Newsweek – Page 13 – Old Magazine Articles

A GI View of Japan (Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

Reporter Robert Shaplen (1917 – 1988) filed this account of how the GIs have reacted to the strangest country they have ever encountered:

Looking at the Japanese, the average GI wonders how they ever managed to prosecute a war in the first place. Everything in Japan, even broken and blasted cities and factories, has a miniature toy-like appearance. Automobiles, the ones that are left, don’t work; trains bear little resemblance to the Twentieth Century Limited or a fast freight back home. The short, slight people are dressed poorly and drably.

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What Might Have Been (Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

Into the records of the Pearl Harbor investigating committee last week went a little-noticed document that added new mystery to the disaster of December 7, 1941:

Four months before the enemy struck, the Army and Navy air command at Pearl Harbor drew up a joint defense plan which correctly forecast the hour, the direction, the size of the force and the strategy by which the Japs actually attacked.

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Killing Tiger Tanks in the Ardennes (Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

This article follows the efforts of the Tank Destroyers (TD) in the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge:

This TD work is among the most dangerous of the war. One of the chief reasons is that TDs are constantly up against superior enemy weapons. For example, none of our TDs (except possibly the M-36) can penetrate the 8-inch frontal armor of the King Tiger, whereas the German 88-millimeter anti-tank gun has been able to penetrate any American tank. And to kill the tiger, TDs must shoot for the tracks, then assault the disabled monster with high explosive, setting it afire.

Click here to read about the equipment and training of American tank destroyers during the Second World War.

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The Flight of Rudolf Hess (Newsweek, 1942 & Maptalk, 1946)

Here are two short notices from the Forties about Rudolf Hess (1894 – 1987) and the motivation behind his mad dash to Scotland. The paragraphs ascribe two very different purposes to the flight.

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Black Lessons of the Bomb (Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

The Senate special committee on atomic energy had heard both pros and cons on atomic energy control. Last week it heard another kind of testimony – a terrifying eyewitness account by Dr. Philip Morrison, nuclear physicist of the Los Alamos atomic bomb laboratory, [who] spoke of the effects on Hiroshima.

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The Suffering Infantry (Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

Men slept on their rifles to keep them from freezing. On bitter mornings they urinated down the barrels of automatic weapons to thaw them out… Some Yanks cut holes in their sleeping bags, wearing them underneath their overcoats and knee-length snow capes while sleeping and fighting.

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Bloody Iwo (Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

Some Jap officers, unable to face the prospect of defeat, dressed in their best uniforms, laid their samurai swords by their sides and then shot themselves in the head. Tokyo broadcast a plaintive admission from the Jap commander on Iwo Jima, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi:

‘This island is the front line that defends our mainland and I am going to die here.’

He was right on both counts.

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Lt. Alexander Nininger, Jr. (Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

Lt. Alexander Nininger, Jr. (1918 – 1942) was posthumously awarded the first Medal of Honor of the Second World War, but regardless of that fact he got the brush-off in this column which was primarily written in order to inform the public of a new CBS radio program. The radio show was titled CMH and was intended to tell the individual stories of each and every MoH recipient of W.W. II.

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Canadian Collaborators (Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

A report from the trials that were held in late August, 1945, in order to prosecute those Allied POWs who collaborated with their Nazi captors. The four who were discussed in this column were all Canadians.

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Restless Nazis in Canada (Newsweek Magazine, 1942)

Here is an article about all the goings-on at the POW camp in Bowmanville on Lake Ontario, Canada. It concerns the German inclination to escape and the methods employed by the Canadians to keep them in place.

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