Articles from Coronet Magazine
An optimistic article from 1942 that asks us to look for the sunny side of the Japanese American internment camps – after all, they never had it so good!
Black author Richard Wright (1908 – 1960) clearly delineated for the readers of Coronet why African American participation in W.W. II was of great importance to the Black community.
Attached herein are a few pages from 12 Million Black Voices by Richard Wright (1908 – 1960). The book, published in 1942, is a poetic account of the challenging lives lead by African Americans both before the great migration and after their arrival in the North. The editors of Coronet showed their sympathies for this minority by publishing these pages, but they also showed their total racial insensitivities by running crude pigeon English captions beneath each of the accompanying photographs.
Click here to read about the first Black Marines.
Here is an interesting article from World War Two that goes into some detail explaining what is involved when a lieutenant colonel in an infantry regiment presents his plan of attack on a German town that is heavily defended. We hear him as he addresses the junior officers who will do the heavy lifting, and we get a sense of their concerns. Few reporters have ever paid any attention to this aspect of an assault.
“When Kaethe Schmidt was born in Koenigsberg in 1867, the twin fairies Pity and Indignation claimed her as their own.” As a result of marriage she became Kaethe Kollwitz, and it was under this name she produced her finest works of art:
“She has been the artist of the common people, in that she has made art out of their weal and their woe and she has been content to receive understanding and approbation from them alone.”
Here is an article by a doctor who believed that a modicum of self-knowledge is required before embarking on a diet. It is important to understand why the aspiring dieter overeats in the first place and understands what kind of diet they will be likely to complete successfully:
“Nobody can live on a few shreds of lettuce, a grated carrot and two ounces of boiled asparagus a day, and nobody has to resort to such rigorous tactics.”
This is an Auschwitz testimony from a larger work titled The Camp of Disappearing Men. It was printed in 1944 by an organization called the Polish Workers Party and the singular voice giving the account is unidentified. This eyewitness does not explain how he made good his escape but the testimony was published in the Spring of 1945 – when the existence of the death camp was first discovered and made known to the world.
N.B.: Auschwitz was first called Oświęcim, named for the nearest Polish city.
Five months after the death of President Roosevelt, writer Michael Sayers (1911 – 2010) managed to get this FDR article to press while the public’s interest in the man was still hot. It addressed the tremendous lengths the Secret Service went to on a daily basis to protect President Roosevelt from Axis assassins and general kooks who wanted a shot at him:
“The White House detail, headed by six-foot Michael Reiley (1909 – 1973), stayed beside the President at all times. They became his shadows, unseen in the public glare, but always at hand… The President was not permitted to set foot in any place that had not been thoroughly investigated beforehand.”
As the last year of the war began, the American home front turned their attention to all the various commercial products that would once again be offered in the shops. New cars were a popular topic, but the one subject Americans were most curious about was television.
“Soldiers respect for this weapon traces to two things. It fires .45 caliber slugs as a cyclical rate of 600 to 700 per minute. An enemy struck by a carbine or riffle bullet can keep coming – as Japs have shown. A man struck by a Tommy Gun slug is stopped dead in his tracks. A burst of fire can cut a man in two.”
“Soldiers respect for this weapon traces to two things. It fires .45 caliber slugs as a cyclical rate of 600 to 700 per minute. An enemy struck by a carbine or riffle bullet can keep coming – as Japs have shown. A man struck by a Tommy Gun slug is stopped dead in his tracks. A burst of fire can cut a man in two.”
These are the observations of an American woman in fascist Japan; the writer was Joy Homer. In this article she tells of her travels to Tokyo in 1940 where she was asked to secretly address those small groups that silently wished for a republican form of government while silently opposing their country’s imperial conquest of China.
These are the observations of an American woman in fascist Japan; the writer was Joy Homer. In this article she tells of her travels to Tokyo in 1940 where she was asked to secretly address those small groups that silently wished for a republican form of government while silently opposing their country’s imperial conquest of China.
This article was written during a time when guerrilla armies seemed to be popping up all over the globe, and, no doubt, many men and women must have been asking themselves, “What if it happens here? Could I fight?” And with that, out stepped Bert “Yank” Levy (1897 – 1965), a well-seasoned man of war who wrote a mass market paperback for the English speaking world: Guerrilla Warfare (Amazon). Attached are a few pages from his book.
This article was written during a time when guerrilla armies seemed to be popping up all over the globe, and, no doubt, many men and women must have been asking themselves, “What if it happens here? Could I fight?” And with that, out stepped Bert “Yank” Levy (1897 – 1965), a well-seasoned man of war who wrote a mass market paperback for the English speaking world: Guerrilla Warfare (Amazon). Attached are a few pages from his book.
