– A well-illustrated article which sought to explain to American readers the workings of one of the most heinous inventions of the First World War:
This idea of projecting upon the adverse trenches and their occupants a rain of liquid fire was no sudden afterthought of the German mind. It was conceived, studied, and perfected for several years before the war, and its history may be traced in the German patent office.
Here are a few short paragraphs accompanied by nine images concerning what the college girls of the early Fifties were wearing:
A girl can still get into college with a sweater and skirt, but for full credit she needs quantities of gadgets. For campus, girls stick to classic Brooks Brothers sweaters, pleated skirts, blue jeans – but go wild on accessories and underwear novelties…
The journalist then went to some effort listing many of the fashionable essentials: stamp bracelets, rhinestone handcuff bracelets, silk pleated turtleneck sweaters and harness-neck bib fronts – all to die for.
On the afternoon of December 8, 1918, the troops of the Third American Army entered Koblenz. This was the goal of the occupation. The Yankees had reached the Rhine.
Probably never in all its stressful history did enemy troops enter it so in quite the matter-of-fact manner which marked the American entry last Sunday. There was no band. There were no colors. ‘We’re just going in sort of casual like,’ one of our generals had said the day before, and he was right.
As college girls talked back to school, it was clear that they had switched their allegiances from saddle shoes
to a new favorite: white bucks
Reference is also made to the rounded-button-collar dress shirts that were appearing on the backs of so many college men at that time.
Numbered among the many Monday-morning-quarterbacks who appeared in print throughout much of the Twenties and Thirties were the old horse soldiers of yore, bemoaning the fact that industrial warfare had deprived their kind of the glory that was their birthright. This was not the case on the Eastern Front, where Imperial Russian generals had seen fit to launch as many as 400 cavalry charges – while American troopers were ordered to dismount (along with most other cavalry units in the West) and suffer postings with the Service of Supply, among other assorted indignities.
Numbered among the many Monday-morning-quarterbacks who appeared in print throughout much of the Twenties and Thirties were the old horse soldiers of yore, bemoaning the fact that industrial warfare had deprived their kind of the glory that was their birthright. This was not the case on the Eastern Front, where Imperial Russian generals had seen fit to launch as many as 400 cavalry charges – while American troopers were ordered to dismount (along with most other cavalry units in the West) and suffer postings with the Service of Supply, among other assorted indignities.
Attached is a short review of a book that turned many heads in the diplomatic circles of Europe in 1911: Germany And The Next War, written by Germany’s General von Bernhardi (1849 – 1930):
A very influential military writer in Germany declares that Germany must win her place as a world power through warfare.
The book sales in Germany were quite meager up until the first shot was fired in August of 1914, when they picked up considerably.
A defense was offered for the growth of German military expenditures based on the spread of Slavik pride and the rise of a great Pan-Slavonic movement due to victory of their kinsmen in the Balkans. German leaders, furthermore, felt a deep uneasiness about the fact that about one-third of the population of the Hapsburg Monarchy consisted of Slavs and therefore felt that military aid from the Austro-Hungarian Empire was not guaranteed in the event of a war with Russia and France.
On May 19, 1951 two officials of the British Foreign Office were reported as missing; their disappearance raised many eyebrows within the intelligence community.
One of the men, Donald MacLean (1913 – 1983) had been working in various trusted positions within the British diplomatic corps since 1934, but his handlers in Moscow called him Homer. The other Englishman, Guy Burgess (1911 – 1963) began working for the Foreign Office in 1944; the KGB called him Hicks. The two men were members of a spy ring that would soon be known as the Cambridge Four (the other two being Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt. In later years a fifth spy would surface: Roland Perry. All of them were recruited by the Soviets while attending Cambridge University in the 1930s).
The information that was fed to the journalist who wrote the attached article was clearly meant to disguise the fact that all the Western intelligence agencies were totally freaking out.
Keep it short: that was the M.O. of the hairdressers of the Fifties (as you, no doubt, gathered from this 1949 article) – and this column, accompanied by eight photos, serves as proof. Much of this column pertains to the men who were active in 1952 hair dressing, and their deep thoughts pertaining to pny tails, perms and poodle-cuts.
Click here to read about the short hair craze of the late Forties.
Three years before the total French withdrawal from Vietnam, this one Frenchman summed up his comrade’s frustrations concerning their battles against the Viet Minh:
We can’t win a guerrilla war unless we have the support of the people. Frankly, we have not got it. Hitler or the Russians could conquer this country in two months with mass executions, wholesale reprisals and concentration camps. To fight this war and remain humanitarian is difficult.
Italy, Germany and Russia, leading exponents of Europe’s Fascist and Communist camps, have each asked for more prolific mothers and decreed measures designed to fetch in the bambini, kinder and kodomos. Their dictator’s desires for more babies and still more babies have developed into a population race.
Click here to read about the Nazi struggle to increase their birthrate…
ARBEITER ZEITUNG, a Viennese newspaper, quoted the following swelled with hubris recalling his flight over crushed French Village in the Verdun sector:
I felt like a king, loaded with my bombs… I flew over Saint Privat quite low, so that I could see all the houses, and if I dropped my bombs there, I should have been able to to destroy half the village…
Seven years must have seemed an appropriate amount of time to withhold information concerning the generally unpleasant character traits that were apparent in First Lady Jackie Kennedy – and so in 1970 Washington writers Lucianne Goldberg and Fred Sparks put pen to paper and recalled all the minutiae they could piece together regarding Her Elegance:
Jackie was master of deception. In the White House, she never wore her double-breasted mink coat when she could be photographed. But after her husband died, and she moved to New York, she wore the mink, as one fashion writer put it, ‘to do errands around Manhattan’.
This article appears on this site with the permission of Lucianne Goldberg
Popcorn was introduced as a snack food to American movie-goers as a result of the candy shortages during the earliest years of the Second World War.
Attached is a petite notice documenting the fact that the substitute was a wise one:
By 1952, movie houses accounted for about one-third of the nation’s annual $350 million retail popcorn sales.
Reference is also made to the efforts that were made to secure noiseless popcorn bags.
If popcorn replaced sweets on the home front, what replaced steak?
Two and a half years were left on the clock for the exiled Leon Trotsky (né Lev Davidovich Bronstein: 1879 – 1940) until he would have to keep his rendezvous with an icepick in Mexico – and while living it up on this borrowed time he granted an interview to this one correspondent from a Beverly Hills literary magazine in which he ranted on in that highly-dated and terribly awkward Bolsheviki language about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his social programs.
Click here to read an article about the NKVD agent who murdered Trotsky.
A black and white diagram depicting the breach of the 1903 Springfield rifle
Throughout the course of the war the U.S. Army was paying $19.50 for each rifle.
A black and white diagram depicting the breach of the 1903 Springfield rifle
Throughout the course of the war the U.S. Army was paying $19.50 for each rifle.
