Dontchya Know There’s A War On!
(Click Magazine, 1944)
Click here to learn more about the American W.W. II home front…– from Amazon:Read more …
1944
Articles from 1944
The Most Dreaded Telegram on the Home Front
(Coronet Magazine, 1944)
By the time this historic piece was written, thousands upon thousands of Western Union casualty telegrams had been delivered to altogether too many American households. This article lucidly explains how they should be delivered and how they shouldn’t be delivered. Recognizing the solemnity of the task, the men who passed the news along were often older men, who had tasted some of life’s bitterness:
One mother, receiving the news that her son was dead, crushed the paper in her hand and looking beyond the messenger, said, ‘If it hadn’t been my son, it would have been some other mother’s’.
A Spike In Illegitimate Births
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1944)
A new problem of the war is the fact that children are born to married women whose husbands have been long overseas… Department of Labor figures show that more than twice as many illegitimate children were born this year than in 1942.
Click here to read more on this topic.
A Failed Peace Movement
(Newsweek Magazine, 1944)
We were terribly surprised to learn of a peace movement that existed on the 1944 American home front. Baring an awkward name that was right out of Seventiespeak, Peace Now printed pamphlets that played the class game so prevalent in the other leftist organizations that would come forth twenty years later.
D-Day On The Home Front
(Newsweek Magazine, 1944)
By the dawn’s early light America awoke to the knowledge that its D-Day had come. Electricity meters clocked a sudden spurt in kilowatt loads as house lights and radios went on; telephone switchboards jammed as excited householders passed the word along. By morning on June 6, scarcely a family failed to know that the nation’s sons and brothers, husbands and sweethearts were even then storming the beaches of Normandy to begin the Allied liberation of Europe.
Click here to read about D-Day…
Home Front Chicago
(Yank Magazine, 1944)
Chicago, Illinois saw enormous changes take place during the war years, most notably the overnight construction of over 260 defense plants and the opening of its subway system (six miles in length, at that time). Half a million war workers arrived to toil in her new factories while it is said that each city block in Chicago dispatched, on average, at least seven of her sons and daughters for the armed services.
Nerves are taught with war tension. Hard work adds to the strain and increases the tempo. People walk faster in the streets. Stampedes for surface cars, and the new subway are more chaotic than ever… Five thousand block flagpoles have been erected by block committees of the Office of Civilian Defense. Listed in some manner near each are the names of all the GIs from the block. Some of the installations are elaborate and have bulletin boards that are kept up to date with personal news from camps and war theaters.
John Thompson of the Chicago Tribune
(Coronet Magazine, 1944)
John Thompson of The Chicago Tribune saw more of the World War II than most other correspondents. He had witnessed to the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of Paris and the horrors of the Buchenwald death camp. Throughout his life, Thompson held the distinction of being the last surviving war correspondent to land on Omaha Beach during the D-Day landings; by war’s end he had been awarded the Purple Heart, nine battle stars and was the first correspondent to receive the Medal of Freedom. This column was written in 1943 and pertains to some of his experiences in North Africa and Sicily.
Richard Tregaskis of the International News Service
(Coronet, 1944)
Richard Tregaskis (1916 – 1973) covered the invasion of Guadalcanal and the first seven weeks of Marine fighting on that island, the earliest stages of the Tokyo air raid, covered the Battle of Midway, wrote a best-selling book
(Guadalcanal Diary) and accompanied the forces that invaded the Russell Islands.
It wasn’t long after he arrived in the Mediterrian that stories began appearing in American papers under the Tregaskis byline, and he is still ‘somewhere’ on the European fighting front covering the big battles which make news.
The Absent Teachers
(Click Magazine, 1944)
This 1944 article by the U.S. Commissioner of Education, John W. Studebaker (1887 – 1989), reported on the impact that W.W. II was having on the American educational system. Studebaker pointed out that during the course of the national emergency, as many as 115,000 teachers had left the nation’s classrooms in order to help the war effort in one form or another.
A World War II Prayer Story
(Reader’s Digest, 1944)
A psychologist, in discussing some of the widely publicized ‘miracles’ of the war, puts it this way: ‘God may be likened to an electric dynamo. We can receive the power of this dynamo by attaching ourselves to it by prayer; or we can prove it has no influence in our lives by refusing to attach ourselves to it by prayer. The choice is ours…’ Today indisputable proof of the power of prayer are pouring in from every quarter of the globe. The only surprising thing is that we think it surprising. These praying soldiers, sailors and aviators of ours are merely following the example of Washington who knelt to ask for aid in the snows of Valley Forge and of Lincoln who, in the darkest days of the Civil War, declared: ‘Without the assistance of That Divine Being Who attends me I cannot succeed; with that assistance I cannot fail.’
Click here to read about one of the most famous prayers of the Second World War…
Hermann Goering as Fop: a Cartoon
(The Jesters in Earnest, 1944)
Here is a W.W. II gag cartoon by the Czech chuckle-meister himself, W. Trier (probably a pseudonym) that was smuggled out of his occupied homeland to Britain where it was published in Jesters in Earnest (1944). The cartoonist truly succeeded in satirizing Goering’s love of costume and his precious self-image. However glorious the drawings may be, they fail to impart to the viewers just how enamored the Reichsmarschall was with perfume (and he was)
‘Eighth Over Berlin”
(Newsweek Magazine, 1944)
Comparing the American [daylight] raids with the RAF [nighttime] incursions, it was certainly a great shock to Berliners to find their city now open to round-the-clock bombing.
We don’t mind the Yanks who come when the sun shines and it’s warm. It’s the Tommies sneaking in at night that we don’t like so much.
Who Was Tougher: The Japanese or The Germans?
(Yank Magazine, 1944)
By the end of 1943 Major General Joseph Lawton Collins (1917 – 1987) was one of two U.S. generals to give battle to both the Japanese in the East and the Germans in the West (Curtis Lemay was the other general). In this two page interview with Yank Magazine correspondent Mack Morriss, General Collins answered the question as to which of the two countries produced the most dangerous fighting man:
The Jap is tougher than the German. Even the fanatic SS troops can’t compare with the Jap…Cut off an outfit of Germans and nine times out of 10 they’ll surrender. Not the Jap.
Click here to read another article in which the Japanese and Germans were compared to one another.
Click here to read an interview with a Kamikaze pilot.
The American A-20 Havoc
(Yank Magazine, 1944)
An enthusiastic Yank Magazine article about the Douglas DB-7/A-20 Havoc (the British called it the A-20 Boston): throughout the course of the war, there was no other attack bomber that was manufactured in greater quantity than this one (7,477).
An eyewitness report of a pre-invasion mission over the continent in one of the newest and most effective U.S. air weapons, an attack bomber that looks like an insect but moves and hits with the speed of a meteor…
The First Wave
(Newsweek Magazine, 1944)
Down ramp!‘ shouted the coxswain from the elevated stern.
Down it came with a clank and splash. Ahead – and it seemed at that moment miles off – stretched the sea wall. At Lieutenant Crisson’s insistence we had all daubed our faces with commando black. I charged out with the rest, trying to look fierce and desperate, only to step into a shell hole and submerge myself in the channel. Luckily my gear was too wet and stinking to put on so I was light enough to come up.
This Newsweek journalist was the only allied war correspondent to have witnessed the derring-do of those in the first wave.
A Report on the War Reporters
(Click Magazine, 1944)
A well-illustrated 1944 article by Leonard Lyons pertaining to the assorted wartime experiences of ten American war correspondents:
• Martin Agronsky for NBC News
• Vincent Sheean with The N.Y. Tribune
• Henry Cassidy of the Associated Press
• Bob Casey of the Chicago Tribune
• John Gunther of The Chicago Daily News
• Jack Thompson of The Chicago Tribune
• Cecil Brown of CBS News
• W.L. White of the Associated Press
• Quentin Reynolds of Collier’s Magazine
• Cyrus Schulzberger with the NY Times
More Reports on the War Reporters
(Pic Magazine, 1944)
Published four months after the above article, here is a similar, well-illustrated piece that lists the names of the photographers and reporters who were killed – and the younger breed of writers and lens-men who took their places.
General Stilwell In Burma
(Yank Magazine, 1944)
In May 1942 Lieutenant General Joseph Warren Stilwell (1883 – 1946) made that frank statement after leading a tired, battered band of 103 officers, men and nurses on a 20-day march into India, refugees from the Allied rout in Burma… Stilwell’s return to Burma is the result of two years of careful preparation in which two major projects were developed. One was a Chinese-American training center in India…The other was the Ledo Road, a supply route from India by which Allied troops moving into Northern Burma could be equipped and provisioned.