1945 – Page 10 – Old Magazine Articles

Adultery on the Home Front
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

The overlords of the Illinois justice system became so fed-up with the growing divorce rate in their state as a result of wives who stepped-out while their husbands were fighting overseas, and they decided to do something about it. The Illinois Attorney General proposed a plan:

Penalties for conviction range from $500 fine or a year in jail or both for the first offense to $3,000 fine or three years in jail or both for a third conviction.

A W.W. II Draft Board
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

When Michael Campiseno turned 18, he was pulled out of his senior class in Norwood High School and drafted. Mike was sore. He swore that if he ever returned, he’d throw his discharge papers on the desk of the board chairman and say, ‘Now, ya sonuvabitch, I hope you’re satisfied!’

Here is the skinny on Draft Board 119 of Norwood, Massachusetts – an average draft board that sent 2,103 men off to war (75 of them never returned).

Japan’s War Against The Home Front
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

When World War II was inching toward it’s bloody conclusion, Japan launched its Fu-go Campaign – a project designed to deploy thousands of high-altitude hydrogen balloons armed with incendiary devices. These balloons were to follow the westerly winds of the upper atmosphere, drifting to the west coast of North America where they were expected descend into the forests and explode.

The Japanese home front suffered from tuberculosis – click here to read about it…

The Drive On Berlin
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

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Dachau
(Collier’s Magazine, 1945)

Attached is Martha Gellhorn’s (1908 – 1998) very disturbing eyewitness account of the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau, Poland:

Nothing about war was ever as insanely wicked as these starved and outraged naked, nameless dead. Behind one pile of dead lay the clothed healthy bodies of the German guards who had been found in this camp. They were killed at once by the prisoners when the American Army entered.

The man primarily responsible for delivering the innocent into the ovens of the death camps was Obergrupenfuehrer Albert Ganzenmüller click here to read about him…

Manhattan During Wartime
(Yank, 1945)

This is a three page article concerning the city of New York from Yank‘s on-going series, Home Towns in Wartime.

The Yank correspondent, Sanderson Vanderbilt, characterized Gotham as being overcrowded (in 1945 the population was believed to be 1,902,000; as opposed to the number today: 8,143,197) and I’m sure we can all assume that today’s New Yorkers tend to feel that their fore-bearers did not know the meaning of the word.

New York was the home base of Yank Magazine and this article presents a young man’s view of that town and the differences that he can recall when he remembers it’s pre-war glory (Sanderson tended to feel that the city looked a bit down-at-the-heel).

Click here if you would like to read an article about the celebrations in New York the day World War Two ended.
Read a Vanity Fair article about New York during W.W. I

Click here to read about the first NYC air-raid wardens of 1942.

The Capture of Laval
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

The game was up. At the Prat de Llobregat airfield outside Barcelona the traitor sat heavily on a camp stool, waiting for the reprieve. It did not come. The Franco government had found Pierre Laval too hot to handle… Laval shrugged: ‘I suppose if Petain can face the music, I can’. But later he shouted: ‘It is unfair… delivering me to my country.’

More about Laval can be read here

The Age Progression of President Lincoln
(Coronet Magazine, 1945)

Ever since the age of photography began, one of the semi-official pastimes of the American people involves taking note of the rapid facial decay of their assorted presidents while in-office – and as the collected photographic portraits of Abraham Lincoln clearly indicate, no one will be naming a skincare product after him any time soon, however, the aging process that effected his face so dramatically has been the subject of Lincoln admirer’s through the years, and some are collected in the attached article.

German Boy Soldiers in Captivity
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

A fascinating article reporting on the Baby Cage, the Allied prisoner of war camp that held some 7,000 boy soldiers of the German army, ages 12 through 17.

In light of the fact that so manyGerman youths had been indoctrinated from their earliest days in Nazi dogma and then dumbfounded to a far greater degree within the Hitler Jugend system, the Allied leadership post-war government believed that this group needed to be instructed in the ways of tolerance before being let loose into the general population.

Click here to read about the Nazi indoctrination of German youth.

Hitler’s Man in Delhi
(Collier’s Magazine, 1944)

Subhas Chandra Bose (1897 – 1945) spent much of the Twenties and Thirties brainstorming with Gandhi and Nehru as to how best they might secure sovereignty for their beloved India. By 1939 Bose broke ranks with his fellows at the Indian National Congress, believing that British rule would end a good deal quicker if the Indians signed on with the Axis.

The Redhead, The Blonde and the Brunette
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

This brief column tells the story of three women war correspondents who marched at the point of the spear alongside the American infantry in order to report on the collapse of Hitler’s Germany. The correspondents in question were:

• Lee Carson in Remagen

• Iris Carpenter in Remagen

• Ann Stringer in the city of Bonn

The Work Starts
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

As the American occupation forces began to pour in and spread throughout the cities and countryside of Japan, both occupied and occupier slowly get to learn of the other. The cordial attitude of the Japanese leads General MacArthur to conclude that the military presence need not be as large as he had once believed:

Curious and awed, increasingly friendly Japanese flocked to watch what they called the ‘race of giants’ at work.

Japanese Feudalism Overturned
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1945)

The reforms that were imposed upon Occupied Japan in the Forties and Fifties did not simply come in the form of death sentences for war criminals – but additionally the Japanese came to know the rights and protections that are guaranteed to All Americans under the United States Constitution. For the first time ever Japanese women were permitted to vote, unions were legalized and equality under the law was mandated. This small notice concerned the overthrow of the feudal laws that governed the Japanese tenant farmers.

WACs at Christmas
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

By the time the war ended the WACs were 100,000 strong –
they had earned 314 medals and commendations, including 23 Legion of Merit awards and fourteen Purple Hearts. Throughout the war, seventeen thousand WACs had served overseas but by Christmas of 1945 their global strength had been cut in half.

Statistics on American Religions
(America Weekly, 1945)

In this study concerning the religions of the United States during the mid-to-late period of the Second World War, it was revealed that there were a total of 256 religious bodies in the country; of this 13 reported a membership numbering in excess of one million followers. All-in, there were 72,492,669 who were members of one faith or another:

Catholics:…………………………….. 23,419,791

Methodists:…………………………. 8,046,129

Baptists:………………………………. 5,667,926

All the Protestant denominations added up to 41,943,104. The Jewish congregations clocked-in at 4,641,184.

How The Atomic Bomb Was Developed
(Yank, 1945)

The story behind the atomic bomb is a detective story with no Sherlock Holmes for a hero. The number of scientists who took part in the search was without parallel…The dramatic story begins with Dr. Lise Meitner (1878 – 1968), a woman scientist and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. In 1938 Dr. Meitner is bombarding uranium atoms with neutrons and then submitting the uranium to chemical analysis. To her amazement…

Obamacare’ in the Forties
(Atlanta Journal, 1949, Newsweek Magazine, 1945, etc.)

The President wanted medical, dental and hospital care for all. Doctor’s fees would be paid by a Government insurance fund, financed by a 3% payroll tax, paid 50-50 by employee and employer.

(Strange that sexual reassignment surgery wasn’t included…)

O.S.S. Agents Executed by General Anton Dostler
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

On the evening of March 26, 1944, fifteen O.S.S. agents were executed following a failed raid on Italian soil to blow-up an Axis railroad tunnel. The sabotage mission was in support of the allied attack taking place further south at Monte Cassino (Battle of Monte Cassino, January 17, 1944 – May 19, 1944) and had the tunnel been successfully blown, supplies to the defending Germans would have been cut off.

This YANK article reported on the first war crime trial of the post World War Two era: the trial of German General Anton Dostler (1891 – 1945), who gave the order to execute the O.S.S. prisoners. In his defense, General Dostler insisted that he was acting under the orders of General Gustav von Zangen, who denied the claim.