1944 – Old Magazine Articles

Teaching in the Forties
(Pageant Magazine, 1944)

“Teachers, during the war period, have been undergoing unprecedented, exhausting struggle in the classroom. And in their ranks have been casualties that add up to a dangerous teacher shortage. According to the National Education Association, ‘the economic status of teachers has been pushed back 20 years since Pearl Harbor’… The combination of overwork, underpay and the thanklessness of teaching has created an army of deserters from the profession.”

More on the hard lot of teachers during the war can be read here.

Berliners Under the Bombs
(Liberty Magazine, 1944)

A Turkish diplomat explains all that he saw in the war-weary Berlin of 1944:

“You see children wildly seeking for their mothers, wives wildly seeking for their husbands. Women carry dead children in their arms and children weep beside their dead mothers.

The Late-War Era Brought Late-War Divorces
(Liberty Magazine, 1944)

“The divorce rate took a sharp upswing in all the warring countries after World War I, and another rise after this war is already being foreshadowed… Much of the post-war rise in the divorce rate is expected to come from the untying of knots too hastily tied as a result of [the 1941] war hysteria.”

The First Black Marines
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

The editors at Yank (an Army possession) seldom wrote about the Marines – and they loved dissing their weekly magazine, The Leatherneck. However, they did recognize an historic moment when they saw one. As remarked in another article on this site, the Navy was the most prejudiced of all the branches of service, and the Marines had previously rejected all Black recruits, but that changed in 1942, and this article served to introduce their readers to this consequential lot. The first African American Marines trained at Camp Montford Point in Jacksonville, NC from August 26, 1942 until the camp was decommissioned in 1949. The greatest number of black Marines to serve in combat during the Second World War was during the Battle of Okinawa (2,000 strong).

The Seabees
(Pageant Magazine, 1944)

In another article on this site, these words were quoted from the captured dispatches of a Japanese general writing to his superiors:

“[The Yank] is a wizard at handling machinery and he can build airfields, roads and advance bases with uncanny speed.”

– he was, of course, referring to the famous Construction Battalions (Seabees) of the U.S. Navy. This article will tell you all about them.

The Seabees
(Pageant Magazine, 1944)

In another article on this site, these words were quoted from the captured dispatches of a Japanese general writing to his superiors:

“[The Yank] is a wizard at handling machinery and he can build airfields, roads and advance bases with uncanny speed.”

– he was, of course, referring to the famous Construction Battalions (Seabees) of the U.S. Navy. This article will tell you all about them.

The Japanese Run Out of Ships
(PM Tabloid, 1944)

After the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the U.S. Navy believed that the Japanese had lost over half their original strength:

“Naval observers in Washington are exhilarated by the evident extent of the Japanese defeat but, in true Navy tradition, they are being canny about it. It isn’t what we have sunk or disabled [that matters], it’s what is left that can still fight.”

The Japanese Run Out of Ships
(PM Tabloid, 1944)

After the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the U.S. Navy believed that the Japanese had lost over half their original strength:

W.W. II and the Absent Poets
(Pageant Magazine, 1944)

Attached is an interesting article by the noted poet and poetry anthologist, Louis Untermeyer (1885 – 1977). He praised the soldier poets of the First World War and expressed his bafflement concerning the absolute dirth of competent rhyme-slingers in the Second World War:

“Why then, it has been asked again and again, is the poetry of this war so thin, so emotionally anemic, so unrepresentative of the fierce struggle in which the world is engaged? Why has no poet, not even a single poem, emerged to stir the heart and burn into the mind?”

Will Disenchantment Follow This War, Too?
(World Magazine, 1944)

Recalling the general melancholia that descended upon many societies following the slaughterous First World War, a former member of the British Parliament asked whether we should expect the same after an even larger world war.

If you would like to read 1920 article about the disillusioned post-war spirit, click here.