A YANK staff writer Robert Bendiner (1910 - 2009), summed-up the eventful period that began with the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on
April 12, and ended with the Japanese surrender on August 10, 1945. He pointed out that within that period remarkable changes had been made; not merely the deaths of Hitler, Mussolini and the collapse of Imperial Japan, but it was clear to many that the stage was being set for a new world. The foundations were in place for the creation of a "durable world security organization" and as if that wasn't enough, there was a new, hideous weapon called the "Atomic Bomb" that would cast a long shadow across the land and mark this new era as a unique period in world history.
"After a streak like that it would not be surprising if a revulsion against "big news" should set in. It may well be that people long to pick up a paper in which nothing more cosmic is reported than the city's reception of a visiting channel-swimmer, and nothing more violent than a tie-up on the Magnolia Avenue trolley line." Click here to read how British women struggled to understand American slang. The editors of Yank assembled six veteran platoon sergeants to talk about mistakes that most U.S. Army replacements make when they go into combat, and to speak seriously about which weapons and small unit tactics work best when confronting the German enemy: "The first mistake recruits make under fire" began T/Sgt. Harry R. Moore, rifle platoon sergeant from Fort Worth, Texas, "is that they freeze and bunch up. They drop to the ground and just lie there; won't even fire back. I had one man just lie there while a German came right up and shot him. He still wouldn't fight back."
to read about how the Army addressed the problem of soldiers who wouldn't pull their triggers...
The attached article is comprised of numerous war stories from the GIs of the 96th Infantry Division who were assigned the pleasant chore of slugging it out with the Japanese in the Leyte Valley of the Philippines.
Click here to read articles about post-war Japan. At the time this article went to press the Nazis and their European allies had been defeated and all eyes turned to the Pacific Theater as to when that enemy would also be forced to quit.
Click here to read about a popular all-girl band that performed with the USO. Here is a printable list of chronological events and battles that took place in the Pacific Theater between December 7, 1941 through May 3, 1945. Please keep in mind that this is only a partial list, the YANK editors who compiled the chronology had no foreknowledge of the U.S. assaults on Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Click here to read an interview with a Kamikaze pilot.
Written by correspondent Dave Richardson (1916 - 2005) "behind Japanese lines in Northern Burma", this article was characterized as "odds and ends from a battered diary of a footsore YANK correspondent after his first 500 miles of marching and Jap-hunting with Merrill's Marauders."
One of the most highly decorated war correspondents of World War II, Richardson is remembered as the fearless reporter who tramped across 1,000 miles of Asian jungle in order to document the U.S. Army's four-month campaign against entrenched Japanese forces - armed only with a camera, a typewriter and an M-1 carbine. | 
