Seventy-five years ago today, the July 9, 1944, issue of the Milwaukee Journal carried this ad showing why America won the war. The secret weapon was bread, and this housewife knew to put it first on her shopping list.
Thanks to your Government, bread was packed with vitamins, minerals, protein, and carbohydrates, and served as the basis for a healthy diet.
A postscript reveals the probable sponsor of the ad, as it notes that most good bread is made with Fleischmann’s yeast.
On July 4, 1944, this American GI celebrates America’s 168th birthday somewhere in France by sharing candy with these grateful but somber girls. According to this website, the soldier is Sgt. Walter Goworek of Jersey City, NJ.
On Dominion Day (now known as Canada Day) 75 years ago today, July 1, 1944, the gentleman on the right is enjoying a nice summer day on a Canadian beach. The gentlemen on the left, however, were busy on Juno Beach in France, and offered a friendly reminder that the first guy was on the wrong beach.
Surprisingly, the guy relaxing on the Canadian beach (with the pretty girls keeping their distance) was probably also a soldier in the Canadian Army!
After Canada entered the War in 1939, the government of Prime Minister Mackenzie King was eager to avoid violent opposition to the draft, as had happened in 1917. Conscription was instituted in 1940, but with the condition that drafted soldiers were to be used only in North America, and not overseas. Other than the Aleutian Islands Campaign, there was little need for combat soldiers to serve in North America. It wasn’t until late 1944 that drafted soldiers were sent overseas. In the meantime, soldiers had to volunteer. This ad is part of the persuasion, which of course also came from their comrades who had volunteered. Those who volunteered for overseas service wore the “GS” (General Service) insignia. Those who didn’t volunteer wore distinctive uniforms with a black necktie, to make sure that nobody got the two groups mixed up.
This means, of course, that the 340 Canadian soldiers who died taking Juno Beach on D-Day
were there only because they volunteered to be there. By 1943, the men who declined to ship out as part of the GS were being referred to as “zombies,” neither alive nor dead. The force came to be called the Zombie Army. The song “Salute to a Zombie” (sung to the tune of Darling Clementine) became popular throughout Canada.
The song probably hasn’t been performed in almost 75 years, which seemed like a shame. A 1943 performance of the song at a Calgary military base caused a riot after General Service men sang it to taunt the zombies. Ironically, the military police who had to break up the fight were probably themselves zombies, as it would be unwise to waste a GS man with that domestic role.We put out a call for volunteers, and loyal reader David Cripe agreed to perform the song. We are confident that tempers have cooled after 75 years, and no riots will ensue.
The ad at the top appeared in the Ottawa Citizen, 1 July 1944.
References
Here’s another snapshot of wartime grocery prices 75 years ago today, June 29, 1944, as shown in this IGA ad in the Milwaukee Journal. In most browsers, you can click on the image, and then click again to enlarge.
If you’re a comparison shopping time traveler, you might be interested in the following links:
Seventy-five years ago, the over 170,000 students in the Philadelphia schools were getting a good dose of the fourth “R.” In addition to reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmatic, the schools were taking full advantage of Radio. Thanks to the community spirit of the city’s commercial radio stations, regular lessons were scheduled. For example, for the elementary grades, WFIL carried “Studio Schoolhouse,” an educational program three days a week. The Monday program allowed the students, left, to participate in dramatized scripts about how they could help the war effort.
The pictures and accompanying article appeared in the June 1944 issue of Tune In magazine.
Seventy-five years ago, wartime labor shortages meant that critical defense industries had to be creative when it came to staffing their plants. A logical source of labor came in the form of high school students, who eagerly took up the cause of defending the nation, and getting some spending money in the process. Today, there would probably be a great deal of hand wringing if kids were sent in to work with lead and acid, but these Milwaukee teens were eager to lend a hand.
Hundreds of students, both boys and girls, ages 16 and 17, were working for the Signal Battery Co. plant. Shown above cleaning batteries are Midge Wagner (left) of 2471 Fratney St. and Patsy Lee of 3219 N. Bartlett Ave. Both girls were students at Riverside High School. Also shown testing battery current is Mary Lou Burke of 2563 N. Farwell Ave., a student at Holy Angels Academy.
Northern Michigan University has on its website an interesting 1989 oral history interview with another teen worker at the battery plant, Evelyn Cieslick. She recounts:
I worked in a battery factory, in the summer when I was 16 years old, and we filled the acid that went into the batteries to make them work, and there weren’t enough boys around, so the girls took the summer jobs…. We worked in the factory and felt that we were doing our part in, for the war, along with everything else that was involved with giving up sacrifices for the war.
I had to take a bus to get there … in the mornings and, of course, work all day long, it was a summer job, and, like I said, all of us young people felt that we were doing our part by helping out. The name of the company was the Signal Battery Company. I’m sure they were for walkie talkies, and radios … for the war.
These photos appeared 75 years ago today in the June 19, 1944 issue of the Milwaukee Journal. These young women are about 91 years old today. We realize that people Google their own names, and we always enjoy hearing from people we have featured. Please leave a comment below or e-mail me at clem.law@usa.net. If you are one of the students shown here, thank you for your service to your country!
In drydock after salvage. Wikipedia photo.
This picture above appeared 80 years ago today in the June 16, 1939, issue of Radio Guide. Shown is a Washington, D.C., family gathered around the radio, obviously clinging to every word of the news announcer. They are the family of William Isaacs, who was aboard the Navy submarine U.S.S. Squalus when it sank off the coast of New Hampshire on May 23, 1939, killing 26 crew members. The remaining 33 aboard (32 crew and one civilian) were rescued. The ship was initially in contact with a companion ship by telephone line to a buoy, and the men were rescued from 243 feet of water thanks to the McCann Rescue Chamber.
The ship was eventually salvaged, and went on to serve in the Pacific during World War II as the USS Sailfish. The ship was scrapped after the War, but the conning tower, shown here, was preserved after the war as a memorial at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.
The family shown here eventually received good news, as Isaacs was one of the men successfully rescued from the sunken ship.
Wartime parts shortages often meant that radio servicemen had to be creative, and that often meant tube substitution. If the replacement tube was not available, it was often possible to substitute one that was. The substitute often had similar or even identical electrical characteristics, but had a different size plug or pin configuration.
The June 1944 issue of Radio Craft, like many other radio magazines of the era, carried some pointers. The illustration shows common adapters. The base was made of a burnt out tube (perhaps the one being replaced), and the top was a new socket for the new tube. When tubes became available, the adapter could be removed and the original inserted in the socket.
Today marks the 75th anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1944, the beginning of the Allied invasion of Europe during World War II. On the day of the invasion, 4414 Allied servicemen were confirmed dead. Germans suffered between 4000 and 9000 casualties.
When I think of D-Day, my first thought is of a little salt container like the one shown here.
Some time in the late 1960s or early 1970s, my family and I were coming home from somewhere and were passing through Ossian, Iowa, where we stopped for a picnic lunch at a small park across the highway from a gas station.
As we were getting set up, a gregarious gentleman came over and told us that he just got a call that we had forgotten the salt, so he was giving us the container shown here. He was the owner of the gas station, and it turns out that his name was Carey. He handed out little shakers of Carey salt as his business card. I guess it worked, since I remembered his name almost fifty years later.
His full name was James R. “Bob” Carey, Jr. Or more specifically, he was Sgt. Carey. He proudly let us know that he had served at D-Day, and to make sure there was no question about it, he pulled out a copy of The Longest Day and showed us his name as one of the servicemen interviewed by the author.
Sure enough, on page 285 of the book, his name is still there:
“Carey, James R. Jr., Sgt. [8th AF] Carey’s West Side Service, Ossian, Iowa.”
Carey at his roadside park. Waterloo (IA) Sunday Courier, 22 Oct. 1972.
The park where we were picnicking was built by Carey at his own expense as his way of showing gratitude. It later became a city park. Carey described the park in 1972, probably about the same time we had passed through Ossian:
My name is James R. Carey. I own and operate a service station on U.S. 52 at Ossian, Iowa. I moved there in 1951.
Some time between 1945 and 1947 the highway commission relocated a short piece of U.S. 52 outside Ossian, and by doing this left a small piece of land on the south side of the highway in the shape of a piece of pie. When I moved into my station on the opposite side of the road, this piece of land was full of weeds and stumps and high grass. There were two holes, probably wells or old cisterns, which were mostly hidden and dangerous for children to play there.
This was an eyesore, and so I started to clean it up a little at a time when I could do it, and my family helped. First we mowed a strip along the highway, and then we mowed the whole thing; then we filled in the holes and did some more leveling, and started to take care of the trees. Then we discovered that people who stopped at our service station seemed to like to go over into this little piece of ground to have a picnic, or maybe just to stretch and relax a while before going on again. It cost us some money and time to do this, and nobody paid us for it; but we felt repaid by the nice things that people said about it when they stopped there. It meant something to have people say these things, and to see that the) really enjoyed stopping there.
Looking back over some 20 years now, we feel we’ve been repaid many times over for our efforts because this project has brought us together with our neighbors in doing something together that gave us all satisfaction. Some helped with the maintenance of the park: others contributed a tree or a shrub. I recall a man 10 miles away gave us a tree, and we went over and hauled it to the park in our truck.
We built a little shelter for the picnic tables. Then I thought we should put in a gas stove. I had the stove, and my neighbor Vern Meyer said he would donate the pipes and labor. And he did. Another neighbor, Elmer Rosa, said, “I’ll give you the roof boards for the shelter.” There was about $100 worth of roofboards and poles and rafters. The Fort Atkinson Nursery donated a flowering crab tree, and we put in flood lights to light it up in the spring when the blossoms came out. Then one day Fred Doan said we ought to have a little neon sign on the shelter. I said I couldn’t afford one. and he said, “I’ll donate it.” And he did. So we had a sign on the shelter that said “Careys Park & Camp.” We keep that sign on day and night.
The town of Ossian boundary line is just a few feet away from the camp, and we asked if they would put in a drinking fountain on the outside of the shelter. By that time we also had built another building for toilets, and we needed water for that. Everything in the park is open 24 hours a day.
I don’t remember anything in particular that Carey said about his service at D-Day. I only remember (and this is probably all he told us) that he was there and that he was proud of it. He did his part to liberate Europe, and then he came home. He started a gas station and did his part to offer rest to weary American travelers.
Sgt. Carey, thanks for a place to rest; thanks for the salt; and thank you for liberating Europe. The world is better because of you.
For more information about Carey, see His Legend Lives On in Northeast Iowa. Carey died in 1977 at the age of 57 and is buried at St. Francis de Sales Cemetery, Winneshiek County, Iowa.
Please see our earlier posts regarding the D-Day invasion:
The first link contains links to the NBC and CBS broadcast days for June 6, and are well worth listening to.
Transmitter engineer flipping the switch at antenna farm to beam program to Europe.
Seventy-five years ago this month, the June 1944 issue of Popular Mechanics highlighted the shortwave broadcasting efforts of the Office of War Information (OWI). The magazine dubbed the American shortwave stations the “Voice of America,” a name which would become official in following years.
The magazine noted that the Nazis had a head start on the radio war, since Germany had over a hundred transmitters spewing propaganda to the world. The United States had only sixteen, all under private ownership. But even though it took some time to get going, the OWI wass directing a 24 hour flow of news and information around the world. The magazine noted that America strictly adhered to factual news.
Jamming was rampant, and broadcasts were normally read at a hundred words per minute to compensate. When poor conditions dictated, this was sometimes slowed to 80 words per minute. The OWI knew that there were listeners. After the liberation of parts of Italy, a survey indicated that one in ten families heard allied programs, despite severe penalties for tuning in.
