1945

Articles from 1945

VE-Day in London (Yank Magazine, 1945)

Hundreds of GIs were gathered at the Rainbow Corner Red Cross Club in Piccadilly when bundles of Stars and Stripes extras were tossed out free. The paper bore a huge banner headline, ‘Germany Quits!’ and contained the official Ministry of Information announcement which all England had just heard on the air.

News of the Reich’s final and complete surrender found Piccadilly, Marble Arch and other popular intersections jammed with people. At first incredulous, the cautious British worked up to a pitch of demonstrative joy…

Click here to read about VJ-Day in London.

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Hiroshima (Yank Magazine, 1945)

Walking into Hiroshima in broad daylight, wearing an American uniform and knowing that you were one of the first Americans the people in that utterly ruined city had laid eyes on since the bombing, was not a comfortable feeling.


After the war it was discovered that one quarter of the Hiroshima dead were Koreans who were there as slave laborers.


The October 3, 1946 issue of the Atlanta Constitution ran a front page headline declaring that Imperial Japan had successfully tested their own Atom Bomb during the summer of ’45. Click here to read more on this topic.


Click here to read General Marshal’s opinions regarding the Atomic Bomb.

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VJ Day in an American P.O.W. Camp (Yank Magazine, 1945)

A short column filed by an eye-witness in Manila who described well the profound sense of melancholy that descended upon the W.W. II Japanese prisoners of war when they had learned of the Japanese surrender.


Click here if you would like to read an article about the Japanese surrender proceedings in Tokyo Bay.

Click here to read more articles about the liberation of Paris in 1944.

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The Japanese Surrender Proceedings (Yank Magazine, 1945)

We are gathered here, representatives of the major warring powers, to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored.

Those were the words of General Douglas MacArthur when he opened the Japanese Surrender Proceedings on board the deck of the American battleship, U.S.S. Missouri on the morning of September 2, 1945. This report was filed by Yank correspondent Dale Kramerstyle=border:none, who amusingly noted that all concerned were dressed in a manner fitting the occasion, with the exception of the American officers who (oddly) seemed unable to locate their neckties that morning.

Click here if you would like to read about the atomic blast over the Japanese city of Nagasaki.

Click here to read articles about post-war Japan.


Click here to read about August 28, 1945 – the day the American occupation began.

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The Battle of Iwo Jima and the First Flag Raising on Mount Suribachi (Yank Magazine, 1945)

Yank staff correspondent Bill Reed wrote the following account of the Fifth Marine Division’s slug fest on the island of Iwo Jima throughout the months on February and March, 1945:

For two days the men who landed on Green beach were pinned to the ground. Murderous machine-gun, sniper, and mortar fire came from a line of pillboxes 300 yards away in the scrubby shrubbery at the foot of the volcano. No one on the beach, whether he was a CP phone operator or a front line rifleman, was exempt. The sight of a head raised above a foxhole was the signal to dozens of Japs, safely hidden in the concrete emplacements, to open up. Men lay on their sides to drink from canteens or urinate. An errand between foxholes became a life-and-death mission for the man who attempted it.

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The Iwo Jima Invasion (Collier’s Magazine, 1945)

Written by war correspondent Walter Davenport some thirteen months prior to taking the helm as editor-in-chief at Collier’s Magazine, this article gives the reader a sense as to what D-plus-one looked like from the fifty yard line at the Battle of Iwo Jima (Operation Detachment: February 19 – March 26, 1945):

There is no Jap navy here to stop us; no Jap air force, either… So you see Jap? On our way up here to Iwo we flew over more supply ships, more cargo carriers. Those decks carry concrete mixers, Diesel-powered road crushers and rollers. There aren’t many cliffs on Iwo to hide out in, Jap! You can’t live for weeks in the crevices of Suribachi. You can’t grow gardens on that rock. So, while you can still see, look down at what we’re seeing: An American city, a harsh, womanless city is moving in on you.


Davenport’s observations were no doubt a comfort to the Collier’s readers on the home front, but post-war accounting revealed that one quarter of the U.S. Navy’s losses took place at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.


Click here to read a unique story about the Battle of the Sula Straits…

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With the War Came Medical Innovations (Pageant Magazine, 1945)

Four years of global carnage did not simply usher in an era of more destructive weaponry for the inhabitants of Earth to ponder; it also gave cause for tremendous improvements in medical care. This 1945 article anticipated a much better world that would be created from the smoldering remains of Europe and Asia – a world that was better prepared to address the health requirements of the diseased and the burned. The medical advancements that were forged between the years 1939 through 1945 saw remarkable improvements in surgery and anesthesia and brought new light on how the medical establishment understood blood and the treatment of venereal disease.


CLICK HERE… to read one man’s account of his struggle with shell shock…

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June 6, 1945: the First Anniversary (Yank Magazine, 1945)

YANK correspondent Dewitt Gilpin visited the Omaha and Utah beaches exactly one year after the 1944 Normandy Invasion. The journalist interviewed some American D-Day veterans as well as members of the local French population who recalled that bloody day -while others simply tried to forget.

Landing to the left of the Rangers on Omaha was the 116th Infantry of the 29th Division. Their 1st Battalion came in over a beach that had more dead men on it than live ones.


Read what the army psychologists had to say about fear in combat.

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