Recent Articles – Page 77 – Old Magazine Articles

The Man Germany Hates Most
(Collier’s Magazine, 1944)

This is the story of Bomber Harris, also known as Sir Arthur Travers Harris, Marshal of the Royal Air Force (1892 – 1984) between the years 1942 through 1945. He was the daily tormentor of Nazi Germany, striving relentlessly to bring an end to German hostilities by bombing their home front without pity. This article tells the tale of Harris the soldier and Harris the man: his W.W. I experiences, his inter-war training and Washington posting, his W.W. II contributions as Air Marshal as well as his family life.

Click here to read W.W. II articles about life in Harris-plagued Germany.

Click here to read about the 1943 bombing campaign against Germany.

U.S. Army Carrier Pigeons of World War II
(Click Magazine, 1943)

Although historians may like to refer to World War II as the first hi-tech war, some of the ancient tools were still put to use with great effect. The attached article gives a very brief outline concerning the W.W. II use of carrier pigeons and the goings on at Camp Crowder, Missouri, where these birds were trained.

Since 1400 B.C. these birds have acted as couriers; they are the oldest instruments of war still in use. Although they form only a small part of our tremendous Signal Corps resources, the Army maintains a corps of expert pigeoneers who have rendered their birds, by scientific training and breeding, ten percent stronger than those used in World War One.

During the course of World War II the U.S. Army signal Corps deployed more than 50,000 carrier pigeons.

You might also enjoy reading this article about the carrier pigeons of W.W. I.

The Free Speech Dilemma
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1939)

The antisemitic radio ramblings of Father Charles Coughlin (1891 – 1979) prompted the brain trust of the nascent radio world to ponder deeply the differences between hate speech and free speech and where their responsibilities rested in the matter.

The Free Speech Dilemma
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1939)

‘Assault Climbing”
(Click Magazine, 1944)

One month after this article was seen on the newsstands, America would be reading a good deal about the U.S. Army Assault Climbers when they thirsted to read further about those hardy lads who climbed the steep cliffs at Point du Hoc on D-Day; but in May of 1944, the term was new to them. The article is well illustrated with two color images and a brief explanation as to what was involved in the training of those lucky souls who were charged with the task of learning how to climb the rocky terrain held by the Fascist powers.

Read what the U.S. Army psychologists had to say about fear in combat.

D-Day with the Eighth Air Force
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

D-Day for the lads of the U.S. Army Air Corps’ Eighth Air Force was a time of great excitement and anticipation. Despite the exhaustion that comes with a fifteen hour day, all concerned recognized well that they were participating in an historic event that would be discussed long after they had left this world, but of greater importance was their understanding that the tides of war were shifting in the Allies’ favor.

In his book Wartime, Paul Fussel noted that the Allies had placed as many as 11,000 planes in the skies above France that day.

Click here to read about the 8th Air Force and their bombing efforts in the skies above Germany.

FDR Takes On the Great Depression
(The Literary Digest, 1933)

All the editorial writers quoted in this 1933 article agreed that FDR was the first U.S. President to ever have faced a genuine economic calamity as that which was created by the Great Depression:

Look at the picture flung into the face of Franklin Roosevelt:

Ships are tied up in harbors and their hulls are rotting; freight trains are idle; passenger trains are empty; 11,000,000 people are without work; business is at a standstill; the treasury building is bursting with gold, yet Congress wrestles with a deficit mounting into the billions, the result of wild and extravagant spending; granaries are overflowing with wheat and corn; cotton is a drag on the market, food crops are gigantic and unsalable, yet millions beg for food; mines are shut down; oil industries are engaged in cutthroat competition; farmers are desperate, taking the law into their own hands to prevent foreclosures; factories are idle; industry is paralyzed…

John Nance Garner on F.D.R.
(Collier’s, 1948)

A printable article by John Nance Garner (1868 – 1967), FDR’s first Vice-President (1933 – 1941), who wrote a number of pieces for the readers of COLLIER’S MAGAZINE in 1948 outlining the various reasons for their contentious relationship.

Cactus Jack Garner bickered with F.D.R. on a number of issues; primarily supporting a balanced federal budget and opposing F.D.R.’s efforts to pack the Supreme Court. Within these attached pages, Garner tells how Roosevelt lost the support of his Democratic Congress.

Read about FDR’s African-American advisers here…

The Significance of the Union Victory at Vicksburg
(The National Park Service, 1954)

The great objective of the war in the West – the opening of the Mississippi River and the severing of the Confederacy – had been realized with the fall of Vicksburg.

On July 9 [1863], the Confederate commander at Port Hudson, upon learning of the fall of Vicksburg, surrendered his garrison of 6,000 men. One week later the merchant steamboat Imperial tied up at the wharf at New Orleans, completing the 1,000-mile passage from St. Louis undisturbed by hostile guns. After two years of land and naval warfare, the Mississippi River was open, the grip of the South had been broken, and merchant and military traffic had now a safe avenue to the gulf of Mexico. In the words of Lincoln:

The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.

The Lady in the Harbor
(Coronet Magazine, 1955)

When this article first appeared, the Statue of Liberty was praised as the tallest statue in the world – today, it doesn’t even make the list of the tallest statues; nonetheless, here is a collection of facts about the Ladyy Liberty:

• 200,000 pounds of copper were used in the statue, enough copper for more than 100 stacks of pennies, each as tall as the Empire State Building.

• Trans-Atlantic voyagers do not see Liberty until their ship enters N.Y. Harbor, but her torch can be seen 15 miles out.

• Her index finger is eight feet long.

A Profile of ”Mr. America”
(Pageant Magazine, 1955)

WHO, WHAT, AND WHY is the average American [man]? What does he eat? What does he wear? What does he worry about? These questions and more like them have taken us on a long journey through the realm of statistics. Out of the discoveries of the Department of Commerce, the Census Bureau and Dr. Gallup’s polls, we’ve succeeded in piecing together an uncommon portrait of the common man.

‘Patriotism”
(The Crisis, 1918)

An interesting editorial from World War I in which the writer (possibly W.E.B. Duboise) expressed that an African-American’s sense of patriotism in that era was based on the nation’s potential to be judicious and fair.

The article is a fine example illustrating the influence that George Creel and his Committee on Public Information had strong-arming the American magazine editors during the period of World War One.

D.W. Griffith: His Minor Masterworks
(Rob Wagner’s Script, 1946)

In 1946 the Museum of Modern Art Film Department decided to exhibit only the most famous films of D.W. Griffith for the retrospective that was being launched to celebrate the famed director. This enormous omission inspired film critic Herb Sterne (1906 – 1995) to think again about the large body of work that the director created and, putting pen to paper, he wrote:

Because of the museum’s lack of judgment, the Griffith collection it has chosen to circulate is woefully incomplete, thereby giving contemporary students of the motion picture a distorted and erroneous impression of the scope of the man’s achievements.

To read a 1924 article regarding Hollywood film executive Irving Thalberg, click here.

Whatever Happened to Evelyn Nesbit?
(People Today, 1952)

She had been a key figure in the most spectacular murder trial of the Gilded Age. An artist’s model, a Broadway chorus girl, the obsession of crazed millionaire and the play thing of one of America’s greatest architects; her beauty was legend – driving men to do the sorts of things that they knew were wrong. Her name was Evelyn Nesbit (1884 – 1967) and when that era faded into obscurity, so did she; until the hard-charging reporters of PEOPLE TODAY found her decades later – in the Land of Fruits and Nuts (Southern California), where the celebrities of yesteryear all go to find themselves.

An Interview with Woodrow Wilson
(Collier;s Magazine, 1916)

In 1916 Ida Tarbell (1857 – 1944) interviewed President Woodrow Wilson and came away with these impressions:

The common things of life interest him, and this fact somewhere strengthens enormously the estimate which any candid examination of his career forces, and that is that here at last we have a president whose real interest in life centers around the common man and on whom we can count to serve that man so far as his ability goes.

Fracture in Moscow
(Literary Digest, 1921)

Sharp encounters between Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Dzerzhinsky and other Bolshevik leaders took place when Trotsky tried to take Warsaw in 1920 and the majority of the committee antagonized his policy, we learn from a letter written by a Bolshevik adherents in Russia, who is ‘presumably‘ high up in the Soviet hierarchy and a partisan of Trotsky.

The Battle of Iwo Jima and the First Flag Raising on Mount Suribachi
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Yank staff correspondent Bill Reed wrote the following account of the Fifth Marine Division’s slug fest on the island of Iwo Jima throughout the months on February and March, 1945:

For two days the men who landed on Green beach were pinned to the ground. Murderous machine-gun, sniper, and mortar fire came from a line of pillboxes 300 yards away in the scrubby shrubbery at the foot of the volcano. No one on the beach, whether he was a CP phone operator or a front line rifleman, was exempt. The sight of a head raised above a foxhole was the signal to dozens of Japs, safely hidden in the concrete emplacements, to open up. Men lay on their sides to drink from canteens or urinate. An errand between foxholes became a life-and-death mission for the man who attempted it.

Teddy Roosevelt, R.I.P.
(The Crises, 1919)

Written with a strong spirit of gratitude, this is the obituary of Teddy Roosevelt as it appeared in the N.A.A.C.P. magazine The Crises. Published at a time when the friends of the black man were few, this is a stirring tribute to a man who, although not always an ally, was respected as the world’s greatest protagonist of lofty ideals and principles.

Click here to read a 1945 article about the funeral of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, TR’s nephew.

Click here to read an article about one of New York’s greatest mayors: Fiorello LaGuardia.