1945 – Page 12 – Old Magazine Articles

The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse
(PM Tabloid, 1943)

The reason the Nazis banned The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse was that it was a political preachment against Hitler ‘socialism,’ by a man [Fritz Lang] whose films were appreciated by the Germans as true interpretations of the social trends of post-war Germany… Lang’s intention in the film was, in his own words, ‘to expose the masked Nazi theory of the necessity to deliberately destroy everything which is precious to a people so that they would lose all faith in the institutions and ideals of the State. Then, when everything collapsed, they would try to find help in the new order.’

Yvonne De Carlo Arrives
(Collier’s Magazine, 1945)

A 1945 Collier’s Magazine article about Yvonne De Carlo (a.k.a. Lilly Munster: 1922 – 2007) that appeared shortly after her first big break in Hollywood, Salome, Where She Danced. At the time of this interview the actress had well-over fifteen minor films on her resume but the journalist chose to claim that Salome was her first, just for the unbelievable glamor of it all; he also chose to shave three years off her age.

Yvonne De Carlo was born twenty years ago in Vancouver, British Columbia…She was a featured dancer at Earl Caroll’s and earned the undying respect of the producer by tipping the scales at a svelte 115 pounds, standing on the runway at a mere 5 feet four inches, and by displaying an 11 -/2 -inch neck, a 36 bust, a 24 waist, 32 hips a 7 1/2 -inch ankle, and 15 2/3 -inch wrist.

Regretting the A-Bomb
(Commonweal Magazine, 1945)

An anonymous columnist at The Commonweal (New York) was quick to condemn the use of the Atomic Bombs:

… we are confronted with an obligation to condemn what we ourselves did, an obligation to admit that our victory has been sadly sullied not only because we used this weapon but because we have tacitly acceded to use it.

Breaking Up The ‘Big Eight’
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

As the American effort to restructure a defeated Japan commenced, it seemed obvious to all that one of the first things to go was the Zaibatsu Family. Zaibatsu was the name given to the eight families which had held a monopoly on the manufacturing wealth and banking power in Japan since the mid-to-late Nineteenth Century. Made up of many names that you will recognize, this article goes into some detail explaining how the power structure worked and its relation with the Emperor.

The Capture of General Hideko Tojo
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

War correspondent George Burns reported on the momentous day when the American Army came to arrest the former Prime Minister of Imperial Japan, General Hideko Tojo (1884 – 1948). Tojo served as Japan’s Prime Minister between 1941 and 1944 and is remembered for having ordered the attack on the American naval installation at Pearl Harbor, as well as the invasions of many other Western outposts in the Pacific. Judged as incompetent by the Emperor, he was removed from office in the summer of 1944.

This article describes the efforts of Lt. Jack Wilpers who is credited for prolonging the life of Tojo after his amateur suicide attempt and seeing to it that the man kept his date with the hangman. Nominated for the Bronze Star, he was decorated in 2010: read THE WASHINGTON POST article.

The Question of Japanese Youth
(PM Tabloid, 1945)

Far-flung correspondent Max Lerner (1902 – 1992) penned the attached editorial concerning the necessity of reëducation Japanese school children:

The Japanese youth are the key to Japan’s future. There were 12,000,000 of them in the elementary schools before the war, dressed in school uniforms, bowing before the Emperor’s portrait every day on entering and leaving… The values taught to him were feudal and fascist values, but the weapons given him were modern weapons. This is the combination that produced the suicide-squadrons of the Kamikaze.

A similar article about German youth can be read here.

The Trials at Nuremberg
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

As for the defendant’s guilt: the British Attorney general named seven individually as ‘murderers, robbers, black-mailers and gangsters’ who led Germany into war…

Click here if you would like to read what the German people thought about the trials…

The First Winter of the Peace
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

The coming winter will be an extremely trying one for our occupation troops. If present conditions continue, there is certain to be starvation in Germany.

Starvation
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1945)

Intelligence officers of the U.S. Army, just returned from Germany, brought appalling stories of the conditions under the policy of divided control established at Potsdam last August. Berlin, they reported confidentially, had a pre-war population of four million and an average daily death of toll of 175. Berlin today, although harboring over a million refugees from what was Eastern Germany, has a population of just over three million; deaths, 4,000 a day.

Judgment in Oslo
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

Norwegian traitor Vidkun Quisling (1887 – 1945) insisted on his innocence throughout his trial and all the way up to the day of his firing squad. To counter his claims in the courtroom prosecutors produced the diary of Hitler’s foreign minister, Alfred Rosenberg, that clearly stated that Quisling was complicit from the very beginning in the invasion of his homeland. A pride of Norwegian military officers recalled the day of the Nazi attack when Quisling refused to give the mobilization order.

Click here to read an article about another European traitor: Pierre Laval.

The End of the Home Front
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

The word reconversion is a term so odd to our era that my auto-correct insists it is a misspelling – but the word appears more than a few times in the September 3, 1945 issue of Newsweek and it pertains to process of turning the economy (and society) from one centered on war to one that caters to consumers. This article encapsulates the excitement of the previous week when the war was declared over – POWs returned, rationing ended, Lend-Lease completed, nukes created, draft quotas reduced, traitors hanged and the recruits demobilized.

End of the Road for Sgt. John Basilone
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

The first Marine waves that stormed ashore on Iwo Jima included a stalwart young sergeant who stood out as a leader even in that picked group. Handsome, dark-haired, and purposeful, he strode through the surf seemingly oblivious to the enemy’s artillery fire. His eyes focused inland on a spot suitable for his machine-gun platoon… Suddenly, a Jap shell screamed. The sergeant fell. John Basilone, first enlisted Marine in this war to win the Congressional Medal of Honor, was dead.

What The GIs Thought of The Films of the Forties
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

After four hard years of watching sappy Hollywood drivel about the war and the home front, the censorship machine was finally dismantled – which allowed the servicemen to speak their minds about what they REALLY thought about those movies…

Hispanic Women in the WACs
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

A group of women of Latin-American extraction took the Army oath before more than 6,000 persons in San Antonio’s Municipal Auditorium to become the second section of the Benito Juarez Air-WAC Squadron, named for the hero who helped liberate Mexico from European domination in 1862.

Led by an honor guard from the first Latin-American WAC squadron, the new war-women, marched into the auditorium to be sworn in and to hear words of greeting from Colonel Oveta Culp Hobby (1905 – 1995) and from Mrs. Dwight Eisenhower (1896 – 1979).

The first Hispanic WAC was Carmen Contreras-Bozak.

Click here to read about some of the Puerto Ricans who served with distinction during the war.

From Amazon:
Dressed for Duty: America’s Women in Uniform, 1898-1973

The Murder of Grefreiter Kunz
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

Accusing one of their fellow inmates of treason (Vaterlandsverrater), a Nazi kangaroo court located in the POW camp in Tonkawa, Oklahoma murdered him. The U.S. Army administrators who run the camp dutifully received the body as if justice had been served, and buried it in the camp graveyard. This article explains how all this came about.

The German Army’s Official Report on D-Day
(Dept. of the Army, 1945)

Translated from German, labeled CONFIDENTIAL and printed in a booklet for a class at the U.S. Army Military Academy in 1945 was the attached German Army assessment of the D-Day invasion. Distributed on June 20, 1944, just two weeks after the Normandy landings, the report originated in the offices of Field Marshal von Rundstedt (1875 – 1953) and served to document the German reaction to the Allied Operations in Normandy.

Contest On Okinawa
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Writing about the bitter fighting on Okinawa some years after the war, Marine veteran Eugene Sledge remarked that he and his comrades had been reduced to Twentieth Century savages. Much of what he said is confirmed in the attached Yank article from 1945 that clearly illustrated the terror that was experienced by G.I.s and Marines on that island after the sun went down.

Assessing the U.S. Navy in W.W. II
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1945)

Some four months after VJ-Day U.S. Fleet Admiral Ernest King (1878 – 1956) gave a post-game summary of the Navy’s performance in his third and final report for the Department of War:

• Biggest factor in this victory was the perfection of amphibious landings

• Hardest Pacific battle: Okinawa invasion

• American subs sank at least 275 warships of all types

• Of the 323 Japanese warships lost, the U.S. Navy claimed 257 (figure disputed by Army Air Corps)

Read an article about the many faults of the
German Navy during the Second World War…