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A British Tommy to the Mother of his Victim (True Stories of the Great War, 1918)

One of the most moving letters included in the the 1918 book True Stories of the Great War
was the pair that we have attached herein: a British soldier, heartily sickened by war, composed a letter to the mother of the German he had killed, pleading for her forgiveness. The mother wrote back and her response was unpredictable.
This exchange was first published in a Geneva newspaper.


Click here to read about compassion on the battlefield.

German and Italian P.o.W.s in America (United States News, 1945)

By the end of 1944 the P.o.W. population within the U.S. stood somewhere in the neighborhood of 340,000 and was growing at a rate between 25,000 to 30,000 each month. The vast majority of them (300,000) were from the German Army and 51,000 were Italians:

There are reports that these prisoners often are pampered, that they are getting cigarettes when American civilians cannot get them, that they are being served in their camps by American soldiers, that they are often not working at a time when war workers are scarce. The general complaint is that the 46,000 American prisoners in Germany are not faring as well as 3000,000 Germans in this country.


Read about the escaped German POWs who the FBI never found…

Princess Elizabeth Comes of Age (Click Magazine, 1944)

The attached article was about the Spring of 1944 and why it was such an exciting season for Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary of England (b. 1926): the twenty-first of April marked her eighteenth birthday and her country was entering the last year of their bloodiest war, while the princess herself held two positions that she took quite seriously: Patrol Leader of the Buckingham Palace Girlguides, as well as Colonel-in-Chief of the Grenadier Guards. There were also times when she was required to join her father when he was in conference with his ministers.


Also addressed in these pages was the royal concern as to who was suitable to be her mate; a list of names was provided.

The New York Social Register (America, 1932)

Who could write an accurate assessment of social New York better than a celebrated Broadway playwright? Exactly; that is why we were so happy to find this essay by Clare Boothe Luce (1903 – 1987) on just that very topic:

The New York Social Register for 1931 contained about thirty-five thousand names, an increase of fifteen thousand over the Social Register of 1914; and the fourteen social registers of the largest American cities contained more than one hundred thousand names – an increase of over fifty thousand names during the same length of time.


These figures are particularly remarkable when one considers that the social register of exactly one hundred years ago, Longworth’s New York Directory, boasted exactly eighteen names.


From Amazon: Price of Fame: The Honorable Clare Boothe Lucestyle=border:none

The Life and Death of Hank Williams (Coronet Magazine, 1956)

Country Music legend Hank Williams (1923 – 1953)
died just four and a half months after being kicked out of the Grand Ol’ Opry for drunken and erratic behavior. He was at the peak of his fame, earning over $200,000 a year and enjoying the enthusiasm of ten million fans in the U.S. and five million abroad. He was 29 years old and known only for 35 songs. The attached article will let you in on the short and painful life of country music’s fair haired boy.


Like many artists, his creativity was nurtured by an empty stomach. Hank Williams was raised under dreadfully impoverished conditions in Depression era Alabama; suffering from spinal bifida, the illness that eventually overcame him, he sought relief from the pain with liquor and drugs and died in the back of the Caddy that was ferrying him to a gig in Canton Ohio.

Statism (Pathfinder Magazine, 1946)

Not long after the free world had conquered fascism, the long twilight struggle against Communism commenced. Stalin’s Soviet Union had refused to comply with the treaties it had previously agreed to and was occupying North Korea and many of the Eastern European countries that the Nazis had invaded. Furthermore, Stalin was was funding armed insurgencies in Greece, Vietnam and China. In an effort to help define the tyranny that is Communism, Pathfinder ran this column that defined Communism as Statism and explained it in simple terms.

The Defection of Stalin’s Daughter (Coronet Magazine, 1967)

Unquestionably, the most famous individual to defect from the USSR and seek refuge in the West was Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926 – 2011), the only daughter of Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin (she used her mother’s maiden name). She was the one closest to the aging dictator during his closing days – and her defection to the United States aroused a tremendous amount of interest throughout the world. In this interview she claimed that her defection to the West was primarily inspired by her yearning to write freely. Dutiful daughter that she was, Alliluyeva stated that the guilt for the crimes attributed to her father should be equally shared by those who served in the Politburo at the time.


– from Amazon:


Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyevastyle=border:none

Immigration Hollywood-Style (Rob Wagner’s Script, 1935)

Apparently during the pit of the Great Depression there were complaints coming from a few frustrated corners about the number of foreign talents that were being hired to entertain us in the movie business. An old Hollywood salt answered this complaint head-on:

The average world-fan cares nothing that Chaplin is an Englishman, Garbo a Swede, Novarro a Mexican, Bergner a German or Boyer a Frenchman.

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