World War Two – Page 62 – Old Magazine Articles

The Making of the Atomic Bomb
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

The Manhattan Project was the code name given to the allied effort to develop the Atomic Bomb during World War Two. The research and development spanned the years 1942 through 1946 and the participating nations behind the effort were the Unites States, Great Britain and Canada. Within the United States, there were as many as three locations where the Manhattan Project was carried out however this article concerns the goings-on at the uranium-enrichment facilities in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The article presents the point of view of your basic PFC on the base; how he had to maintain the necessary secrecy, what was it like living among such a plethora of pointy-headed slide-rule jockeys and how grateful they were to be living the comfortable life, while so many other draftees fared so poorly.

Captured: A Woman Sniper
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

A small notice from a post D-Day YANK announced the capture of a German woman sniper named, Myra.

Click here if you would like to read about women combatants during W.W. I.

Letter from France
(Tricolor Magazine, 1944)

A British staff officer who was an eyewitness to the Allied breakout from the Normandy hedgerows compiled all the assorted questions that friends and family had written to him in their respective letters and answered them in a public format published in TRICOLOR MAGAZINE:

What do you feel when you see people dead?

Just an urgent desire to get by quickly and a feeling of revulsion which is greater or less according to the length of time the body has been dead… There is no difference in appearance between decomposing men and decomposing animals and the same stench comes from both.

A Writer in the Ranks
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Dashiel Hammett (1894 – 1961) had a pretty swell resume by the time World War II came along. He had written a string of well-received novels and enjoyed a few well-paying gigs in Hollywood. During the war years it was rare, but not unheard of, for an older man with such accomplishments to enlist in the army – and that is just what he did. The attached article spells out Hammett’s period serving on an Alaskan army base, his slow climb from Buck Private to sergeant, his difficulty with officers and the enjoyment of being anonymous.

Accompanying the article is a black and white image of the writer wearing Uncle Sam’s olive drab, herringbone twill – rather than the tell-tale tweed he was so often photographed wearing.

Click here to read a 1939 STAGE MAGAZINE profile of Hammett’s wife, the playwright Lillian Hellman.

‘Dark December”
(The Commonweal, 1947)

This is the 1947 review of Robert Merrian’s history on the Battle of the Bulge, Dark December; the reviewer, T.E. Cassidy, had served as a U.S. Army intelligence officer in the Ardennes:

Merriam is at his best analyzing the actual confusion that was rampant from the very beginning of the German drive on December 16th. I know his handling is expert here, for I was in the midst of the chaos, and can vividly recall, for example, the blank stares I met at various headquarters when I would ask what road net was clear, and to what point. It was really no one’s fault, after the first day or two. People simply did not know what was happening. And it was days and days before there was any concerted agreement among the different levels as to just what was going on.

‘Dark December”
(The Commonweal, 1947)

This is the 1947 review of Robert Merrian’s history on the Battle of the Bulge, Dark December; the reviewer, T.E. Cassidy, had served as a U.S. Army intelligence officer in the Ardennes:

Louis L’Amour on Post-War Paris
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1946)

During the course of the Second World War, Western fiction writer Louis L’Amour (1908 – 1988) served as a U.S. Army lieutenant in a transport unit. He penned this nifty article about 1946 Paris while waiting to return home:

It is cold in Paris now. There are chill winds blowing down those wide streets. The fuel shortage is serious, and will probably continue to be so as transportation is not yet what it should be.

Vivid with historical background, the city somehow remains modern. It has kept step with the world without losing its beauty or its patina…Easy enough when riding along the Rue St. Antoine to forget that where the jeeps and command cars roll now, there were once Roman chariots. No corner of Paris is without its memories.

An Illegal Comedy in Occupied Paris
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

In Nazi occupied Paris there was a secret underground movie theater (93 Champs Elysees) operating throughout the entire four year period and it charged an excessive sum of francs to gain entry. Guess which Chaplin film was shown?

American Makeup Goes to War
(Click Magazine, 1942)

An interesting look at the beauty products used by American women during the Second World War and how that war effected the cosmetic industry. Students of history will be reminded that when a nation commits itself to a state of total war, all available elements within a government’s grasp will be picked over by that country’s military; even makeup.

If you’re following a routine of ‘beauty as usual’ with qualms of conscience, believing that cosmetics and toiletries use materials essential to the war machine, know for certain that if Uncle Sam needed your lipstick for bombs and bullets, he’d have gotten it first.

The U.S. cosmetics industry was effected in many ways, read the article and find out.

Click here to read an article about a popular 1940s hairstyle.

CLICK HERE to read about the beautiful Blonde Battalions who spied for the Nazis…

VJ-Day in Rome
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

A smattering of opinions on the subject of VJ Day (they all seemed to have been in favor of it) were offered up by a collection of Rome-based American soldiers composed of assorted hues and ranks.

VJ Day in Paris
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

The GIs had managed to keep their VJ spirit bottled up through most of the phony rumors, but when the real thing was announced the cork popped with a vengeance. A spontaneous parade, including jeeps and trucks and WACs and GIs and officers and nurses and enlisted me, snaked from the Red Cross Club at Rainbow Corner down to the Place de l’Opera and back…

Constance Drexel of Massachusetts
(Coronet Magazine, 1943)

The hokum that Constance Drexel (1894 – 1856?) coughed-up over the airwaves on behalf of her Nazi paymasters was considered to have been so negligible in content by the U.S. Department of Justice that all charges against her were dropped.

Leo Disher of the United Press
(Coronet Magazine, 1944)

Leo Disher was among the war correspondents who sailed for Africa with the American invasion fleet late in October of 1942… Army authorities were so impressed with his conduct under fire that they presented him with a Purple Heart [he was the first W.W. II reporter to earn this distinction]. More important was the fact that the story he dictated from his hospital cot after the shooting was over was displayed on the front pages of most of the UP papers.

Bob Miller of the United Press
(Coronet Magazine, 1944)

On the day following the first landing made by United States Marines on Guadalcanal, United Press’ Bob Miller accomplished something which probably no other war correspondent has ever done. Singlehanded, he captured a Jap prisoner.

During the six weeks he spent on Guadalcanal, Miller’s group was bombed almost daily during the entire time, and Jap ground forces were a constant threat.

Miller was known to one and all in the Pacific Theater as Baldy. Shortly before this article appeared in CORONET he had fallen victim to malaria and was returned to the U.S. for convelesence. In 1944 his dispatches to the UnitedPress would concern the liberation of France and the Nuremburg Trials.

The Lady was a Sniper…
(Yank, 1944)

This small notice from a post D-Day issue of YANK announced the capture of a German woman sniper named Myra. It is interesting to note that she was captured in civilian clothing; a male sharp-shooter would have probably been shot immediately. The popular reasoning on all sides during war stems from the fact that snipers do not take prisoners themselves, therefore why should they be afforded the privilege?

If you would like to read an article about women soldiers in W.W. I, click here.

The Psychology of Fear in Combat
(Yank Magazine, 1943)

The YANK MAGAZINE editors remarked that this brief column, which was intended to help American G.I.s deal with panic attacks during combat, was written by the National Research Council and appeared in the Infantry Journal of 1943. It is a segment from a longer article titled, Psychology for the Fighting Man. The psychologists who wrote it presented a number of examples of soldier’s panic (mostly from the last war) and illustrate how best the front-line soldier could deal with this stress while the bullets are flying. Happily, they made it sound so easy.

Click here to read about one other effect the stress of combat wrought upon the luckless men of the Forties.

From Amazon: Psychology for the Fighting Man

– also from Amazon: Cowardice: A Brief History

How the US Helped the Fascists Before Entering the War
(Coronet Magazine, 1941)

Although our friends in Asia, Europe and Canada had been fighting the Axis for at least a year and a half, American corporations continued to trade with the fascists all the way up until the U.S. declaration of war. This 1941 article, published seven months prior to that day, goes into some detail on the matter; although corporations are not named, it is pretty easy to identify them by their products.

One reason why America today is short of ships to fill Britain’s desperate needs is [due to] the fact that for six years or more, Japan and her scrap agents bought almost every American cargo vessel placed on the auction blocks, using them for scrap to feed the blazing steel mills of Nipon.

File Sharing
(United States News & World Report, 1948)

This is the story of how Russia got military secrets from the United States during W.W. II. It is a story that has little to do with the spy ring that congressional committees are trying to prove existed during the war period (The Gouzenko Affair: read about it here) . But it does throw light on the methods and purposes of the so-called ‘spy ring’.

Military information was going to Russia as a matter of routine, by official channels, on an organized basis, all during the period when United States Communists and their friends were supposed to be spying out bits of information to send… As an ally of the U.S. in the war against Germany, Russia had free access to far more information than the so-called ‘spy ring’ claims…