While it was headline news, the post war investigation of Pearl Harbor was still getting a lot of press as well.
We don't think much about the post war finger pointing now.
Today In Wyoming's History: November 20: 1945 Mindful of an industry that had become significant in the state even well before World War One, Gov. Lester Hunt urged western governors to cooperate in selling the West to tourists who would follow the end of World War Two. Attribution. Wyoming History Calendar.In what would prove to be a last straw for Gen. Eisenhower, Gen. Patton expressed skepticism over denazification, comparing the Nazis to Republicans and Democrats.
Patton was growing increasingly frustrated now that peace had arrived. If Eisenhower could have read the comments in his journal, he would have been relieved by this time.
The Huaiyin–Huai'an Campaign ended in communist victory in China.
Former French pows went on a rampage in Saigon and killed members of the Viet Minh and innocent civilians, including children. French civilians joined in.
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The Great Strike Wave of 1945-1945 expanded as Ford Motors was idled due to wildcat strikes.
Contrary to the universal bliss myth so often assumed about the postwar world, the lid was coming off of labor relations as soldiers returned and wartime compromises, which oddly approached a sort of corporatism that fascist states had aspired to, ceased. It was flying apart.
The Japanese garrison on Celebes surrendered at Manado.
The Government of Belgium announced a 17,000 man commitment to the occupation of Germany.
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Post war news items were getting a bit weird.
Mike the Headless chicken was ineffectively beheaded, and would go on to become sort of a freak show star for a brief period of time.
Life magazine featured a black and white cover photo of a UAW worker. The contents of the magazine were:
Pg… 29 The Week's Events: U. S. Occupies Japan
Pg… 42 The Week's Events: Editorial: Peace in Asia
Pg… 45 The Week's Events: King Leopold's Family
Pg… 51 The Week's Events: Black Markets Boom in Berlin
Pg… 127 The Week's Events: Lilly Dache Packs for Paris
Pg… 63 Articles: Nijinsky in Vienna, by William Walton
Pg… 112 Articles: As We May Think, by Vannevor Bush
Pg… 103 Photographic Essay: United Automobile Workers
Pg… 57 Modern Living: House for Texas
Pg… 90 Modern Living: The French Look
Pg… 61 Art: Portrait of Sylvia Sidney, by Fletcher Martin
Pg… 82 Art: Hudson River School of Painters
Pg… 75 Movies: "Uncle Harry"
Pg… 97 Sports: Grownups Spin Tops
Pg… 138 Science: Plant Cancer
Pg… 2 Other Departments: Letters to the Editors
Pg… 12 Other Departments: Speaking of Pictures: Germany's Fantastic Secret Weapons
Pg… 16 Other Departments: LIFE's Reports: "Bottoms Up" in China, by Lieut. Thomas P. Ronan
Pg… 132 Other Departments: LIFE Goes Swordfishing
Pg… 142 Other Departments: Miscellany: Seabees Give Waves a Party
Life is often remembered as a great magazine in its heyday, but it featured some pretty vapid articles. This issue's feature on The French Look informed readers that young French women had small breasts and often went braless, depicting a typical bra (on a young French woman), for those occasions in which les mademoiselles wore them. Doing that in the US, UK, or Germany would have been regarded as shockingly indecent, although it was not uncommon in the Southern European Slavic and Romance language speaking countries, which in turn contributed to the American and British views that the Italians were really primitive, and the German view that the Yugoslavians were.
In case you wonder, I ran across the Life magazine item searching this date on Twitter. I haven't pulled up the article.
I'm clueless on the truth or accuracy of that claim and not going to investigate it, but French living conditions were definitely different than American ones, with a significantly different diet. Most people and cultures today are significantly thinner than Americans are and in the 1940s the French had suffered years of near starvation conditions, so they were likely overall less bulky than Americans in every manner. A 20 year old French woman in 1945 had lived her teen years in starvation conditions and had been on pretty thing rations throughout the 1930s. She would have been smaller in every way.
Also, French clothing had been severely rationed during the Second World War and you can't wear clothes you just don't have. Americans have largely forgotten, indeed never appreciated, the extent to which World War Two causes massive food and material deficits during the Second World War.
Added to that, Americans for some reason think of the French as being Parisians, which most are not. Paris had been the center of the fashion industry since at least the mid 19th Century, but that didn't apply to most of the French. About 50% of the French were rural in 1940, down from 64% in 1920, but still a very large percentage. As late as 1960 about 40% of the French were rural.
This oddly ties into this topic as rural life isn't like urban life, including in terms of the clothing people wear. Starting in the late 19th Century French and British artists began to glamorize the agrarian life and left a fair number of romantic, but fairly realistic, paintings of it. Some British paintings of rural life show farm women working fields in the hot summer months flat out topless, something you would not associate with either the UK or British farming today. French paintings can be a shock to run across while as they're often very well done and beautiful, they also make it relatively apparent that French farm women in hot months were wearing light cotton blouses with nothing underneath them.
European agriculture was much slower to mechanize than American agriculture. The Great Depression had an enormous retarding effect on the mechanization of American agriculture and this is even more so for European agriculture, which remained largely equine or bovine powered before the end of World War Two, another thing contributing to starvation as horses were conscripted for the German Army and cows and bulls just shot and ate them. Here, however, this is significant as French men and women were working the fields largely in the same way as they had in 1918.
Brassiers are actually a French invention, makign their appearance in the 1880s, as we've discussed before, and they received a boost due to World War One, as we addressed here:
As noted, things don't change overnight. So, maybe, young women coming of age in Paris in the 1940s who had an okay income or who had parents who did, might have a more advanced clothing standard then, say, a young woman growing up in rural Normandy, even if that young woman had moved into Paris during the war.
And, shall we noted this, in 1914-1918 Americans had been absolutely charmed by the French, and American men had been charmed by French women. But those men were largely rural and they were meeting women who were largely rural. In 1918, 20% of American homes had full indoor plumbing, meaning most did not. By World War Two most Americans homes did, although quite a few very rural ones did not. Most Americans were no longer rural by 1945.
In 1940 only 5% of French homes had indoor plumbing. The percentage for Italy was lower.
5%.
Perhaps not too surprisingly, therefore, lots of American troops were fairly horrified by the French, contrary to the way we like to remember it, when they started landing on French soil in 1944. The French, to put it mildly, smelled. And if the French smelled, the Italians smelled worse, with Italian women wearing cotton dresses in hot weather in which their upper lady bits flopped out, combined with omitting shoes and going around in bare feet. They were hopelessly primitive, in American eyes (which as noted is how the Germans found the Yugoslavians).
Anyhow, if you don't have indoor plumbing, you aren't going to be able to easily frequently wash your clothes and if you can omit something, you probably are going to.
Additionally, if you live in those conditions, and those of the 30s and early 40s, you are probably 40% underweight, smoke cigarettes constantly, have a large percentage of your caloric intake depending on alcohol, and you smell bad.
That's okay if everyone you associate with also is underweight and unwashed.
Things weren't like imagine them to be back then. Glamorous French women? Sure, on their own terms in the conditions in which they found themselves.
Life today is now a sort of special issue magazine featuring photographs. It's very large size format always existed, but it was originally a weekly and was so until 1972. It's big competitor was Look, which ceased publication in 1971. That both of these magazines took a hit in the early 1970s is really interesting is at long predates the Internet, which would otherwise be blamed for it.
Anyhow, Life was always a photo magazine, of which there were several others. It was a serious one, but right from its onset in 1936 (interesting to note it came out during the Great Depression) it frequently featured cheesecake, running racy photographs of actresses and semi undressed women on the guise of discussing clothing or fashion. Some of the photographs even today are shocking if you are not anticipating them. In 1953 it went full pornography for the first time running a nude of Marilyn Monroe which would be the same photograph used as the very first Playboy centerfold in 1953. The excuse, and probably the actual motivation, for that is that by doing that it was attempting to save the career of Monroe, who would be scandalized if her nude, taken in the late 1940s before she was a well known and up and coming actress, appeared first in a pornographic magazine, but still there's the only difference between the two publications of the image is the purpose the magazines served.
Anyhow, this is interesting in that Life and Look were general publication magazines that were outright flirting with cheesecake very early on, showing an (unfortunate) evolution on community standards. We've looked at this in the past, but this is certainly good evidence that whatever was going on in the culture was going on before World War Two and before the 1950s.
The Allied Control Commission decided to transmit to all neutral states a request for the return to Germany of "all German officials and obnoxious Germans".
Sweden resumed allowing foreign warships to enter its territorial waters.
MacArthur ordered the dissolution of the Imperial general headquarters and imposed censorship on the press.
The Shangdang Campaign began in the Chinese Civil War between the Eighth Route Army and Kuomintang troops led by Yan Xishan in what is now Shanxi Province, China.
The Indonesian Navy was founded.
The USS Midway was Commissioned
José Feliciano was born in Lares, Puerto Rico.
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Japanese forces attempting to breakout of the Pegu Hills suffered heavy casualties.
US Task Force 92 bombarded Paramushiro in the Kurile Islands.
Nine U.S. destroyers penetrated Tokyo Bay under the cover of a storm.
The Japanese government announced that it was open to peace negotiations, but not to threats.
Allied military police were allowed to cross into any zone in Berlin.
The Potsdam Conference between Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill and Harry Truman commenced.
The immediate topic was the governance of postwar Germany.
The British participated in a carrier raid on Tokyo.
German Field Marshal Busch, the former commander of Army Group Center on the Eastern Front, died at the military hospital in Notts at age 60 due to a heart attack.
The King, Queen and Princess Elizabeth visited Ulster.
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The name is nearly blasphemous. The device itself was called the "Gadget".
Nuclear power, sadly, arrived in the form of a weapon. It had not, however, yet been used that way.
British soldiers were taking advantage of the relaxation of the fraternization rules by chatting with German women. We often hear of the calorie deprivation of the Second World War, but, while not seeking to be vulgar, the young woman on the far right clearly hadn't been too calorie deprived in the late stages of the war.
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Eisenhower announced the closure of SHAEF.
Eisenhower also eased the fraternization rules between Allied troops and German civilians allowing Allied soldiers to chat and speak to German civilians.
By September nearly all of the rules would be removed.
Fraternization in this context does not mean what people commonly assume it does, but it is more in line with the etymology of the word's origins, from Latin through French: "to sympathize as brothers". Eisenhower, who was first of all an administrator, and highly intelligent, recognized that contact between the Western Allies, and with Americans in particular, would help have a corrosive impact on Prussianized and Nazified German culture. Bans on contacts had already been lifted as to contacts with children, which were impossible to prevent between oversupplied American troops and German children anyhow. The British, contrary to what is often reported in regard to the development in policy, followed suit.
There was really no danger that French troops were going to fraternize to any significant degree with Germans, nor those of any country the Germans had overrun. And of course in Russian controlled territory, where Eisenhower's orders didn't apply rapine Red Army troops simply terrorize and brutalized civilians, and not only Germans.
Be that as it may, the inevitable problem that existed with American troops in particular fraternizing in the wider sense was already there. It had been a problem after World War One during which the American Army had taken steps to stop friendly contacts between Germans and Americans with limited success. At that time, Americans already were noting in letters home that Germany looked more like the US than France did, in that it was more technologically advanced and cleaner. By the end of World War Two this was much more the case, with Americans being shocked by what they deemed the primitive conditions the French and Italians lived in, and impressed with the more advanced state of German municipalities. While its often little noted, a non insignificant number of GIs found themselves not really liking the French and outright horrified by the conditions Italians lived in.
With things being the way they are, even before the end of the war the U.S. Army had trouble keeping soldiers away from German women, which is not to say that all such contacts had only one thing in mind. Having said that, the conditions that followed the havoc of the Eastern Front and the war in general were having a massive impact on German culture even without Eisenhower seeking to step in and direct it. The German military had been huge with a very large number of German men in it. Many of them were killed during the war and many were simply missing by 1945.
A vast number of German men were held as prisoners of war as well. The Western Allies held over 3,150,000 by April 30, 1945. By the end of the war that number was over 7,614,790,with the 425,000 German POWs in 511 main and branch camps. The Soviet Union also held at least 2,733,739, fewer than a person might suspect, actually, reflecting the nature of the combat in the east.
The Western Allies did not, and could not have, repatriated German POWS immediately. The US held German prisoners until 1946 in the US, with it notably being the case that many went from disciplined Nazi soldiers to actually enjoying the last year of their captivity. Reeducation proved unnecessary as they rapidly evolved into democratic Germans in the last months of their captivity.
The point, however, is that with over 10,000,000 German men in captivity, and with millions of German men killed during the war, and with the German citizenry in the east put to flight, nature began to play a role in things very quickly. Hundreds of thousands of German women were left without support in a country that had largely resisted imposing female labor on its citizenry during the war. Man young women knew at an instinctive level that the normal path of finding a lifelong mate had been destroyed. And the collapse of the Nazi system proved to be a bit like tearing a scab off a wound as even the Nazifield population proved capable of abandoning Nazi propaganda pretty rapidly, even if only superficially in some instance.
Added to this, the war itself had damaged domestic life globally. This has been noted in the context of World War Two marriages in the US on this site already. While the German situation was different, it was found that after the war an appreciable number of Germans, both male and female, simply changed identities up to and including abandoning a spouse, missing or not. In some instances German women became outright disgusted with German men and blamed them for the war and the fate they'd suffered, something that was also the case with Japanese women.
By June of 1944, Life magazine was noting:
There’s one blonde Fräulein with braided hair who always walked past two MPs every day on her way to do shopping, swinging her hips from side to side even more noticeably than usual. As she passed she would look slyly at the MPs, tap one hip and utter the word, ‘Verboten.’ […]
In Germany fraternization is officially a matter of high policy. But for the GI it is not a case of policy or of politics or of going out with girls who used to go out with the guys who killed your buddies. You don’t talk politics when you fraternize. It’s more a matter of bicycles and skirts waving in the breeze and a lonesome, combat-weary solder looking warily around the corner to see if a policeman is in sight.”
Ultimately somewhere between 14,000 to 20,000 German women would marry American soldiers after the war, something that stands in remarkable contrast to the French, as only 6,500 French women married US soldiers. Between 10,000 and 100,000 Italian women married U.S. soldiers. 70,000 English women did the same.
If all of this seems a bit odd, it's probably a lot more human than people might suppose. Germany had been heavily propagandized during the Nazi era, but the era was a lot shorter than people like to recall, which is frightening in that Germany descended into madness so quickly. Be that as it may, DNA tends to rule at the end of the day and the Japanese and German examples tend to show that, with the German one perhaps being the most consequential. Nazi Germany had very distinct concepts of what women were to do, which were more than a little perverse. Germany itself was, of course, a Christian nation which the anti Christian Nazi party was seeking to transform into something else, and which it was surprisingly successful in doing in its short period of rule.
The Nazis were heavily invested in an exaggerated martial concept of manliness which failed. By late 1944 the Allies were on Germany's doorstep. Fairly soon German soldiers in the East would outright be fighting to the last man to try to protect German civilians from the Red Army, which is much of the reason that the fighting in 1945 was so much worse in the East than at any time prior to that. German troops did in fact go down fighting in many instances to attempt to give German civilians, including women, the chance to get away, but to a large degree they failed. German men, in other words, were unable to protect German women from rape and death in the East.
In the West, the German military failure had less severe physical consequences, but German manhood failed there too. Cities were destroyed and lives wrecked. The irony, however, was that in the West, the Allies themselves became the protector, and indeed the liberator, of German women. By making them temporarily Verboten, they gave them independence in a way that they had not had since 1932, if ever.
Italy declared war on Japan.
The French flag was formally unfurled at the summit of the Victory Column in Berlin.
The monument celebrated the German victory over France in the Franco Prussian War.
Japanese destroyer Tachibana was sunk in Hakodate Bay by aircraft of the U.S. Navy. The battleships South Dakota, Indiana and Massachusetts, plus two heavy cruisers and 4 destroyers, bombarded the Kamaishi steel works in the first naval gunfire directed against the Japanese home islands.
The Simla Conference ended without a positive result.
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The first meeting of the Inter-Allied Council for Berlin took place in which the USSR agreed to hand over civilian and military control of West Berlin to the UK and US.
The Japanese destroyer Sakura hit a mine and sank in Osaka Harbor.
The 8th Air Force began to redeploy from Europe to Okinawa, where they were to receive B-29s after initially having a training role. The redeployment of its aircraft to the continental US also began on this day.
The US used napalm on resistant Japanese targets on Luzon.
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Fadil Hoxha became President of the Assembly of Kosovo and Metohija.
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