1945 – Page 12 – Old Magazine Articles

34th Division: From Kasserine, All the Way up the Boot
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

On January 26, 1942 the long awaited boatload of U.S. troops to Great Britain had finally arrived. The first American G.I. to step off the plank and plant his foot on British soil was Pfc. Milburn H. Henke (1918 – 1998) of the 34th Infantry Division; and as the news spread throughout all of John Bull’s island that help had arrived and the first guy had a German surname, the Brits (always big fans of irony) had a good laugh all around.

This article tells the tale of the 1st Battalion, 34th Division which had the distinction of being the longest serving U.S. combat unit in the course of the entire war. It was these men of the Mid-West who took it on the chin that day at Kasserine (America’s first W.W. II battle, which was a defeat), avenged their dead at El Guettar, landed at Salerno, Anzio and fought their way up to Bologna. By the time the war ended, there weren’t many of the original men left, but what few there were reminisce in this article. Interesting gripes about the problems of American uniforms can be read.

‘The Story of GI Joe”
(Pic Magazine, 1945)

The Story of G.I. Joe was released shortly before the war ended and was praised by General Eisenhower for being the best war movie he had ever seen. Directed by William Wellman, the film was applauded by American combat veterans of the time for it’s accuracy – in their letters home, many would write that Wellman’s film had brought them to tears. The movie was based on the war reporting of Ernie Pyle as it appeared in his 1943 memoir, Here Is Your War: Story of G.I. Joe. Although it is not mentioned here, Pyle himself had spent some time on the set as a technical adviser, and the film was released two months after his death.

The German M.G. 34
(U.S. Dept. of War, 1945)

Two black and white photographs of the World War II German M.G. 34 (maschinengewehr 34) as well as some fast-stats that were collected by President Roosevelt’s Department of War during the closing days of the conflict.

An Historic Telephone Call Recorded
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

Out of the Pearl Harbor investigation last week came a decoded telephone conversation made on November 27, 1941, two weeks before the Japanese attacked, that had all the elements of a penny-dreadful spy thriller… On the Washington end of the trans-pacific phone call was Saburo Kurusu, Japanese special envoy to the United States; on the Tokyo end, Admiral Yeisuke Yamamoto, Chief of the American Division of the Japanese Foreign Office.

The conversation guaranteed Yamamoto that the negotiations between the two sides were proceeding smoothly and that the attack on Pearl Harbor would be a surprise.

The Congressional Hearings Regarding the Pearl Harbor Attack
(United States News, 1945)

The Navy’s own story of the events that led up to Pearl Harbor now can be drawn from top-secret documents placed before the Pearl Harbor Committee. These documents show that misunderstanding, inadequate co-ordination and other factors helped the Japanese surprise attack, even though the Navy was almost certain a Pacific war was coming.

The Un-Secret Secrets
(United States News, 1945)

To get a sense as to how thoroughly the Japanese diplomatic codes had been compromised, we recommend that you read the attached article. It is composed entirely of the chit-chat that took place between the government functionaries in Tokyo, their diplomats in Washington, their spies in Hawaii and their representatives in Berlin.

The article winds up explaining that the one vital communication that contained the information regarding the day of Japan’s attack was not translated until December 8.

The Champ is Gone
(PM Tabloid, 1945)

This highly personal column appeared in one of New York City’s evening papers and seemed characteristic of the feeling experienced by much of the U.S. after hearing about the unexpected death of President Roosevelt.
Written by Joe Cummiskey, the column stands out as the type of remembrance that is thoroughly unique to those who write about sports all day long, which is who Mr. Commiskey was:

Somehow or other, if you were in sports, you never thought of FDR so much as connected with the high office which he held. Rather, you remembered him most the way he’d chuckle, getting ready to throw out the the first ball to open the baseball season. Or how he’d sit on the 50 at the Army-Navy game…

The German Surrender
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

The attached article is an eye-witness account of the World War II surrender proceedings in Reims, France in the early days of May, 1945. Written in the patois of the 1940s American soldier (which sounded a good deal like the movies of the time), this article describes the goings-on that day by members of the U.S. Army’s 201st Military Police Company, who were not impressed in the least by the likes of German General Gustav Jodl or his naval counterpart, Admiral Hans von Friedeburg:

Sgt. Henry Wheeler of Youngstown, N.Y., said, ‘The wind-up was pretty much what we expected. ‘Ike’ didn’t have anything to do with those phonies until they were ready to quit. Then he went in and told them to sign up. And what does he do as he comes out of the meeting? He shakes hands with the first GI he comes to.

Click here to read about the fall of Paris…

Paris Cheered When Berlin Fell
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

An eyewitness account of all the excitement that was V.E. Day in Paris:

On the Champs Elysees they were singing ‘It’s a Long Wat to Tipperary,’ and it was a long way even the few blocks from Fouquet’s restaurant to the Arc de Triomphe if you tried to walk up the Champs on V-E Day in Paris. From one side of the broad and beautiful avenue to the other, all the way to the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe in the Place de l’Etoile, there was hardly any place to breathe and no place at all to move. That was the way it was in the Place l’Opera and the Place de la Republique and all the other famous spots and in a lot of obscure little side streets that nobody but Parisians know.

Remembering The Occupation
(Tricolor Magazine, 1945)

Shortly after the German exit from Paris, French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) put pen to paper in an effort to help explain what the citizens of that city were feeling throughout the German occupation of Paris:

At first the site of them made us ill; then, little by little, we forgot to notice them, for they had become an institution. What put the finishing touches to their harmlessness was their ignorance of our language. A hundred times I’ve seen Parisians in cafes express themselves freely about politics two steps away from a blank looking German soldier with a lemonade glass in front of him. They seemed more like furniture than like men.

Click here to read about the fall of Paris…

Evil Geniuses
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

There was some concern among members of the prosecuting legal team assembled at Nuremberg as to whether the Nazi defendants were mentally capable of standing trial for their heinous crimes. It was decided that each of the accused be administered an IQ test; to the surprise of all (except the accused) it was discovered that many of these men possessed intelligence levels that ranked at genius and near-genius grade!

Click here to read about the fall of Paris…

Filming the War
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

The True Glory is a documentary film about the Allied victory in World War II using actual footage from the war; the film was a joint effort between Great Britain and the United States intending to show the team work that won the war. Beginning with the D-Day invasion of Normandy Beach, the film chronicles the collapse of the Nazi war machine on the Western Front:

This is the sort of film the Germans would never have made – because it shows our victories without gloating and admits setbacks like the Ardennes breakthrough; because it’s peppered with humor and because, at the end, it warns against repetition of such a war.

Front-Line Sergeants Talk Combat and Rant About Replacements
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

The editors of Yank assembled six veteran platoon sergeants to talk about mistakes that most U.S. Army replacements make when they go into combat, and to speak seriously about which weapons and small unit tactics work best when confronting the German enemy:

The first mistake recruits make under fire began T/Sgt. Harry R. Moore, rifle platoon sergeant from Fort Worth, Texas, is that they freeze and bunch up. They drop to the ground and just lie there; won’t even fire back. I had one man just lie there while a German came right up and shot him. He still wouldn’t fight back.

<Click here to read about how the Army addressed the problem of soldiers who wouldn’t pull their triggers…

The Kamikazes That Weren’t
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

Luftwaffe Diva Hanna Reitsch (1912 – 1979) sitting under the bright lights of her interrogators cursed the name of Hermann Goring who rejected her plan to fly bomb-laden aircraft into the hulls of the Allied
ships sitting off the Normandy coast on June 6, 1944.

U.S. Post Office Stamps Honoring Army, Navy, Marines and Coast Guard
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

The philatelists in our audience know well the G.I. stamps issued by the U.S. Post Office in 1945; what they may not know are some of the stories that lay behind them (some stories are sad and some are merely pathetic).

70,000 American Prisoners of War
(PM Tabloid, 1945)

In a manly display of boastful trash-talking a few weeks before VE-Day, the over-burdened P.R. offices of the German high command issued a statement indicating that their military had in their possession some 70,000 U.S Prisoners of war. This was in contrast to the records kept by the Pentagon whose best guess stood in the neighborhood of 48,000.

The statement revealed that 27 of the 78 prisoner of war camps in Germany have been overrun by the Red Army and U.S./British forces, and that 15,000 Yanks have been liberated.

The Pershing M26 Tank
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Although the the Pershing M26 didn’t get into the fighting in Europe until very late in the game (March, 1945), it was long enough to prove itself. This new 43-toner is the Ordnance Department’s answer to the heavier German Tiger. It mounts a 90-mm high-velocity gun, equipped with a muzzle-brake, as opposed to the 88-mm on a Tiger.

The M26 Pershing tank was the one featured in the movie, Fury (2014).

One of the First Letters to the Editor in Favor of the Bomb
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Apparently the arguments that we still hear today concerning whether or not use of the Atomic Bomb in 1945 was justifiable popped-up right away. The following is a letter to the editor of Yank Magazine written by a hard-charging fellow who explained that he was heartily sick of reading the

-pious cries of horror [that] come from the musty libraries of well-fed clergymen and from others equally far removed from the war.