Recent Articles – Page 47 – Old Magazine Articles

The German Army’s Official Report on D-Day
(Dept. of the Army, 1945)

Translated from German, labeled CONFIDENTIAL and printed in a booklet for a class at the U.S. Army Military Academy in 1945 was the attached German Army assessment of the D-Day invasion. Distributed on June 20, 1944, just two weeks after the Normandy landings, the report originated in the offices of Field Marshal von Rundstedt (1875 – 1953) and served to document the German reaction to the Allied Operations in Normandy.

Would Nuking the USSR Have Been an Immoral Act?
(Quick Magazine, 1949)

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The Daily Worker
(New Outlook, 1933)

The revolution in America today supports about a dozen main propaganda organs. Chief among them is The Daily Worker it makes no pretense at impartiality. It is a revolutionary [newspaper] and nothing else, frankly admitted at every turn. For the genuine Red no such thing as an impartial newspaper exists… No one gets paid very much in the Red press. Salaries of twenty or twenty-five dollars a week are the maximum. One reason is political, we are told. Revolutionaries do not believe in high salaries.

In 1887 the The New York Times reviewed the first English edition of Das Kapital by Karl Marx, click here to read it…

Click here to read more about the American communists of the 1930s.

Bette Davis Tells All
(Collier’s Magazine, 1955)

Those were the days when the talkies had taken over from the silent films and movie executives began a wholesale raid on the New York stage for promising young talent. It was fertile territory. In a comparatively brief period they signed Clark Gable, George Brent, Jimmy Cagney, Joan Blondell, Spencer Tracy Ginger Rogers, Humphrey Bogart, Francis Tone and a score of others. While I was in Broken Dishes I had been screen tested by Samuel Goldwyn for a feminine lead opposite Ronald Coleman…I reached Hollywood with my mother on December 13, 1930.

World War I Fashions in the Spring of 1916
(Strauss Magazine, 1916)

Assorted dry observations regarding what the women of Gotham were sporting that last American Spring of peace (Congress would declare war on Germany during the April of 1917).

Speculation About Hitler’s Sexual Frustrations
(Physical Culture, 1937)

Attached is a 1937 article from the long-forgotten magazine
Physical Culture (1899 – 1950). The article is a psycho-graphic study by psychologist Lawrence Gould, who believed that the Fuhrer was an odd pervert who’s sexual grief could only trigger a global war.

Read about Hitler’s expert on sex and racial purity…

How Many Americans Had Cars in the 1920s?
(Current Opinion, 1922)

The post-World War I American economy was humming along quite nicely when an inquisitive journalist took notice as to how many more cars there were on the streets (all told, there were 7.5 million). Perhaps there were no written studies documenting what we now call ‘the order of durable goods’ – that dependable yardstick we use to measure American opulence, and so this investigative journalist came up with a different way of figuring out just how many cars Americans could purchase -and we’re mighty glad he did!

The Birth of the Slip Dress
(Quick Magazine, 1949)

One Autumn evening in 1949, New York fashion model Anna-Lee Daniels and her gay boyfriend, Henry, took it upon themselves to demonstrate just how chic ladies’ undergarments were becoming. Recognizing that the latest slips were so minimal in their design – appearing much like the dresses flappers were often seen wearing back in the day It was soon decided that the two should step out for a night on the town – with young Anna-Lee sporting the slip – just to see if anyone caught on.

Paris, 1918: La Guerre Fini!
(The Stars and Stripes, 1918)

Yank and Aussie and Jock, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Pole, Checko-Slovak, Tommy, Indian, all from the newly arrived Brazilians to the wizened and and weather-beaten poilus wearing the seven brisques denoting four years in the furnace, knew no nationality, no difference of tongues or even of uniform.

Click here to read another article about the 1918 Armistice.

– from Amazon:

The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

Blitzkrieg: In the Words of Nazi Officers
(American Legion Weekly, 1940)

An article by military historian and biographer Fairfax Downey (1894 – 1990) concerning the unique manner of mechanized warfare that the Germans had introduced to the world during the opening weeks of the Second World War:

Thunder rumbles, lightening flashes and strikes. Incredibly swiftly it is over. So, compared to the campaigns of the First World War, was the German Blitzkrieg, rumbling, flashing and striking down Poland, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France. How did it work? What made it click?

The Search for an Honorable Exit
(Pageant Magazine, 1970)

Using a public forum, retired U.S. Air Force General Edward Lansdale (1908 – 1987) proposed a plan for the withdrawal of American and Allied Forces from Vietnam – a plan that came to be known as Vietnamization.

Traveling Movie Theaters
(Click Magazine, 1944)

Two million Americans have as their principal form of visual entertainment nomad movies, run by some 3000 road-showmen who present their motion pictures in tents, auditoriums or churches. Few city folks realize that this is the way in which entertainment is brought to about 5000 U.S. towns of less than 1000 population… Road-showmen say that the favorite shows are fast-action westerns and occasional comedies. Mushy love scenes are box-office poison among their clientele. During harvest seasons, when customers can best afford the ten to twenty-five cents admission charge, these showmen take in between $75.00 and $150.00 a week.

These were not the only traveling entertainers during the Thirties: the Federal Theater Project also sent hoards of players throughout the nation to amuse and beguile – you can read about that here

Click here to read about Marilyn Monroe and watch a terrific documentary about her life.

Daddy’s Boy
(People Today, 1952)

Attached is a brief notice concerning Joseph P. Kennedy (1888 – 1969), Hollywood producer, politician, adulterer and FDR’s one-time ambassador to Britain – and his thwarted attempt to merge the Boston Post with the Boston Globe in order to best influence voters in the 1952 Massachusetts congressional elections.

From Amazon: Assassination of John F. Kennedy Encyclopedia

The Japanese Did Not Like The Germans
(Collier’s Magazine, 1943)

A ranking member of of the German embassy staff in Tokyo told me a few weeks before Pearl Harbor, ‘If Japan goes to war against America and Britain, our days will be numbered here, too. Japan will wage a race war in which we Germans will be regarded as enemies along with the rest of the white race. It is only a matter of time. They intend to conquer all of us, but they are smart enough not to tackle all of us at once.’

Imperial Japan had a great many reasons to dislike their Nazi ally and most of them were far more legitimate than this one. All of them are are laid out in the attached article.

The Steel Tennis Racket Makes It’s Appearance
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1922)

Although the steel tennis racket would not know true glory until Jimmy Connors used his Wilson T2000 in the 1970s, a big splash was made by William A. Larned (1872 – 1926; seven times champion of the U.S. Open) when he designed the Dayton Steel Racket in 1922. It wasn’t the first steel racket, but it was an improvement on the existing ones.

TV Viewers And Sports Attendance
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1950)

Without a doubt, the strongest impulse to buy the earliest televisions came from sports fans. The deep lust in their hearts to witness their favorite sporting events as it happened, free of a bar tab, was a strong one – and the television industry loved them right back. This glorious trifecta consisting of viewers, TV networks and team owners not only altered the way America watched sports, it totally transformed sports itself. Author Steven D. Stark put it nicely in his book Glued to the Set (1997):

Television has changed the sports landscape — changing everything from the salaries, number of teams, and color of uniforms, to the way that fans conceive of sports and athletes alike,

The Twentieth Anniversary
(Literary Digest, 1937)

Here is a 1937 article marking the significance of General Edmund Allenby’s (1861 – 1936) march into the ancient city of Jerusalem in 1917. Written twenty years after the event, the article also marks the twentieth anniversary of the the Balfour Declaration – the British edict that declared British Palestine as the home of world Jewry.

Mary Pickford Considers Her Rolls
(Vanity Fair, 1920)

This article was written by the silent film star herself for a fashionable American magazine concerning a few of the difficulties in the way of dress, make-up, manners and technique an actress might consider before portraying a child on stage or screen.