World War Two – Page 52 – Old Magazine Articles

Who are the U.S.Marines?
(Click Magazine, 1943)

A nice piece of P.R. for the W.W. II Gyrenes:

Since the policy limits Marine Corps personel to 20 percent of the navy, no Marine can specialize as do other service men. He must be a crack rifle and pistol shot, a saboteur, a scout familiar with jungle and city alike. He must run, walk, swim, sail, shoot, and maim better than the men he’s fighting… He glories in this responsibility, as in his corp’s 167-year-old reputation as nonpareil shock troops. He’s never yeilded either that responsibility or reputation to his jealous friends in rough-and-ready Army and Navy units. They resent the Marine. He knows it and doesn’t give a damn, cocky in the knowledge that he’s relied on to pave the way for the Army’s operations and to finish up the Navy’s.

This is a six page photo-essay that is comprised of seventeen images (two in color) of the San Diego Marines, who are identified as the dirtiest and cockiest fighters in the nation’s arsenal.

Click here to read another article about the Marines.

Who are the U.S.Marines?
(Click Magazine, 1943)

A nice piece of P.R. for the W.W. II Gyrenes:

This is a six page photo-essay that is comprised of seventeen images (two in color) of the San Diego Marines, who are identified as the dirtiest and cockiest fighters in the nation’s arsenal.

Click here to read another article about the Marines.

The West Coast as a Military Zone
(U.S. Gov. 1943)

The following illustration was created by the U.S. Government during the early days of World War II and will help to illustrate how enormous the task of Japanese-American relocation must have been.

Click here to read some of the reasoning that was offered for this step…

Dogs for Defense
(American Magazine, 1943)

Dogs for Defense was a World War II organization founded by three patriotic dog enthusiasts who established the group in order to procure patriotic canines (meeting certain height and weight standards) for the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps, that branch of the services charged with the task of training the animals. Dogs for Defense was able to provide as many as four hundred dogs a week for the U.S. Army throughout both W.W. II as well as the Korean War.

The attached article can be printed.

Women Worked the Railroads
(Click Magazine, 1943)

Nearly 100,000 women, from messengers aged 16 to seasoned railroaders of 55 to 65, are keeping America’s wartime trains rolling. So well do they handle their jobs that the railroad companies, once opposed to hiring any women, are adding others as fast as they can get them…

German Paratroops
(U.S. Dept. of War, 1945)

Attached is the U.S. War Department study regarding the tactical uses of German airborne forces throughout the course of the Second World War; from the Battle of Crete to the Battle of the Bulge:

In Russia, the Balkans, and the December 1944 counteroffensive in the Ardennes, units varying in strength from a platoon to a battalion have been landed behind enemy lines to disrupt communications, to seize such key points as railroads, roadheads, bridges and power stations.

The Consequences of the Munich Agreement
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1938)

When England and France yielded to Germany in the Munich Agreement of last September, a significant change took place. The balance of power in Europe shifted from the democracies to the dictatorships… [and] the United States had to stop thinking of England and France as America’s ‘first line of defense’ in the time of a European war.

‘A Letter to Germany” by Thomas Mann
(Prevent W.W. III Magazine, 1945)

Not too long after the close of the war, exiled German author Thomas Mann (1875 – 1955) was invited to return to Germany. Walter von Molo, a German writer, who during the Nazi regime remained and worked in Germany, sent the invitation to Mann as an Open Letter in the name of German intellectuals. Attached an excerpt of the writer’s response.

‘The Most Married Man in America”
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

As a result of the generous proxy-marriage laws allowed by the citizens of Kansas City, Kansas, many young women, feeling the urge to marry their beaus residing so far afield as a result of the Second World War, would board buses and trains and head to that far-distant burg with one name on their lips: Finnegan. This is the story of Mr. Thomas H. Finnegan, a successful lawyer back in the day who saw fit to do his patriotic duty by standing-in for all those G.I.s who were unable to attend their own weddings.

The Front-Line Mechanics
(United States News, 1942)

Side by side with with the fighting men who ride to battle goes an army of men who fight with tools and machinery, instead of guns and tanks… That army of fighter-mechanics has grown in importance with the increase in the Army’s dependence on motorized equipment. They operate beyond the glow of headlines – but without the aid of mechanics the Army’s wheels would never turn.

The Americans Who First Crossed the Rhine
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

The attached article tells the story of the first Americans to cross the Rhine river into Germany following the capture of the Ludendorf Bridge at Remagen, Germany.

One of the most striking incidents of the first day’s action on the bridge was the way German snipers opened up on their own men who had been taken prisoners. As each batch of PWs was lead across the bridge, a storm of sniper fire from the surrounding hills swept its ranks. Several were killed.

Pictured on page two is a photograph of the first American to make it across: Sgt. Alexander A. Drabik (1910 – 1993) of the 27th Armored Infantry Division.

Click here to read about a popular all-girl band that performed with the USO.

1945 Victory Strategies for the Pacific Theater
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

At the time this article went to press the Nazis and their European allies had been defeated and all eyes turned to the Pacific Theater as to when that enemy would also be forced to quit.

Click here to read about a popular all-girl band that performed with the USO.

Home Front Feminism
(Collier’s Magazine, 1943)

1940s feminism bares no resemblance to the take-no-prisoners feminism of today. This is made clear in the attached article by Amaran Scheinfeld (1900 – 1979), a writer, whose book Women and Men (1944), as stated by the New York Times, foreshadowed many issues of the feminist movement. The primary difference between the two lay in the fact that seventy-five years ago it was believed that it was nature that had established many of the rolls played by the (two) genders.

The Last 125 Days of the War
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

A YANK staff writer Robert Bendiner (1910 – 2009), summed-up the eventful period that began with the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on
April 12, and ended with the Japanese surrender on August 10, 1945. He pointed out that within that period remarkable changes had been made; not merely the deaths of Hitler, Mussolini and the collapse of Imperial Japan, but it was clear to many that the stage was being set for a new world. The foundations were in place for the creation of a durable world security organization and as if that wasn’t enough, there was a new, hideous weapon called the Atomic Bomb that would cast a long shadow across the land and mark this new era as a unique period in world history.

After a streak like that it would not be surprising if a revulsion against big news should set in. It may well be that people long to pick up a paper in which nothing more cosmic is reported than the city’s reception of a visiting channel-swimmer, and nothing more violent than a tie-up on the Magnolia Avenue trolley line.

Click here to read how British women struggled to understand American slang.

Was Allied Air Power Decisive During World War II?
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

A light and breezy review concerning the findings of a U.S. government study regarding the effectiveness of the Allied strategic bombing campaign against Nazi Germany:

…the survey authorities report that although air power might have been more advantageously applied in this case or that, its decisive bearing on the victory was undeniable…At sea, its contribution, combined with naval air power, brought an end to the enemy’s greatest naval threat -the U-boat; on land, it helped turn the tide overwhelmingly in favor of allied ground forces.

Articles about the daily hardships in post-war Germany can be read by clicking here.

The 101st Division at Bastogne
(Combat Studies Group, 1986)

Attached is the concluding essay from a U.S. Army report written in 1986 concerning the spirited defense that was offered by the 101st Airborne Division at the Battle of the Bulge.

At Bastogne, well-coordinated combined arms teams defeated uncoordinated armored and infantry forces committed to an unrealistic plan.

Click here to read more about W.W. II parachute infantry…

Another article about this battle can be read by clicking here…

D-Day Plus Ten With the 82nd Airborne
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

The battle of the hedgerows as experienced by the paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division:

They all had been fighting since D-Day. Compared with the obstacles at the beginning of their drive, the hill they had just taken was only a minor deal, but it was no push-over. At some places, one paratrooper told me, the fighting was so close the Krauts didn’t even bother to throw their grenades, they just handed them over to us.

The Biased Military Courts of the U.S. Army
(G.I. Joe Magazine, 1945)

G.I. JOE MAGAZINE was established shortly after the war by a shrewd, commerce-driven soul who fully recognized that the American veterans of W.W. II would have a good deal to say about their military hardships, and would need a venue in which to do it. The attached article was written by a veteran who preferred to remain anonymous; the righteous indignation can be keenly sensed in his prose as he explained the three-tiered justice system that he believed to have been built into the offices of the U.S. Army military court system. The first tier meted out soft justice for officers, the second dispensed a harsh justice to White enlisted men, and the bottom tier dished-out a far more vile variety to the American soldiers of African descent.

Read an Article about Racial Integration in the U.S. Military