Collier’s Magazine – Page 6 – Old Magazine Articles

Americans ♥ Winston Churchill
(Collier’s Magazine, 1942)

Shortly after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made a solemn visit to the White House in order to plot the course of the war with FDR. The affect that the Prime Minister impressed upon the average American was profound and was soon made manifest in the form of innumerable gifts that began descending upon the White House addressed to him. An unsigned editorial in Collier’s Magazine noticed the event and remarked:

If we hadn’t liked Mr. Churchill immensely from the moment he arrived here, none of us would have sent him anything. The size and variety of this shower of gifts are the best measure of the terrific hit he made with all kinds and conditions of Americans.

‘What the Finns Won”
(Collier’s Magazine, 1940)

We suppose debate will go on for years about whether the Finns or the Russians won their 105-day war of late 1939 and early 1940. We think the Finns won all the phases of the war except those included in the peace treaty – and that the treaty was a minor matter in the long view of it all…As for the predictions that the Russians will be coming back in six months or so to gobble up the rest of Finland – we may easily be wrong, but we can’t picture the Russians tackling the Finns again for another thirty years.

Listening-In On The Enemy
(Collier’s Magazine, 1943)

The FBIS – short for Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service – is the organization that listens to the world’s radios for Uncle Sam. It’s monitoring station in Washington has, besides editors and annalists, some sixty fantastic linguists on its staff – people who are fluent at anywhere from three or four – up to a couple of dozen, languages apiece. Their job is to intercept and translate the shortwave broadcasts of Rome, Berlin, Vichy and a score of lesser stations, which daily pour out Axis propaganda in more languages than were ever spoken in the Tower of babel.

The Atlantic Convoys
(Collier’s Magazine, 1944)

The War Shipping Administration is never at a loss for an answer when asked what’s been authorized, what’s in the works, what’s been shipped and where everything is at the moment? Nevertheless, the Transportation Inventory Department is a tidy place, with no visible signs of agitation. The TID has never lost so much as a bolt. Once it took twenty-two weeks to find a couple of airplane engines which had got themselves lost.

The Greatest Sea Battle
(Collier’s Magazine, 1945)

Patching together the reports of four different war correspondents, the editors at Collier’s were able to create a genuine page-turner narrating the American naval victory that took place off the coast of the Philippines during the Fall of 1944.

Secretary of the Navy Forrestal summed up the results as ‘One of the great naval victories of the war that will go down, along with Midway and Guadalcanal sea battles as one of the great, shattering blows struck against Japanese sea power. The Japanese fleet was indeed beaten, routed and broken.’

Robert Capa in Tunisia
(Collier’s Magazine, 1943)

Robert Capa’s (1913 – 1954) images of the American thrust through Tunisia.

The Domino Theory
(Collier’s Magazine, 1951)

In 1951, N.Y. Governor Thomas Dewey (1902 – 1971) made a fact-finding trip to French Indochina (Vietnam), and as impressed as he was with the French command, he wrote urgently in this Collier’s article of his belief in the Domino Theory – Indochina, Thailand and Burma were the Rice Bowl of Southeast Asia:

The Rice Bowl of Southeast Asia is the cornerstone of our Pacific defenses. And Indochina is the cornerstone of the cornerstone.

Absolute, Total Morons on the Home Front
(Collier’s Magazine, 1943)

If you’re one of those types who tend to feel that Americans aren’t as smart as they used to be, this is the article for you: attached is a collection of quotes generated by eight home front dullards who were asked the question:

Do you know what you are fighting?

They all understood that their nation had just finished it’s second year fighting something called Fascism but were hard-pressed to put a thoughtful definition to the term:

A Kansas cattle raiser defined Fascism as ‘…the belief in a big industrial enterprise. Anyone who thinks that way is Fascist-minded.

Additionally, it is fun to see the pictures of all the assorted noobs who made such ridiculous statements.

Here Comes Denim
(Collier’s Magazine, 1942)

Nine months into the war the American fashion industry awoke to discover that one of the most sought after cottons being purchased domestically was denim.

Denim was first seen in 1853, worn by the men who panned for gold in California. When faced with hard labor, this sturdy twill had proven its worth again and again, and when the American home front recognized that there was a great deal of work to be done in the fields and factories if the war was to be won, they slipped on jeans and denim coveralls and saw the job through.

Who on Sixth Avenue could have known back then that denim would be the main-stay in American sportswear for decades to come?

A far more thorough history of blue jeans can be read here.

Princess Elizabeth During the Second World War
(Collier’s Magazine, 1947)

A printable article (excerpted from a longer one) outlining what exactly Princess Elizabeth II was up to during World War II:

…and it was decided that Elizabeth must not enlist in anything, that her training for the throne was of the first importance. But Elizabeth felt that she would be a slacker and carry about an inferiority complex for life. So for a year, relentlessly, she persisted. Just before her nineteenth birthday, her father gave in…

I Still Believe in Non-Violence’ by Mahatma Gandhi
(Collier’s Magazine, 1943)

In the face of history’s most brutal war, as men the world over live by the rule of kill or be killed, India’s leader preaches a gospel of never lifting a weapon or pulling a trigger. Here he tells why:

The principle of non-violence means, in general terms, that men will deliberately shun all weapons of slaughter and the use of force of any kind whatsoever against their fellow men…Are we naive fools? Is non-violence a sort of dreamy wishful thinking that has never had and can never have any real success against the heavy odds of modern armies and the unlimited application of force and frightfulness?

Irving Thalberg: Hollywood’s Boy Wonder
(Collier’s Magazine, 1924)

An article covering the early career of twenty five year-old Irving Thalberg (1899 – 1936): legendary Hollywood executive and movie producer, whose natural abilities in the Dream Factory catapulted his meteoric rise to greater power, leaving a long string of hits and well-admired film productions in his wake before pneumonia got the better of him twelve years after this article went to press.

Dachau
(Collier’s Magazine, 1945)

Attached is Martha Gellhorn’s (1908 – 1998) very disturbing eyewitness account of the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau, Poland:

Nothing about war was ever as insanely wicked as these starved and outraged naked, nameless dead. Behind one pile of dead lay the clothed healthy bodies of the German guards who had been found in this camp. They were killed at once by the prisoners when the American Army entered.

The man primarily responsible for delivering the innocent into the ovens of the death camps was Obergrupenfuehrer Albert Ganzenmüller click here to read about him…

Walt Disney’s Artists and the Making of ‘Bambi’
(Collier’s Magazine, 1942)

For the production of Snow White (1938), the Disney artists had gone to great lengths in order to properly portray the manner in which young women move; these efforts were rewarded at the box-office to such a high degree that the same devotion was applied to the study of deer anatomy in their efforts to create Bambi (1942).

We had to remember, that Disney has a ruthless fidelity to the physical scene, to the truth of nature, even when he may seem to be distorting nature.

Click here to read more articles about Disney animation.

Enter, Esther Williams
(Collier’s Magazine, 1942)

There is a new girl out at MGM in Culver City named Esther Williams (1921 – 2013), who is a cross between Lana Turner and a seal…Miss Williams happens to be that fortunate thing known as ‘a knockout’ – in looks and one of the greatest swimmers in the world.

Click here to read about Marilyn Monroe and watch a terrific documentary about her life.

Pierre Laval: French Premier and Traitor
(Collier’s Magazine, 1943)

French collaborator Pierre Laval (1883 – 1945) is remembered as the Nazi tool who presided over France between 1942 and 1944, allowing for the deportation of Jews and French laborers into Germany. On D-Day, Laval stood before the radio microphones cautioning his countrymen not to join in the fight against the German occupiers. His many sins would be known a year later during the liberation of Paris, but this writer was very accurate in cataloging all his many failings, both as a citizen of France and as a Human Being.

Laval was captured in Spain; you can read about that here…

CLICK HERE to read about Laval’s Norwegian counterpart: Prime Minister Vidkun Quisling…

Hitler’s Man in Delhi
(Collier’s Magazine, 1944)

Subhas Chandra Bose (1897 – 1945) spent much of the Twenties and Thirties brainstorming with Gandhi and Nehru as to how best they might secure sovereignty for their beloved India. By 1939 Bose broke ranks with his fellows at the Indian National Congress, believing that British rule would end a good deal quicker if the Indians signed on with the Axis.

Japanese Prisoners at Camp McCoy
(Collier’s Magazine, 1944)

A midget Jap submarine went aground on the morning of December 8, 1941, off the island of Oahu in Hawaii, and a lieutenant just one year out of the Imperial Naval Academy walked ashore and became the first, and for many weeks our only, W.W. II prisoner. He eventually wound up at Camp McCoy…