1945 – Page 15 – Old Magazine Articles

An Interview with a Kamikaze Pilot
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

With the fall of imperial Japan, YANK correspondent Robert MacMillan was
one of the very first journalists to interview the Japanese Kamikaze pilot Norio Okamoto, which allowed his readers to gain some understanding as
to how the Kamikaze Corps operated:

Okomoto’s story took all the wind -the Divine Wind – out of the Kamikaze sails. Even the interpreter, a Japanese civilian, was surprised. He had worked for radio Tokyo and while he knew a lot of the propaganda stories were ridiculous, he had believed the Kamikaze legend.

Click here to read articles about post-war Japan.

The VT Radio Fuse
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Its been said that World War Two was the first high-tech war, and a passing look at many of the military tools used between 1939 and 1945 will bare that out to be true. It was not only th the first war in which jet engines and atomic bombs were used, but also the first war to deploy walkie-talkie radios, rockets, and radar. This article concerns what the U.S. Department of War classified as a weapons system just as revolutionary as the atomic bomb: the VT fuse artillery shell (a.k.a. the time proximity fuse). It was used with great success in various theaters: anti-Kamikaze in the Pacific, anti-personnel in the Ardennes and anti V-1 in defense of Britain.

This is a short article that goes into greater detail outlining the successes listed above and explains how the system worked; it also is accompanied by a diagram of the shell.

Click here to learn about the timing fuses designed for W.W. I shrapnel shells.

The American 4.5 Multiple Rocket Launcher
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

To the American G.I.s serving along the Italian Front, the presence of rockets was like a page out of a Buck Rogers comic book. They had grown accustomed to seeing them mounted on the wings of quickly speeding American fighter aircraft, but to see and hear them up close and personal when fixed to the turret of a Sherman tank (pictured) seemed altogether too bizarre. This article, Rockets in Italy, will allow you to learn about the use and deployment of the U.S. Army’s ground rocket-gun and how it amazed all the men who ever came near enough to see one.

Click here to read about one of the greatest innovations by 20th Century chemists: plastic.

S/Sgt. Henry E. Erwin Off the Coast of Japan
(Collier’s Magazine, 1945)

War correspondents see and hear about many courageous acts that serve as a testimony to the level of personal commitment held high by many (but not all) of the American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who served in the Second World War, and when I read the opening paragraphs about this hero, I knew it was going to be unique:

His name is Staff Sergeant Henry E. Erwin of Bessemer, Alabama. He was the radio operator on a B-29, and what he did, we think, was the bravest thing we ever heard of.

American Advantages During World War II
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

General Marshall listed a number of clear advantages that the American G.I. had over his German and Japanese counterpart: the M-1 Garand semi-automatic rifle, the jeep and the two-and-a-half ton truck (Deuce and a half):

It is interesting to trace the planning and decisions that gave us the Garand rifle and the tremendous small arms fire-power that went with it, noting especially that the War Department was strenuously opposed.

FDR’s Funeral
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Here is a series of articles from YANK magazine that reported on the funeral of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. One of these four correspondents was assigned to write about the general sense of loss that New Yorkers felt upon learning of the death of their president:

Not in my lifetime or in yours, will we again see see such a man.

CLICK HERE… to read the obituary of President Kennedy.

Bernard Baruch: Elder Statesman
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Bernard Baruch (1870 – 1965) was a major player in President Franklin Roosevelt’s Brain Trust; during World War Two he served that president as a respected adviser concerning economic matters. Not long after this interview, during the Truman Administration, he was appointed to serve as the first U.S. Representative on the U.N Atomic Energy Commission.

Click here to read a 1945 article about the funeral of FDR.

The French Return To Vietnam
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

In South China, 6,000 French troops stood ready to reenter French Indo-China. A portion of the French fleet and a French air force unit prepared to back them up.

We are definitely taking over.

In 1954 the French gave up on Vietnam and the U.S. accepted the challenge – click here to read about it…

The Vietminh
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

Hanoi is now the fountainhead of the largest and most successful anti-French insurgent movement ever mounted in Indo-China. Here Vietminh (first and last words of Viet Nam Doclap Dong Minh, meaning the league for the independence of Viet Nam) has set up the provisional government of the Viet Nam Republic. Viet Nam is the ancient name for the coastal provinces of Indo-China. Vietminh has been actively in existence since 1939. The President of Viet Nam and leader of the whole insurgent movement is a slight, graying little man of 55, named Ho Chi Minh who commanded guerrillas in collaboration with American officers in Northern Tonkin… For 43 years he has devoted himself to anti-French activity. Constantly reported captured or dead, he never actually fell into French hands.

VJ-Day in London
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

…There were crowds in Piccadilly Circus and Leicester and Trafalgar Squares. Quite a few people got rid of their waste paper by throwing it out the windows, a sign that the need for saving such things for the war effort was just about over.

Click here to rrad about VE-Day in London.

VE-Day in London
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Hundreds of GIs were gathered at the Rainbow Corner Red Cross Club in Piccadilly when bundles of Stars and Stripes extras were tossed out free. The paper bore a huge banner headline, ‘Germany Quits!’ and contained the official Ministry of Information announcement which all England had just heard on the air.

News of the Reich’s final and complete surrender found Piccadilly, Marble Arch and other popular intersections jammed with people. At first incredulous, the cautious British worked up to a pitch of demonstrative joy…

Click here to read about VJ-Day in London.

Hiroshima
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Walking into Hiroshima in broad daylight, wearing an American uniform and knowing that you were one of the first Americans the people in that utterly ruined city had laid eyes on since the bombing, was not a comfortable feeling.

After the war it was discovered that one quarter of the Hiroshima dead were Koreans who were there as slave laborers.

The October 3, 1946 issue of the Atlanta Constitution ran a front page headline declaring that Imperial Japan had successfully tested their own Atom Bomb during the summer of ’45. Click here to read more on this topic.

Click here to read General Marshal’s opinions regarding the Atomic Bomb.

The American Amalgamation
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

In this brief report on the National Conference of Christian and Jews, a break-down of the various cultural groups is presented along with a list of the assorted religious denominations found in America at that time. We suppose that Hispanics and Asians were excluded because their numbers were so terribly small at that time.

VJ Day in an American P.O.W. Camp
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

A short column filed by an eye-witness in Manila who described well the profound sense of melancholy that descended upon the W.W. II Japanese prisoners of war when they had learned of the Japanese surrender.

Click here if you would like to read an article about the Japanese surrender proceedings in Tokyo Bay.

Click here to read more articles about the liberation of Paris in 1944.

The Japanese Surrender Proceedings
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

We are gathered here, representatives of the major warring powers, to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored.

Those were the words of General Douglas MacArthur when he opened the Japanese Surrender Proceedings on board the deck of the American battleship, U.S.S. Missouri on the morning of September 2, 1945. This report was filed by Yank correspondent Dale Kramer, who amusingly noted that all concerned were dressed in a manner fitting the occasion, with the exception of the American officers who (oddly) seemed unable to locate their neckties that morning.

Click here if you would like to read about the atomic blast over the Japanese city of Nagasaki.

Click here to read articles about post-war Japan.

Click here to read about August 28, 1945 – the day the American occupation began.

The Battle of Iwo Jima and the First Flag Raising on Mount Suribachi
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Yank staff correspondent Bill Reed wrote the following account of the Fifth Marine Division’s slug fest on the island of Iwo Jima throughout the months on February and March, 1945:

For two days the men who landed on Green beach were pinned to the ground. Murderous machine-gun, sniper, and mortar fire came from a line of pillboxes 300 yards away in the scrubby shrubbery at the foot of the volcano. No one on the beach, whether he was a CP phone operator or a front line rifleman, was exempt. The sight of a head raised above a foxhole was the signal to dozens of Japs, safely hidden in the concrete emplacements, to open up. Men lay on their sides to drink from canteens or urinate. An errand between foxholes became a life-and-death mission for the man who attempted it.

The Iwo Jima Invasion
(Collier’s Magazine, 1945)

Written by war correspondent Walter Davenport some thirteen months prior to taking the helm as editor-in-chief at Collier’s Magazine, this article gives the reader a sense as to what D-plus-one looked like from the fifty yard line at the Battle of Iwo Jima (Operation Detachment: February 19 – March 26, 1945):

There is no Jap navy here to stop us; no Jap air force, either… So you see Jap? On our way up here to Iwo we flew over more supply ships, more cargo carriers. Those decks carry concrete mixers, Diesel-powered road crushers and rollers. There aren’t many cliffs on Iwo to hide out in, Jap! You can’t live for weeks in the crevices of Suribachi. You can’t grow gardens on that rock. So, while you can still see, look down at what we’re seeing: An American city, a harsh, womanless city is moving in on you.

Davenport’s observations were no doubt a comfort to the Collier’s readers on the home front, but post-war accounting revealed that one quarter of the U.S. Navy’s losses took place at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

Click here to read a unique story about the Battle of the Sula Straits…

With the War Came Medical Innovations
(Pageant Magazine, 1945)

Four years of global carnage did not simply usher in an era of more destructive weaponry for the inhabitants of Earth to ponder; it also gave cause for tremendous improvements in medical care. This 1945 article anticipated a much better world that would be created from the smoldering remains of Europe and Asia – a world that was better prepared to address the health requirements of the diseased and the burned. The medical advancements that were forged between the years 1939 through 1945 saw remarkable improvements in surgery and anesthesia and brought new light on how the medical establishment understood blood and the treatment of venereal disease.

CLICK HERE… to read one man’s account of his struggle with shell shock…