Articles from 1945
By 1945 the Japanese Army was beginning to see the writing on the wall insofar as their occupation of China was concerned. With the collapse of Germany they knew they could expect the Soviets to attack at any time – this foreboding inspired them to corral greater numbers of hapless Chinese and force them to build barricades in order to postpone the inevitable.
Two months after the Fascists cried uncle and raised their white flag, this article went to press that was filled with two pages-worth of previously classified information as to the important roll that British and American radar played in winning the war. It was 1945 articles like this in which the world finally learned why the German submarine blockade of Britain proved to be so unsuccessful, why the London blitz was such a devastating blow to the Luftwaffe and how the Allied navies succeeded in getting so many convoys across the North Atlantic.
Lloyd Cortez Hawks (1911 – 1953) was a U.S. Army private and a recipient of the United States military’s highest decoration for valor — the Congressional Medal of Honor. Hawks performed his celebrated acts of derring-do while serving as a medic attached to the 30th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Division outside of Carano, Italy.
YANK correspondent, Sergeant Ed Cunningham, filed this report concerning all that he saw during the earliest stages of the German counter-attack in Bastogne; some Americans were leaving, some were staying, new ones were arriving – and all the while the Belgian townsfolk watched in confusion and hoped for the best.
An interesting article, written with a sense of embarrassment regarding the injustice done to the Japanese-Americans, and published a few weeks shy of VJ-Day. The article reports on how the former internment camp families were faring after they were released from their incarceration. 55,000 Japanese-Americans chose to remain in the camps rather than walk freely among their old neighbors; one man, Takeyoshi Arikawa, a former produce dealer, remarked:
I would like to take my people back home, but there are too many people in Los Angeles who would resent our return. These are troubled times for America. Why should I cause the country any more trouble?
Important references are made concerning those families who had lost their young men serving in the famed 442 Regimental Combat Team: a U.S. Army unit composed entirely of Nisei that was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation for it’s fortitude displayed in Italy, France and Germany.
…On, on, on it went into the night and the next night as the biggest city in the world went its way toward picking up the biggest hangover in its history. It was a hangover few would ever regret.
Click here if you would like to read an article about the VE Day celebrations in Europe.
Click here if you would like to read about the VE Day celebrations in the United States.
With the exception of the attached piece, there is no magazine article in existence that illustrated so clearly the soul-piercing pain that descended upon the city of New York when the word got around that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died. YANK correspondent Bill Davidson walked from one neighborhood to the next recording much of what he saw:
Nowhere was grief so open as in the poorest districts of the city. In Old St. Patrick’s in the heart of the Italian district on the lower East Side, bowed, shabby figures came and went, and by the day after the President died hundreds of candles burned in front of the altar. ‘Never’ a priest said ‘have so many candles burned in this church’.
A woman clasped her 8-year-old son and said, ‘Not in my lifetime or in yours will we again see such a man.’
This is a conversational General Eisenhower article that primarily concerns the plans for the Allied occupation of Germany, coupled with every American soldier’s wish to simply get in boats and go home:
I’m just as bad off as any GI today, General Eisenhower said quietly. I don’t want to be here. I’m 54 years old and I lead a kind of lonely life.
The third paragraph makes reference to a pretty British secretary named Lt. Kay Summersby.
Recommended Reading: Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight Eisenhower_by_Kay Summersby
The attached article is disguised as a Hollywood fluff piece about actress Angela Lansbury (b. 1925), who at that time was about to earn her first and only Academy Award, but journalist Peter Churchill devoted the majority of column space to the life and career of her socialist grandfather George Lansbury (1859 – 1940), one time Member of Parliament and star of the British Labor Party:
Old George was born, bred, lived and died among the poor of London, and never had any money, and yes, that goes for the time he was a member of His Britanic Majesty’s Cabinet, too. But the folks down at the less desirable parts (we don’t talk of slums) of the Bow and Bromley district of London where he lived could tell you what a difference it made to have a Cabinet Minister for a neighbor.
Click here to read George Lansbury’s account of time he met Lenin…
You Might Also Want to Read an Article About Lady Nancy Astor, M.P.
Click here to read about an American woman who grew heartily sick of the socialists who loitered on every street corner during the Great Depression…
The attached article is disguised as a Hollywood fluff piece about actress Angela Lansbury (b. 1925), who at that time was about to earn her first and only Academy Award, but journalist Peter Churchill devoted the majority of column space to the life and career of her socialist grandfather George Lansbury (1859 – 1940), one time Member of Parliament and star of the British Labor Party:
Old George was born, bred, lived and died among the poor of London, and never had any money, and yes, that goes for the time he was a member of His Britanic Majesty’s Cabinet, too. But the folks down at the less desirable parts (we don’t talk of slums) of the Bow and Bromley district of London where he lived could tell you what a difference it made to have a Cabinet Minister for a neighbor.
Click here to read George Lansbury’s account of time he met Lenin…
You Might Also Want to Read an Article About Lady Nancy Astor, M.P.
Click here to read about an American woman who grew heartily sick of the socialists who loitered on every street corner during the Great Depression…
In a city prone to revelry, New Orleans had prematurely celebrated the end of World War Two on three previous occasions; not willing to go down that path a fourth time, the residents were in a state of disbelief when the news of the Japanese surrender began to circulate all over again. However, when it was understood that this time the rumor proved true everyone seemed grateful for the rehearsal time.
Throughout the course of the war in the Pacific, there were as many as twelve Japanese female radio commentators broadcasting assorted varieties of demoralizing radio programming to the American and Allied forces from Japan. However the Americans knew nothing of this collective and simply assumed that all the broadcasts were hosted by one woman, who they dubbed, Tokyo Rose.
The story told in this article begins in the late summer of 1945 when:
…one of the supreme objectives of American correspondents landing in Japan was Radio Tokyo. There they hoped to find someone to pass off as the one-and-only Rose and scoop their colleagues. When the information had been sifted a little, a girl named Iva Toguri (Iva Toguri D’Aquino: 1916 – 2006), emerged as the only candidate who came close to filling the bill. For three years she had played records, interspersed with snappy comments, beamed to Allied soldiers on the Zero Hour…Her own name for herself was Orphan Ann.
Kind words regarding the M-1 Garand rifle were written in a 1945 report by the Department of the Army; it was widely believed in those circles that this American weapon was one of the primary advantages that lead to victory.
Click here to read about the mobile pill boxes of the Nazi army.
The use of animals in war is as old as war itself; but the concept of kicking dogs out of perfectly good aircraft so they might be able to parachute onto snowy hilltops and deliver aid to wounded combatants dates to World War II. This printable Collier’s Magazine article tells the story of the Parapups:
Completely G.I., the dogs have service records, serial numbers, enlistment papers and shots against disease. Sentimentalists along the Alaska Division even proposed that they be authorized to wear Parawings after five jumps.
In 1947 former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt penned this nifty essay about her least favorite word:
I do not like the word tolerance.
If you tolerate something, you do not like it very much.
The attached column is a 1945 magazine profile of Clement Attlee (1883 – 1967: U.K. Prime Minister: 1945 – 1951) it appeared just a few weeks following the long over-do wrap-up of the Second World War and the hasty ouster of Conservative Party Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965).
You might also want to read an article about Soviet Foreign Minister Andre Gromyko.
The attached 1945 article was intended to serve as a suit-buying-guide for all those young men who were in the throes of trading in their military uniforms for civilian attire.
The one kind of wool that is not discussed in this article is worsted: this was the wool that was specifically reserved for the uniforms of the U.S. military (enough to outfit 12 million souls) and there wasn’t a single thread of it that could be purchased on the civilian market.
