Articles from 1943
General Sir Thomas A. Blamey, Australian commander of Allied ground forces in the Southwest Pacific, declared the Japs have massed 200,000 first-line troops on the approaches to Australia and might be expected to launch an offensive at any time.
Attached is small Yank Magazine article pertaining to a booklet titled, When You Meet an American that was distributed to assorted British girls by their government during the Second World War:
Try not to appear shocked at some of their expressions…if a lad from back home asks for a hot dog he actually means, ‘fried sausage in split rolls’…’Hi’ya baby!’ is legitimate.
During the Summer of 1943, James F. Byrenes, FDR’s Director of the Office of Economic Stabilization, gave a report on the wartime production output for that period. 1943 proved to have been a turning point for the Allied war efforts on both fronts.
For those who survived it, the Second World War changed many lives – some for better, some for worse. Gale Volchok was rescued from a dreary job in New York retail and delivered to the proving grounds of two different infantry training camps in New Jersey. It was under her watchful eye that thousands of American soldiers learned to throw their enemies into the dirt and generally defend them selves.
By the Autumn of 1943 it was becoming apparent to both parties that the Allies were coming into their own. The Axis was discovering to their surprise that they were not the only ones who knew how to fight – they’d been routed from North Africa, creamed at Stalingrad and bloodied at the Bismarck Sea:
On every front in this global war Axis strategy is definitely on the defensive.
Similar articles can be read here and here…
McMillan, who was [in 1914] the first accredited correspondent with the BEF in France, was sent by the United Press from London to Gibraltar in November, 1940, on what he thought would be a routine assignment. He expected to be back in England in two days. Instead, he stayed in the Mediterranean two years.
Before December 7, 1941, the average American regarded the Jap as a comical little fellow who bowed deeply from the waist and said, ‘So sorry.’…[and] as a fighting man, the Jap was obviously a joke. His army hadn’t been able to to lick poor old broken-down China in four years… This picture was destroyed forever by the bombs that fell on Pearl Harbor… But what makes the Jap so brave? Briefly, the Jap has two words for it. The first is Shinto and the second bushido,
Here is a short profile of Irna Phillips (1901 – 1973) – she was, more than anyone else, the one who can be credited with the creation of the daytime dramas called soap operas on both radio and television.
This article,‘Blow It Out of Your Ballast Tank’ was penned by Marion Hargrove and cartoonist Ralph Stein
in order to clear away some of the Hollywood blarney and set the record straight about the W.W. II submarine duty in the U.S. Navy:
To read articles about submarines, you’d think they were about as big as a small beer keg, and that the men worked curled around each others elbows. To see submarine movies, you’d think the sailors spent their time bailing water, gasping, sweating, hammering on jammed doors and getting on each other’s nerves.
This is really a lot of Navy propaganda, designed to keep surface fleets from being stripped of their personnel by a rush of volunteers for submarine duty.
Click here to read about a Soviet submarine called the S-13…
This printable list of war-themed movies indicates that Hollywood studio heads were all earning their commission stripes in 1943; attached you will find a list of film titles, stars and a one sentence synopsis of the plots.
In this article, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 – 1962) attempted to play (very politically) 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.
Here is a petite profile of Tracy Strong (1887 – 1968), who, as Director of the YMCA War Prisoners Aid Committee, had license to enter every combatant nation in order to see to the health and welfare of all POWs. Much of his work involved procuring books, sporting equipment and musical instruments to the incarcerated.
An odor rises from the men, the characteristic odor of an army. It is the smell of of wool and the bitter smell of fatigue and the smell of gun oil and leather. Troops always have this odor. The men lie sprawled, some with their mouths open, but they do not snore. Perhaps they are too tired to snore, but their breathing is an inaudible, pulsing thing.
Click here to read a movie review of The Grapes of Wrath.
When Manuel Avila Camacho (1897 – 1955) came to power as the president of Mexico (1940 – 1946) he immediately went to work kicking out the Fascist spies from Japan and Germany
He banned Nazi newspapers and cut Nazis off the air. He squashed the anti-Semitic Gold Shirts of Monterey and purged fifth columnists in key positions. He washed his hands of the Nazis and extended a hearty handclasp to Roosevelt.
The long-awaited climax of the great Allied air offensive against Germany came like a thunderclap last week. It was the opening of the Battle of Berlin… According to the [British Ministry of Economic Warfare], the Germans have evacuated nonessential civilians (children, invalids and the aged) just as the British had from London three years before. But all evidence indicated that government officials and essential workers still remained in the German capital.
Berlin police counted 5,680 dead.
More on the bombing of Germany can be read here…
Americans on December 5 [1943] will look backwards to a dramatic night 10 years ago – many will be surprised that a whole decade has passed since the nation abandoned Prohibition… In the early ’30s, Congressman LaGuardia found authorities siphoning an estimated million dollars a day in graft from bootleggers. Cost of the ‘Noble Experiment’ to the government hovered around a billion dollars a year. In the last 14 Prohibition years, the public was figured to have spent more than $36,000,000,000 for bootlegging and smuggled liquor!
The attached chart shows the total number of elementary and high school students who were enrolled at the ten Japanese-American internment camps during the period leading up to March, 1943.
Originally published in the Stars & Stripes of the U.S. Marine Corps, The Leatherneck, this is an interesting eight page article illustrated with fifteen photographs regarding the dramatic growth in that institution that took place in the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack.
Click here to read a CLICK MAGAZINE article about the Marines of W.W. II.
Articles about the W.W. I Marines can be read HERE…
Read what the U.S. Army psychologists had to say about courage in war.
Read what the editors of YANK MAGAZINE thought about the Marine Corps Magazine, LEATHERNECK…
Read about the Women Marines of W.W. II HERE.
