World War Two – Page 53 – Old Magazine Articles

Jane Anderson of Georgia
(Coronet Magazine, 1943)

Jane Anderson began broadcasting from Berlin on April 14, 1941. When Nazi Germany declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941 American citizens were repatriated from Germany but Anderson chose to remain.
She broadcast Nazi propaganda by way of a short wave radio for the German State Radio’s U.S.A. Zone, the Germans named her ‘The Georgia Peach’. Her programs regularly heaped high praise upon Adolf Hitler and ran ‘exposés’ of the ‘communist domination’ of the Roosevelt and Churchill administrations. She conducted numerous on-air interviews, the most famous among them was of her co-worker, the British traitor William Joyce. When Berlin fell she was on the run up until April of 1947, when she was caught in Salzburg, Austria and placed in the custody of the U.S. military.

Towards a Nuclear Strategy
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1949)

Here is the Pathfinder Magazine article about Air University; established in 1946 by the U.S. Department of War in order to train senior American Air Force officers to serve as strategic thinkers in the realm of national security. In 1949 that meant conceiving of ways to implement a successful strategy in which the Soviet Union would be defeated with nuclear weapons:

At AU’s apex is the Air War College. To its senior officer-students the question of destroying an enemy’s will to resist is grimly real. Killing ten million citizens of an enemy nation is no haphazard problem to the Air War College. In the statistics of modern war, a loss of approximately 4% of a nation’s population saps its will to resist…

Six months after this article was first read, the Soviets tested their first Atomic bomb; click here to read about that event.

The Atomic Bomb
(Dept. of the Army, 1956)

In ten lines the U.S. Army history section succinctly outlined Japan’s grim situation and the events that led up to the dropping of the bomb:

By the summer of 1945 it was obvious to most responsible leaders in Japan that the end of the war was near. For the first time those who favored ending the war came out in the open and in June, Japan sent out peace feelers through the Soviet Union. The rejection of the Potsdam Declaration of 26 July, however, sealed the doom of Japan…

Click here to read an article about American public opinion during the early Cold War years

The Atomic Crusade
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1948)

Attached is a 1948 article by the Nobel laureate Arthur Holly Compton (1892 – 1962) concerning the widespread understanding among nuclear physicists to wrestle control of atomic energy away from the military and firmly in the hands of civil authorities, where it’s benefits can be put to general use and harnessed as positive force in the lives of all mankind.

Awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1927, the SCRIPT MAGAZINE editors believed that Arthur Compton, more than anyone else, deserved the title Daddy of the Atomic bomb. When the U.S. Government decided to proceed with the research and development of this weapon, Compton was assigned the double task of attempting a nuclear chain reaction and of designing the bomb itself.

Compton is remembered as the senior physicist at the Manhattan Project who hired Dr. Robert Oppenheimer.

Click here to read an article about American public opinion during the early Cold War years.

Click here to read about the invention of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile

600 Nisei Judged Disloyal
(L.A. Times, 1944)

About 630 American-born Japanese over the age of 17, now at the Poston (AZ.) relocation center, were found to be openly disloyal or of questionable loyalty to the United States, the Dies subcommittee learned at its hearing yesterday in the Federal Building…Among the 630 there were 606 men and 24 women.

Laval Testifies in the Petain Trial
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

Neither the prosecution nor the defense wanted Henri Philippe Petain’s oily accomplice to testify in the trial of the old marshal. Both sides feared his slanderous tongue and his slimy skill for wriggling out of blame.

The Betrayal of French Jewry
(Newsweek Magazine, 1942)

The Nazis quickly extended the dread Nuremberg laws to the occupied territory. Jews lost jobs, businesses, property, liberty, even their lives. They were flung into primitive concentration camps and deported to Polish ghettos. And with them the Nazis brought the usual wave of Jewish suicides.

The American Half-Track
(Yank Magazine, 1943)

This YANK MAGAZINEarticle was written shortly after the U.S. Army’s triumphant performance during the Battle of El Guettar in Tunisia (March 23 – April 7, 1943) and rambles on with much enthusiasm regarding the admirable performance of the M2 Half Tracks. Half Tracks were used on many fronts throughout the war and in many ways, yet as this article makes clear these armored vehicles at El Guettar were mounted with a field gun and used to devastating effect as tank-destroyers against the German 10th Panzer Division.

The writer, Ralph G. Martin

went on in later years to become a prolific historian and biographer.

Click here to read an article about German half-tracks.

The American Half-Track
(Yank Magazine, 1943)

The writer, Ralph G. Martin

went on in later years to become a prolific historian and biographer.

Click here to read an article about German half-tracks.

The American Half-Track
(Yank Magazine, 1943)

The writer, Ralph G. Martin

went on in later years to become a prolific historian and biographer.

Click here to read an article about German half-tracks.

Hello, Denim
(Collier’s Magazine, 1942)

The editors at COLLIER’S MAGAZINE could not have known the significance of this subject back in 1942, yet to those Americans born after 1960 who read these old columns, it seems like a sign post that pointed the way to the sportswear of the future. Verily, few are the Americans who tread the fruited plane today who do not see at least one pair of jeans every day. Blue jeans have become the symbol of the nation, just as much as the flag.

This 1940s article pointed out that more and more Americans are waking up to denim. They found that it suited them and deemed it a sensible fabric in light of the new agricultural and industrial toil that needed to be finished if the fascists were to be beaten. However, denim was not some newfangled wartime invention; denim has been on the American scene since 1853 – in the Western gold mines and barnyards, roundhouses and cattle ranges.

Some seven years before this article hit the newsstands American teenagers began wearing jeans, but it was W.W. II that created a market for women’s jeans, and for good or ill, the course of American sportswear was forever altered.

A far more thorough fashion history of blue jeans can be read here.

‘They, Too, Have Fought and Died”
(Maptalk, 1945)

You’re damn right those Nisei boys have a place in the American heart, now and forever. And I say soldiers ought to form a pickaxe club to protect the Japanese-Americans who fought the war with us. Any time we see a barfly commando picking on those kids or discriminating against them, we ought to bang them over the head with a pickaxe. I’m willing to be a charter member.

General Joseph W. Stillwell

Read the letters of American soldiers and Marines who recognized
the injustice that was done to the Japanese-Americans…

The Japanese-Americans of the OSS
(Rob Wagner’s Script, 1946)

Printed on the attached two pages is an informative history of the vital contributions that were made by the Japanese-Americans who served in the O.S.S. behind enemy lines during the Burma-China campaign. Additionally, the men who toiled on behalf of the Southeast Asia Translation and Interrogation Center are also praised. This article does not hold back in giving credit where it is due – many are the names that were remembered with gratitude.

The D-Day Landing Crafts
(Click Magazine, 1942)

If you ever wondered why The National W.W. II Museum is located in New Orleans rather than West Point, Annapolis or the nation’s capitol – the answer can be spoken in two words: Andrew Higgins. Higgins was the innovator who designed and manufactured the landing crafts that made it possible for the Allied forces to land on all those far-flung beaches throughout the world and show those Fascists dogs a thing or two. His factory, Higgins Industries, was located on Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans and it was for this reason that the museum board of directors chose to doff their collective caps, and erect their repository in his home town.

Attached is a five page photo-essay about Higgins and all that he was doing to aid in the war effort.

The Mettle of Americans
(Click Magazine, 1944)

Following his tour of the war fronts, U.S. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. (1902 – 1985) put pen to paper in an attempt to express his admiration for the brave and selfless acts that Americans were performing all over the globe:

If asked to say what impressed me on my recent trip to the war theater, my answer would be: the heroic qualities displayed by our American boys. My most lasting impressions were gained in the field and in the hospitals around the globe. It is there that one sees the kind of boy America produces.

Additional praise for the American fighting man can be read here…

The WACs
(Think Magazine, 1946)

The Women’s Army Corps (WAC), first organized as an auxiliary May 14, 1942, became ‘regular army’ a little more than a year later…They were secretaries and stenographers for generals. They operated switchboards which kept communications alive throughout the European theater of operations…Their keen eyes and quick fingers made them expert as parachute riggers. They became weather experts [charting the aerial routes for the long-range bombers of the U.S. Eighth Air Force].

140,000 women served as WACs – – although this article stated that there were only 100,000.

Guys & WAACs
(Click Magazine, 1943)

Fort Warren, Wyoming, is bleak, windswept, desolate. It is no wonder that the soldiers stationed there looked forward to the arrival at the lonely post of a unit of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC). [When the women arrived] The men of Company H, Fifth Quartermaster Training Regiment, sent over an invitation to a party… The party was informal but military. The hosts marched in formation to their guests’ barracks where the two companies fell in behind their respective officers for the return trip. The evening included a buffet supper, attendance at boxing matches and refreshments afterwards.

U.S. Army Mobile Hospitals of World War Two
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

The American military personnel who are wounded while fighting the terrorists in both Iraq and Afghanistan are today the beneficiaries of a field hospital system that was developed long ago in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. The mobile hospitals developed by the U.S. Army Medical Corps has evolved into a unique life-saving force that has not simply relied on a trained staff but also a fast and well-fueled transportation system. This Yank Magazine article will give the reader a good look at how the medics and doctors had to work during the second War to End All Wars:

A portable surgical hospital is a medical unit of four doctors and generally 32 enlisted men. They’re supposed to work directly behind the line of battle and patch up casualties so they can be removed to an evacuation hospital. Sometimes part of the portable hospital personnel have to be removed, too.