Articles from Newsweek
The last eight months of the home front saw the suspension of all horse racing (in the interest of preserving tires and gas) and more foods, both delicious and otherwise, became a good deal harder to locate.
During the closing months of the war, the draft pool was increased, as well – click here to read about it.
From inside Germany last week emerged the picture of a state that by all normal standards was in the last stages of dissolution… All signs indicated a physical breakdown perhaps as great as that of France in 1940… Refugees, mostly women and children with blankets around their bodies and shawls on their heads to protect them from the sub-zero weather, queue up for hours outside bakeries to get a loaf of bread. Draftees ride tanks in never-ending columns.
An odor rises from the men, the characteristic odor of an army. It is the smell of of wool and the bitter smell of fatigue and the smell of gun oil and leather. Troops always have this odor. The men lie sprawled, some with their mouths open, but they do not snore. Perhaps they are too tired to snore, but their breathing is an inaudible, pulsing thing.
Click here to read a movie review of The Grapes of Wrath.
The attached YANK MAGAZINE article was written from the perspective of the American G.I.; it lays out a few peculiar facts about life in the World War Two Brazilian Army:
Every type of South American racial strain is represented. This gives a squad the appearance of a capsule League of Nations, except that there are no blonds.
Read about the day Brazil declared war on Nazi Germany…
Mexico preferred not to participate in the war, but they did kick all the Fascist spies out of their country, click here to read about it…
On June 29, 1931, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical letter that condemned Italian fascism’s “pagan worship of the State” and “revolution which snatches the young from the Church and from Jesus Christ, and which inculcates in its own young people hatred, violence and irreverence.” The Pope irritated Mussolini to a further degree by labeling the Italian Fascist government as anti-Catholic after Il Duce put the kibosh on numerous Catholic youth organizations throughout the land. A Truce was agreed upon but as Mussolini grew closer to the Nazis later in the decade, and the battle reemerged.
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…
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.
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.
The long-awaited climax of the great Allied air offensive against Germany came like a thunderclap last week. It was the opening of the Battle of Berlin… According to the [British Ministry of Economic Warfare], the Germans have evacuated nonessential civilians (children, invalids and the aged) just as the British had from London three years before. But all evidence indicated that government officials and essential workers still remained in the German capital.
Berlin police counted 5,680 dead.
More on the bombing of Germany can be read here…
Here was the first report on the kangaroo courts that were held at frequent intervals in the American POW camps that housed captured German soldiers and sailors. It seems that it was a common practice to level the charge of treason on one of the inmates, put him in the docket where, just like the courts at home, he would fail to present an adequate defense and soon find himself condemned to death by his fellows. Beaten to death by his former compatriots, the corpse would then be presented to the American camp authorities who would see to the burial.
Click here to read about the actual event…
The dilemma before Hitler is that he must marshall all his air strength to crush Russia. He cannot do so without weakening his air units in France or the Mediterranean. Such a move would threaten him either with an Allied invasion of the Continent or the disruption of the Axis supply lines to Africa… The Luftwaffe had lost 15,000 planes in Russia – and with them the hope of regaining air superiority in Russian skies.
With the loss of Asian sources for rope fiber, the Department of Agriculture requested American farmers harvest marijuana to make up for the dearth.
On February 29, at the Academy’s twelfth annual dinner at the Ambassador Hotel in Hollywood, Gone with the Wind surpassed [1934’s ‘It Happened One Night’] by winning eight out of sixteen possible prizes and garnering two special awards for good measure.
The bombing of the Medieval abbey at Montecassino was one of the saddest tactical errors of the Second World War. The decision to bomb the structure was a result an error in translating an intercepted German communique that lead the Allies to believe that there was Nazi battalion contained within the abbey. This was not the case. When the Allies sifted through the rubble they were surprised to find the remains of numerous Italian civilians and very few Germans. The attached article recalls the fantastic view that was enjoyed by the assembled U.S. and British troops as the bombs fell.
On Sunday morning, August 5 (Washington time), an American airplane flew over Hiroshima, a Japanese army base [!] on the Inland Sea. It dropped a single bomb. When that missile struck the earth, it blew up in the greatest man-made explosion in the history of the world. The United States had loosed an atomic bomb on Japan.
Click here to read about the invention of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile
Nobody tried to deny it. The Germans had achieved perhaps the most valuable of military advantages – surprise. How did they do it? [In these two articles] Allied officers gave some obvious reasons, but critics guessed at some that were less obvious.
Here is the NEWSWEEK MAGAZINE account of the defense of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge (December 16, 1944 – January 25, 1945). The article opens with a thorough explanation of General McAuliffe’s famous response to the German officers who came in search of an American surrender.
As the Battle of the Bulge reached its conclusion and the Germans resumed their retreat, British General Bernard Law Montgomery (1887 – 1976) held a press conference in which he praised the fighting abilities and the leadership skills of all those Americans who resisted the German onslaught in the Ardennes:
But when all is said and done, I shall always feel that Rundstedt was really beaten by the good fighting qualities of the American soldier…
