Yank Magazine – Page 8 – Old Magazine Articles

VE-Day in Europe
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Assorted reports from various European capitols concerning the capitulation of Hitler’s Germany:

Finally, when Paris believed the news, it was just a big-city celebration –crowds and singing and cheers and lots of cognac and girls. People stopped work and airplanes of all the Allied forces buzzed the Champs Elysees. Pvt. Ernest Kuhn of Chicago listened to the news come over the radio at the 108th General Hospital. He had just been liberated after five months in a Nazi PW camp and he still had some shrapnel in his throat. I listened to Churchill talk, he said, and I kept saying to myself, ‘I’m still alive. The war is over and I’m still alive’ I thought of all the guys in the 28th Division Band with me who were dead now. We used to be a pretty good band.

VE-Day in Four Western American Cities
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

A report from Portland, Oregon, Houston, Texas, Los Angeles and San Francisco, California as to how those cities celebrated the surrender of Germany in May of 1945.

VE-Day in New York City
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

New Yorkers milled around the Wall Street district and Times Square, and over a loudspeaker Mayor Fiorlello H. LaGuardia told them to behave themselves…

Click here to read about the VJ-Day celebrations around the world.

VE-Day in the U.S. of A.
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

A report from Boston, Atlanta, Baltimore, Cleveland, Minneapolis, St Louis and Springfield (Mass.) as to how VE-Day was celebrated (or not) in these cities:

To get an over-all view of VE-day in America, YANK asked civilian newspapermen and staff writers in various parts of the country to send an eye-witness reports. From these OPs the reports were much the same. Dallas was quiet, Des Moines was sober, Seattle was calm, Boston was staid.

Sports in Japanese Prison Camps
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

Assorted yarns told by liberated Allied soldiers as to the types of games played in Japanese prison camps between bouts of malaria, dysentery and gangrene:

We had a big fellow with us in camp, a guy named Chris Bell, who was 6 feet 2 and the rocky sort. The Jap guards were having a wrestling tournament at the guardhouse and they wanted Bell to come down and wrestle one of those huge sumo men. These sumo wrestlers weigh about 300 pounds and are very agile…

This was NOT the first time that a Japanese baseball team had faced Americans.

Click here to read about that game.

Prison Bust in Libya
(Yank Magazine, 1942)

Click here to read more about W.W. II prisoners of war…Read more …

The AWOL GIs in the Black Market of Paris
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Attached is a four page article that reported on the deserters of the U.S. Army who organized themselves into Chicago-style gangs in post-occupied Paris, replete with gun-molls, hideouts, fencing contacts and all the trimmings of a third-rate-blood-and-thunder detective story.

Kyoto: The Japanese City That Was Never Bombed
(Yank, 1945)

An article touching on the war-weary appearance of Kyoto, Japan. Although the writer had been informed by the locals that Kyoto was very special to the Japanese, the dullard was really unable to see beyond the filth, rampant prostitution and general disrepair of the city in order to understand this.

Facts About WACS
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Attached are a few interesting factoids about the American lassies who served in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps throughout the Second World War.

Humor in Uniform
(Yank Magazine, 1943)

In the years to come, he would be known as the Oscar Award winning screenwriter for A Place in the Sun, SANDS OF IWO JIMA and OCEAN’S ELEVEN – but in 1943 Harry Brown
(1917 – 1986) was writing tongue and cheek essays like this one on the history of warfare under the nome de guerre Artie Greengroin:

War is a very popular pass-time of humane beings. It is fought by men, on sides, with the popular intentions of killing people of the other side. The more people get killed the more you win. That is war. Historically, war has been fought for a long time and several people have won them. Some people have been Alexander, Julius Caesar and some other people…

1943 was truly the year that proved to have been the turning point in the war, click here to read about it…

American P.O.W.s Massacred
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Nine Americans recalled witnessing the deliberate torture and killing of American prisoners of war by their Japanese captors on the Pacific island of Palawan.

The American began begging to be shot and not burned. He screamed in such a high voice I could hear him. Then I could see the Jap pour gasoline on one of his feet and burn it, and then the other. He collapsed…

Port of Embarcation
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

This one page article from YANK MAGAZINE by Irwin Swerdlow will give you a sense of the Herculean task that was involved in the transporting of so many men and supplies across the English Channel to breach Rommel’s Atlantic Wall:

The biggest job of coordination that the world has ever known was under way. Thousands of things had to happen at a certain time, things which, if they did not happen, would delay the entire movement.

Click here to read about unloading supplies on Iwo Jima.

The Invasion of Japan and the Importance of Iwo Jima
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

In our day, the significance of the 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima is often dismissed as a campaign that should never have been waged; be that as it may, the following attachment is the U.S. Government explanation as to why the invasion of Iwo Jima was an essential part of the American strategy to invade Japan. Although you won’t find the information in this particular YANK article, the Marine and Army units that were to play leading rolls in the Japanese invasion were already selected and were at this point in training for the grim task before them (had it not been for the deployment of the Atomic Bombs, which hastened an end to the hostilities and saved hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides).

The Capture of Heinrich Himmler
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

A quick read, which begins with the story of how the British Army of occupation in Germany managed to detain and identify Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler (1900 – 1945) when he was disguised in the Wehrmacht uniform of a sergeant. The remaining paragraphs are devoted to instructing the reader as to how similar ploys could be managed to identify other German war crimes suspects when they are in captivity.

In France with the Canadian Army
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

Written four months after the allied invasion of Europe, and seven months to go until the war’s end, YANK MAGAZINE published this account of the Canadian march through France and their heroic stand at the Falaise Gap.

Click here to read about the Canadian POWs who collaborated with the Nazis.

Read about the French-Canadians who resisted the draft…

The Planned Invasion of Japan
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Published four months after the World War II Japanese surrender, the YANK MAGAZINE editors saw fit to publish the happily obsolete plans for the invasion of Japan: operations CORONET and OLYMPIC.

Click here to read articles about post-war Japan.

War Stories from the Pacific
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

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.

If You’re Captured…
(Yank Magazine, 1943)

This cautionary article seems like a collaboration between Emily Post, the Twentieth Century’s High-Priestess of manners, and Sigmund Freud. It concerns one-part social instruction and one-part psychology. It offers wise words to the Yank readers as how best to behave when being interrogated by Axis goons; American mothers would have been proud to know that their tax dollars were well-spent advising their progeny to keep in mind manners, manners, manners and always anticipate the direction of the conversation:

It’s best to call your enemy questioner Sir or his rank, if you can figure out what it is. Then when you answer I’m sorry, sir to his questions, there isn’t much he can do about it…

Click here to read an article about the American POW experience during the Korean War.