Articles from PM Tabloid
After the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the U.S. Navy believed that the Japanese had lost over half their original strength:
“Naval observers in Washington are exhilarated by the evident extent of the Japanese defeat but, in true Navy tradition, they are being canny about it. It isn’t what we have sunk or disabled [that matters], it’s what is left that can still fight.”
After the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the U.S. Navy believed that the Japanese had lost over half their original strength:
“Naval observers in Washington are exhilarated by the evident extent of the Japanese defeat but, in true Navy tradition, they are being canny about it. It isn’t what we have sunk or disabled [that matters], it’s what is left that can still fight.”
Listed herein are 17 events that transpired between the U.S. diplomatic corps and their opposite numbers representing the Empire of Japan.
“Don’t believe that the Japanese ordered their dawn assault only yesterday. The fact is that they ordered it not days ago but weeks ago. While Japan’s special envoy, Saburo Kurusu, was busy talking in Washington, the ships that were to attack us were already on their way. While he was staling and waiting ‘for instructions’, they were getting into position. More than that: they had their orders before Kurusu even started talking.”
The mass arrests of Japanese Americans began the evening of the Pearl Harbor attack:
“As the arrests began last night, Attorney General Francis Biddle announced that FDR had authorized him to apprehend as ‘alien enemies’, Japanese aliens considered dangerous ‘to the peace and security of the U.S.A. He said that at least 1,000 Japanese nationals would be affected, but there would be ‘a fair hearing for all persons apprehended.’ “
“German prisoners of war are not coddled at the Fort Dix camp. The PWs are not mistreated, but neither is any kindness shown them. The officers supervising them are not cruel or lenient; they adhere strictly to the letter of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners.”
PM reporter Jack Shafer knew all this to have been true, because he went to Fort Dix and saw for himself.
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) had much to say as to how the German people could come to terms with all the dreadful acts that were committed in their name during the previous 12 years.
“[The German] will try frantically to rehabilitate himself in the face of the world’s accusations and hate – but that is not the right way. The only right way is his unconditional acknowledgement of guilt… German penitence must come from within.”
Click here to read Jung’s thoughts on Hitler.
April 14, 1945 is remembered as President Truman’s first day as Chief Executive. FDR died on the twelfth and he was sworn-in shortly after that. Just what he did with the rest of that day, much less on the thirteenth, is a mystery to me – but, let it be known here and now that his first day exercising his Presidential Authority was on the fourteenth. He met with the brass caps from the Pentagon, planned speeches, spoke on the telephone with numerous New Deal big-wigs and shook many, many hands. All involved were in agreement that it was the busiest day in his life.
“Down the line, since [Truman] voted in the Senate in 1935 for U.S. participation in the World Court, his positions on foreign relations and international policy have been consistently on the side of FDR and for the fight against fascism.”
“Down the line, since [Truman] voted in the Senate in 1935 for U.S. participation in the World Court, his positions on foreign relations and international policy have been consistently on the side of FDR and for the fight against fascism.”
The left-of-center New York daily PM examined the liberal Bonafide’s of President Harry Truman and they liked what they saw.
PM war correspondent Victor Bernstein filed this story three weeks before VE-Day concerning a 180-mile forced march that was the lot of assorted Allied prisoner of war in Germany. Numerous interviews with the survivors of the march revealed that the Nazis lording over as many as 4,000 POWs choosing to brutalize the U.S. prisoners in much the same way they abused Poles and Soviets. British POWs seemed not to attract their ire.
“The Japanese are making frenzied and costly attempts at Okinawa to stem our advance toward the home islands, but their efforts appear no more successful than they were in the Philippines and Iwo Jima.”
It is our wish to successfully give utterance to the true feelings from each era that we are able to represent on this website; for this reason, we posted the attached column by Max Lerner (1902 – 1992), in which he expresses his excitement as to how great it was to be alive in one of the Allied nations at the time of Hitler’s demise.
“The two big fascist leaders in whose shadow our whole generation has lived – Mussolini and Hitler – are now lying dead amidst the ruins of their empires, one following the other in the space of a few days…We are not only the anvil. We are the hammer. To know that is to grow in stature in a great time.”
“Flags of two new kinds are flying in the city – white flags displayed by the panic-stricken populace, and the first Soviet flags that, Reuters says, are hoisted over what tall buildings are left within the captured districts. Three Soviet guards carried a blood-soaked banner 2000 miles from Stalingrad to Berlin. Pravda says the soldiers kneeled and kissed the flag and then raised it over a ruined building.”
Blaming it all on an “early winter”, Hitler ordered the volks on the home front to give their furs, woolens and long underwear to the German Army on the Eastern Front.
“The aspiration to be the first to meet the Red Army is aired all the way up and down the line, from division generals to the boys in the foxholes. And if the Yanks had their way, they’d hit the first road east and keep helling it eastward till they hit the vodka. As one soldier from an armored division put it:”
“‘This is what the hell we’ve been pushing across Europe for and I don’t want to lose the pie when I practically have it in my mouth.'”
A short article by a respected military journalist of the time, Max Werner, on how severely Nazi Germany had been beaten.
Click here to read other articles from 1945.
