineties he had appeared in well over fifty films.
During the winter of 1942, Private Harry Carpenter, U.S Army, made a big honking mistake when he decided to declare that the current war was a white man’s war. Arrested by the MPs and carted-off to stand before Magistrate Thomas O’Hara, Carpenter found that he had reaped the whirlwind: he was charged with treason against the United States.
The Battle of Guadalcanal (August 7, 1942 – February 9, 1943) was the first major land offensive by Allied forces against the Japanese. When this article went to press, the American military presence on the island was exactly one month old; it was at this point that the Marines sought to outmaneuver the enemy by conducting an additional amphibious landing on the north side of the island where They found that except for a few snipers, the Japanese had scampered to the hills.
The most devilish Hell on the 2,000-mile front was the battleground before Stalingrad, in the dusty, 50-mile-wide bottleneck between the Don and the Volga. After two months’ furious fighting, the great German offensive begun on June 28 approached its climax.
Shortly after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made a solemn visit to the White House in order to plot the course of the war with FDR. The affect that the Prime Minister impressed upon the average American was profound and was soon made manifest in the form of innumerable gifts that began descending upon the White House addressed to him. An unsigned editorial in Collier’s Magazine noticed the event and remarked:
If we hadn’t liked Mr. Churchill immensely from the moment he arrived here, none of us would have sent him anything. The size and variety of this shower of gifts are the best measure of the terrific hit he made with all kinds and conditions of Americans.
Johannes Kroeger, ex-leader of the German-American Bund was picked up by the FBI in the Fall of 1942 for espionage. Employed as a bus driver on Long Island, New York, Kroeger would regularly carry the employees of the Republic Aviation Company to and from work. When pressed for details, the FBI remarked:
Workers in aviation plants talk too much.
Filed from General MacArthur’s headquarters in Australia, here is Frank Hewlett’s (1913 – 1983) eyewitness account of the defense of American positions in the Philippines (January 7 – April 9, 1942).
