Articles from 1945
A list of five outstanding Britons (two women and three men) accompanied by a description of their selfless acts performed during the Nazi Blitz on their homeland.
Who dares to doubt when Britons sing that there will always be an England?
A report from Newsweek on the August 21, 1945 liberation of three Doolittle Raiders who had been in captivity since April 18, 1942.
Click here to read about the Canadian POWs who collaborated with the Nazis.
This article appeared in an issue Click Magazine that was deliberately edited to aid those young men who had been wearing uniforms for the past few years and, subsequently, had no knowledge whatever of tailoring or of fabric that was not government issued. It consists of a handy guide for the aspiring dandy showing just how a gentleman’s suit should fit if it is to be properly worn.
Nobody has been able to figure out to anyone’s satisfaction why Sinatra has the effect he has on his Bobby Sox fans. One of his secretaries, a cute dish whose husband is serving overseas, said: ‘The doctors say it’s just because he’s got a very sexy voice, but I’ve been with him a year now and his voice doesn’t do a thing to me’.
Maybe it’s the war.
It now becomes apparent that the U.S. Government, long before Pearl Harbor, knew Tokyo’s war plans almost as thoroughly as did the Japanese. To all practical purposes, Washington had ears attuned to the most intimate, secret sessions of Japan’s cabinet.
A year and a half before the Pearl Harbor attack, Naval Intelligence sold a Japanese agent some bogus plans of the naval installation – more about this can be read here.
Here is a 1945 article about the Croatian-born American ballerina Mia Slavenska (1916 – 2002) and her popularity. The article divides its column space between telling us about the dancer and providing a brief history of ballet – and how it was once joined at the hip with opera.
When the YANK staff writers asked the G.I.s to name the greater menace to our country and our values -most of the servicemen polled seemed to agree that the real enemies were from Japan; while Germany, it was believed by most, simply had to be brought back into the fold.
Another article contrasting the Germans and Japanese can be read here…
During the closing weeks of the war it was estimated that the Germans lorded over as many as 65,000 American POWs. Likewise, in the United States, there were 320,118 German Prisoners of War held captive. This article compares and contrasts how each army chose to treat their prisoners.
The greatest deception deployed by the German Army during the the Ardennes Offensive was to parachute Nazi commandos into the American lines – men who had been raised in the U.S. and spoke the language well. They wore American uniforms and performed heinous acts of sabotage, and as this article spells out, lured many GIs to their deaths.
Two of these Germans attempted to kidnap and assassinate General Eisenhower, click here to read about it…
Attached is a stirring collection of eyewitness accounts by the American survivors of the Malmedy Massacre (December 17, 1944) that took place during the Battle of the Bulge.
The German officer in the car stood up, took deliberate aim with a pistol at an American medical officer in the front rank of the prisoners and fired. As the medical officer fell, the Germans fired again and another American dropped. Immediately two tanks at the end of the field opened up with their machine guns on the defenseless prisoners…
By thew war’s end it was revealed that 43% of American prisoners of war had died in Japanese camps; by contrast, 1% had died in German POW camps.
Click here to read about the Nazi murder of an American Jewish P.O.W.
On April 2, 1945, elements of the American First Army liberated a German prison camp adjacent to the little town of Orb, Germany:
What they found there appalled even the toughest GI and seemed to demonstrate that in some cases at least the Germans had treated British and American prisoners of war as badly as any of the pitiful slave laborers.
A Yank Magazine interview with the author of Gone with the Wind (1936).
At the time this article was printed, Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949; Pulitzer Prize 1937) was an American publishing phenomenon; Gone with the Wind (or GWTW, to those in the know) was said to be the fastest selling novel in the history of American publishing. Her one book had a sales record of 50,000 copies in one day and approximately 1,500,000 during it’s first year. By May of 1941 the sales reached 3,368,000 in the English language alone (there were 18 translations made in all; the novel was a blockbuster in Germany, where 5000,000 editions were swiftly sold).
Available from Amazon: Gone with the Wind
In the fall of 1978 former TIME MAGAZINE war correspondent Bill Walton remarked privately about how wildly inappropriate it was to cast the pretty-boy actor Ryan O’Neal in the roll as General James M. Gavin (1907 – 1990) for the epic war film, A Bridge Too Far. Having dropped into Normandy in 1944 with a typewriter strapped to his chest, Walton witnessed first-hand the grit and combat leadership skills that made Gavin so remarkable. The attached YANK article tells the tale of Gavin’s teen-age enlistment, his meteoric rise up the chain of command and his early advocacy for a U.S. Army parachute infantry divisions.
Another article contrasting the Germans and the Japanese can be read here…
The seasoned war correspondent explained in the attached article as to why Operation Market Garden was such a disaster (and the censors let him) and why the next ambitious Allied parachute assault, Operation Varsity, would be different. Reminiscing about all that he saw of the famed parachute jump beyond the Rhine prior to being forced to turn-tail and bail out over English-occupied Belgium, he observed:
…the C-46s come in and apparently walk into a wall of flak. I could not see the flak, but one plane after another went down. All our attention was on our own ship. It could blow up in mid-air at any moment. From the pilot’s compartment came streams of stinging smoke.
A reminiscence by screen writer, artist and all-around literary misfit Rob Wagner (1872 – 1942) as he recalled the bad old days of 1918, when he was hoodwinked into believing that the widespread prohibition of alcohol would help achieve an Allied victory in World War I. When the war ended and time passed, he noticed how the Noble Experiment was evolving into something quite different, and how it was altering not only his friends and neighbors, but American culture as a whole.
Before Prohibition, the average business or professional man, never dreamed of drinking spirits during the working day…Now, however, a full grown man with the sparkle in his eye of a naughty sophomore, will meet you on Spring Street at eleven in the morning, slap you on the back, and ask you to duck up to his office where he will uncork his forbidden treasure…
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
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 G.I. Joe
