1943 – Page 5 – Old Magazine Articles

The American A-36 Fighter Bomber
(Yank Magazine, 1943)

This article page from a 1943 YANK MAGAZINE concerns the American A-36 fighter-bomber of World War II. The article is accompanied by photographs and testimonial accounts as to how well the fighter aircraft performed in combat over North Africa and Sicily.

Built by North American Aviation, this ship is a dive-bomber version of that company’s P-51 Mustang fighter. The A-36 can climb at the rate of nearly half a mile a minute, with a ceiling of 30,000 feet. Powered by a 12-cylinder Allison engine, it has a flying speed in excess of 400 miles an hour…

Fashion Police
(American Magazine, 1943)

Who was it who deprived men of their suit vests and trouser cuffs? Who banned silk stockings? Who outlawed the flow in flowing skirts? Why, it was the War Production Board of course – click the title link if you want a name and a face…

Combat Boxing
(Click Magazine, 1943)

We are not sure how wide-spread boxing exercises were among all the U.S. Army infantry training camps during W.W. II, but the attached photo-essay will cue you in to the fact that it was mighty important at Camp Butner in 1943.

Nazi Art Plunder
(Click Magazine, 1943)

The attached article tells the story of an organization that was formed by the German Foreign Office in order to steal the treasures of the occupied European nations. It was called the Nazi Art Corps and it was divided into four battalions of SS men; they stole manuscripts, sculpture, paintings, jewels etc, etc, etc. They answered to the Reich Minister of Foreign Affairs, Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893 – 1946).

Click here to read about the inmate rebellions that took place at Auschwitz, Sobibor and Triblinka.

‘They Saw Hamburg Die”
(Collier’s Magazine, 1943)

Here is a 1943 article that was cabled from Stockholm, Sweden, relaying assorted eyewitness accounts of the Allied bombing campaign over the German city of Hamburg in 1943:

The people of Germany have now learned, through the terror-filled hours of sleepless nights and days, that air mastery, the annihilating blitz weapon of the Nazis in 1939 and 1940, has been taken over by by the Allies…The most terrible of these punches has been the flood of nitroglycerin and phosphorus that in five days and nights destroyed Hamburg.

Click here to read about the bombing of Japan.

It was an Englishman nick-named Bomber Harris who planned and organized the nightly raids over Nazi Germany: click here to read about him.

British Attack Along The Mareth Line
(PM Tabloid, 1943)

The British have struck heavily at the Mareth Line in what both sides call the opening blow of the long-awaited big battle of Tunisia.

(The Mareth Line was a system of bunkers built by France in southern Tunisia during the late Thirties. The line was intended to protect Tunisia against an Italian invasion from its colony in Libya.)

The Opening Campaign in Tunisia
(Collier’s Magazine, 1943)

General Lunsford Errett Oliver (1889 – 1978) wrote this article about his experiences commanding the American Army in Tunisia. As many of you may know, the American efforts in North Africa were fraught with many difficulties, the least of them were the Germans. The biggest one referred to by the general was the total lack of air cover for his advancing army.

Click here to read about the retreat of the Africa Corps.

WAAC Truck Drivers
(Click Magazine, 1943)

A Click Magazine photo-essay about the hard-charging WAACS of the Motor Transport School in glamorous Daytona Beach, Florida. Trained to operate and maintain two-ton trucks, the American women of the WAACs were mobilized to run the vast convoy system within the U.S. in order to free-up their male counterparts for more dangerous work in hostile regions.

Click here to read about the most famous woman truck driver in all of World War II…

The War On U-Boats
(Coronet Magazine, 1943)

Read the story of the CAMPBELL, a U.S. Coast Guard Cutter – she sank six German U-boats in twelve hours during one of the nastier moments that made up the Battle of the Atlantic.

CLICK HERE to read about the women of the U.S. Coast Guard during the Second World War.

The Photograph
(Yank Magazine, 1943)

Attached you will find a few well-chosen words about that famous 1943 photograph that the censors of the War Department saw fit to release to the American public. The image was distributed in order that the over-optimistic and complacent citizens on the home front gain an understanding that this war is not without a cost.

A haunting image even sixty years later, the photograph depicts three dead American boys washed-over by the tide of Buna Beach, New Guinea. The photographer was George Strock of Life Magazine and the photograph did it’s job.

Click here to read General Marshall’s end-of-war remarks about American casualty figures.

Women Worked The Farms
(Click Magazine, 1943)

Although the Selective Service agency granted 4,192,000 draft deferments to farmers throughout the course of World War II, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recognized that this number alone would never be enough to harvest the food necessary to feed both the home front and the armed forces. With this shortage in mind, the Women’s Land Army was created in 1943 to provide that essential farm labor that proved so vital in winning the war. Between the years 1943 and 1945 millions of American women from various backgrounds rolled up their denim sleeves and got the job done. The attached magazine article is one of the first to tell the tale of this organization, and was printed at a time when there were only 60,000 women in the field.<

The Japanese Did Not Like The Germans
(Collier’s Magazine, 1943)

A ranking member of of the German embassy staff in Tokyo told me a few weeks before Pearl Harbor, ‘If Japan goes to war against America and Britain, our days will be numbered here, too. Japan will wage a race war in which we Germans will be regarded as enemies along with the rest of the white race. It is only a matter of time. They intend to conquer all of us, but they are smart enough not to tackle all of us at once.’

Imperial Japan had a great many reasons to dislike their Nazi ally and most of them were far more legitimate than this one. All of them are are laid out in the attached article.

Lounges for WAACs and WAVES
(Pic Magazine, 1943)

All thanks to the efforts of a private donor, three lounges were built explicitly for the women volunteers of the WACs and WAVES. Furnished with vanities, hair dryers, magazines and ping-pong tables; they must have been a big hit – they look very much like the sets of a Fred Astaire movie.

Click here to read about the U.S.O. entertainers…

No Work, No Nooky
(Collier’s Magazine, 1943)

In an effort to put an end to worker absenteeism at defense plants, a fetching welder at the Albina Engine & Machine Works shipyard (Portland, Oregon), Jeannine Christiansen unhatched a sure-footed scheme to do just that. Recognizing that (most) men don’t find life worth living without rubbing noses with the females of the species, Miss Christiansen instituted the NO WORK NO WOO movement (I think you can guess what Woo means). The attached report states that it was effective and spread to other factories along the West Coast.

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

In this article, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 – 1962) attempted (very politically) to play 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:

‘A Japanese is always a Japanese’ is an easily accepted phrase and it has taken hold quite naturally on the West Coast because of some reasonable or unreasonable fear back of it, but it leads nowhere and solves nothing…

All the Pretty German Spies
(Coronet Magazine, 1943)

Siegrid von Laffert, Edit von Coler and the exotic dancer LaJana had four things in common: they were all carbon-based life forms, they were all all German women, they were all beautiful and they were all Nazis spies:

These women spies are called the ‘Blonde Battalions’. Chosen for their physical attractiveness, they are usually between 18 and 22 years of age. Members of the ‘Blonde Battalion’ are admitted to the Gestapo school in Altona, near Hamburg and after they are sent out to perform their work as efficient machines, with rigid discipline and precision…

From Amazon:
Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

The Films of the U.S. Army Signal Corps
(Click Magazine, 1943)

An article from Click Magazine designed for civilian consumption concerning the U.S. Signal Corps and their efforts to film and photograph as much of the war as was possible in order that the brass hats far off to the rear could sit comfortably and understand what was needed. The article is illustrated with six war photographs and the captions explaining what information was gleaned from each:

Every detail of these films is scrupulously studied by a group of experts, officers and engineers representing the Army Ground Force, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Army Air Corps, the Signal Corps the Armored Forces, the Quartermaster Corps and other military units. Naturally, these services are interested in different sections of every film. To facilitate their studies, a device known as the Multiple Film Selector is used.

The Signal Corps Movies of World War I were intended for different uses…

The 82nd Airborne in Sicily
(Collier’s Magazine, 1943)

An article from the Fall of 1943 that reported on the second campaign fought by the men of the 82nd Airborne Division, the invasion of Sicily:

These air-carried forces were will be in a position to assist seaborne invaders not only by harassing the rear of the foe’s first lines, but by standing in the way of his attempts to bring up his reserves…These men were also to show that an airborne force can assail and capture and enemy’s strategic strong points, can man his bridges and his highways, can dominate his high-banked rivers and fight off his counterattacks.