| The Scared Infantry (Regiment of the Century, 1945) "We were men on a chess board being pushed around by people we never saw, by orders we never read, going to places we didn't know the names of, not knowing where the front was... praying that the 'old man' knew what he was doing".
"Was it the cold, the fear, the letterless days, the dark, the not knowing where or when or was it all of these? ...Whatever it was, wherever and whenever we were scared because we were strictly on our own. Except for the few basic things that we learned in the States, like blackout and water discipline, all this was new and different, the situations never seemed to apply..."
The passage above was found in a year book that told the tale of the 397th (U.S.) Infantry Regiment, of the 100th Division. The 100th Division was on the German's tale all the way to Berlin. U.S. Army Casualties: 1941 - 1944 (United States News, 1944)Here are the U.S. Army casualty figures from December, 1941 through November, 1944. The provided graph points out the following major events that ushered in the larger numbers:
• The Philippine collapse
• The American landings in North Africa
• The Battle of Kasserine Pass
• The Sicily Landings
• Anzio
• D-Day
Shortly after this article appeared on the newsstands the Germans launched their winter counter-offensive in the Ardennes. The editors of this magazine anticipated the American losses for 1945 to be the highest yet. An Observer on the Russian Front (Collier's Magazine, 1945)During the late war period, leftist playwright Lillian Hellman (1905 – 1984), was twice denied permission to travel to war-torn Britain on the grounds that she had been recognized as an active communist. Yet, ironically, those same pencil-pushers in the State Department turned around a few months later and granted her a passport to visit the Soviet Union in August of 1944 - as a guest artist of VOKS, the Soviet agency that processed all international cultural exchanges. It was during this visit that she penned the attached eyewitness account of the Nazi retreat through Stalin's Russia: "Five days of looking out of a train window into endless devastation makes you sad at first, and then numb. Here there is nothing left, and the eye gets unhappily accustomed to nothing and begins to accept it..." Click here to read a 1939 STAGE MAGAZINE profile of this writer.
Why France Fell (Omnibooks Digest, 1942)Writing from France for the Hearst papers in 1940, H.R. Knickerbocker (1898 – 1949) had witnessed the total collapse of the French Army.
His 1941 book, Is Tomorrow Hitler's , Knickerbocker clearly outlined his reasoning as to why Nazi Germany was able to overwhelm the French and turn their withdraw into a route. In the attached seven pages the author answered the question "Why did France fall?":
"Because the French people were hypnotized by their low birth rate; because their Maginot Line had imprisoned their army; because they had no Churchill to inspire and lead them ... their comparative lack of weapons would not have mattered... if they had had the spirit to win they could have held the Germans until the deficiency could be made up."
"Tanks cannot cross properly defended rivers, and there were several sets of rivers which the French could have held if they chose: the Meuse, the Somme and the Oise, the Aisne, the Marne, the Seine, and finally the Loire, but they held not at all at any of these natural barriers. At most of these rivers I was present during the retreat, and it astonished all of us to visit a French position along a river one day and observe how strong it was, and how difficult it would be to take, and then the next day to learn the Germans had taken it within a few hours of our departure."
The Brutality of Combat (Pathfinder Magazine, 1944)"The shock of modern battle is so severe to nervous systems that the hair color of thousands of young men in the Pacific and European theaters of war has turned gray overnight."
Not surprisingly, the young men in question had no interest in resembling their grandfathers and so the services of a patriotic hair dye manufacturing firm were secured. An American Traitor (Pic Magazine, 1943)On July 26, 1943, in the same U.S. Federal Court that tried the American poet Ezra Pound (in absentia) for treason, Robert H. Best (1896 – 1952), formerly of the Associated Press, was also convicted on the same charges. What Iva Toguri (the aleged Tokyo Rose) was believed to have done for Hirohito, and what Pound did for Mussolini is what Best did for Adolf Hitler: he had broadcast Nazi radio propaganda.
"During the past year, Mr. - or Herr - Best tried to play off all the propaganda arguments of Dr. Goebbels and Lord Haw Haw. He appealed to the American people's prejudices, to their fears and avarice. He incited class against class, group against group, and all against the government. He singled out every popular leader as a Jew or a Communist and constantly abused the President."
Captured in late January, 1946, Best was then able to attend his date with the Federal Grand Jury, that had convened on April 16, 1948. He was found guilty on 12 counts of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died four years later at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut.
You might also care to read about the American Bund. | 
