Articles from 1943
While speaking at the 141st anniversary of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Chief of Staff General George Marshall gave a great big shout out to three American generals. Pointing out that all of them were graduates of West Point (as he was) the general could not help but conclude that the Axis didn’t have a chance.
If you’re one of those types who tend to feel that Americans aren’t as smart as they used to be, this is the article for you: attached is a collection of quotes generated by eight home front dullards who were asked the question:
Do you know what you are fighting?
They all understood that their nation had just finished it’s second year fighting something called Fascism but were hard-pressed to put a thoughtful definition to the term:
A Kansas cattle raiser defined Fascism as ‘…the belief in a big industrial enterprise. Anyone who thinks that way is Fascist-minded.
Additionally, it is fun to see the pictures of all the assorted noobs who made such ridiculous statements.
The candy-makers of the nation are not having a such a sweet time of it, for, like most other manufacturers, they are bothered by scarcities of labor and materials and so must cut corners and find substitutes.
The article goes on to point out that the sugar that was available was largely devoted to military personnel (18 pounds a year); as a result of this candy rationing, movie-goers were introduced to popcorn as a substitute (you can read about that here).
After suffering eleven years of the squalor brought on by the Great Depression, many Americans were in shock to find their pockets fully lined with cash and their days spent in gainful employment when W.W. II came along (in 1943, the U.S. unemployment rate stood at 1.9%). The bars and restaurants that were situated around defense plants found that for the first time in years they were fully booked with paying customers. This article points out that this new economic boom on the home front was not without complications: absenteeism. As more factory workers discovered the joy of compensated labor, the more frequent they would skip work – which was seen as a nuisance for an industrial nation at war.
Many workers, not just youngsters, are making more money than they ever made before in their lives.
This article was written by Max Hill, who was serving as the Tokyo bureau chief for the Associated Press at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. The column consists of his observations as to how the Japanese home front operated during his seven month incarceration.
Click here to read about the Japanese home front during the early period of the Sino-Japanese War.
Click here to read about the W.W. II German home front.
This 1943 article by the noted American sociologist, Willard Waller (1899 – 1945), reported on the impact that W.W. II was having on the American educational system. Waller pointed out that during the course of 1942-43 school year, as many as 189,000 teachers had left their classrooms in order to work in defense plants. The author argued four distinct points that would halt the mass exodus – among them was the cry that salaries of teachers must be raised to the point where they match favorably with industry.
The top man in Negro music climbed on the bandwagon when he and his band played a hot spot called the Kentucky Club. That was twenty years ago, in New York City’s Harlem. This year, Duke Ellington (1899 – 1974) made another debut, at Carnegie Hall, goal of the great in music…Piano lessons bored Ellington when he was six years old. He never learned to play conventionally, but he was only a youngster when his flare for improvisation reaped attention and landed him a job in a Washington theater…one by one, his compositions hit the jackpot: ‘Mood Indigo’, ‘Sophisticated Lady’, ‘Ebony Rhapsody’, ‘Solitude’, ‘Caravan’.
Ellington calls his work Negro Music, avoids the terms ‘jazz’ or ‘swing’.
Terrible accounts of the Nazi murders that took place in the occupied nations in Europe between 1939 through 1943. The journalist pointed out that these massacres were not the work of the SS or the Gestapo, but of the Wehrmacht.
In the face of history’s most brutal war, as men the world over live by the rule of kill or be killed, India’s leader preaches a gospel of never lifting a weapon or pulling a trigger. Here he tells why:
The principle of non-violence means, in general terms, that men will deliberately shun all weapons of slaughter and the use of force of any kind whatsoever against their fellow men…Are we naive fools? Is non-violence a sort of dreamy wishful thinking that has never had and can never have any real success against the heavy odds of modern armies and the unlimited application of force and frightfulness?
Douglas Chandler (1889 – ?) was one of several American expatriots to make radio broadcasts on behalf of Adolf Hitler and company. Believing that he was somehow providing a valuable service for the Free and the Brave, he smugly titled his radio program, ‘Paul Revere’.
When 22 divisions were cut off by the Russians at the gates of Stalingrad, the Nazis had to rely on air transport for contact with the surrounded troops. One mid-December day a German cargo plane was shot down on its way from the ringed divisions. The wreckage yielded some three hundred letters from doomed soldier of der Fuehrer. The Soviets selected and published a typical one:
It is hard to confess even to myself, but it seems to me that at Stalingrad we shall soon win ourselves to death.
Click here to read an assessment of the late-war German soldier…
French collaborator Pierre Laval (1883 – 1945) is remembered as the Nazi tool who presided over France between 1942 and 1944, allowing for the deportation of Jews and French laborers into Germany. On D-Day, Laval stood before the radio microphones cautioning his countrymen not to join in the fight against the German occupiers. His many sins would be known a year later during the liberation of Paris, but this writer was very accurate in cataloging all his many failings, both as a citizen of France and as a Human Being.
Laval was captured in Spain; you can read about that here…
CLICK HERE to read about Laval’s Norwegian counterpart: Prime Minister Vidkun Quisling…
The Russians shot down 18 enemy planes over Kuban on Sunday. Moscow estimated German plane losses on all fronts for the week ending Saturday at 381 against 134 Russian planes.
This article will come as a surprise to the historical revisionists who run the Chiang Kai-Schek memorial in Taipei where U.S. involvement in W.W. II is oddly remembered only as having been the nation that sold oil to the Japanese. It is a well-illustrated Yank Magazine article filed from India regarding the military training of Chinese infantry under the watchful eye of General Joe Stilwell’s (1883 – 1946) American drill instructors.
With the loss at Kasserine Pass and the victory at El Guettar behind them, the U.S. Army in North Africa traveled ever northward in a caravan of Jeeps and trucks looking for their next engagement with Rommel’s Africa Corps.
The misery that lingered over the W.W. II German home front is well documented and many of the issues concerning melancholy, hunger and thirst can be read in the attached assortment of letters that were pulled from the bloodied uniforms of the thousands of dead Nazi soldiers that surrounded the city of Stalingrad in 1943. These personal correspondences by German parents, wives and sweethearts present a thorough look at the dreariness that lingered over the German home front.
A photograph, profile and statistical information concerning the Vultee Vengeance A-31 – which was a W.W. II American dive bomber, built by Vultee Aircraft Corporation. The Vengeance was not used in combat by any US units, however it was deployed by the British and Commonwealth Air Forces in Southeast Asia as well as the Southwestern Pacific Theaters.
From the pages of a 1943 issue of America’s Alertman was this page that presented some information about the German JU 88 twin engine bomber, which was the primary offensive aircraft in the Luftwaffe’s arsenal during the Second World War. It was the successor to the Ju-87 and saw service as a night fighter and torpedo bomber in addition to serving as reconnaissance aircraft. The earliest prototype first flew in December of 1936 with a civilian registration of D-AQEN; it managed a top speed of 360 mph. Throughout the course of the war there were 15,000 JU 88’s constructed.
The attached article from 1943 goes into greater detail and can easily be printed.
