Yank Magazine

Articles from Yank Magazine

When New York City Mourned F.D.R. (Yank Magazine, 1945)

With the exception of the attached piece, there is no magazine article in existence that illustrated so clearly the soul-piercing pain that descended upon the city of New York when the word got around that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died. YANK correspondent Bill Davidson walked from one neighborhood to the next recording much of what he saw:

Nowhere was grief so open as in the poorest districts of the city. In Old St. Patrick’s in the heart of the Italian district on the lower East Side, bowed, shabby figures came and went, and by the day after the President died hundreds of candles burned in front of the altar. ‘Never’ a priest said ‘have so many candles burned in this church’.
A woman clasped her 8-year-old son and said, ‘Not in my lifetime or in yours will we again see such a man.’

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Verdun, 1944 (Yank Magazine, 1944)

The contested forts of Verdun (Battle of Verdun, 1916), Fort Douamont, Fort Souville and Fort Vaux, were little more than storage sheds to the American army of World War Two; and during the four years of German occupation, the forts played a similar roll for the German army as well. This is a neat article that briefly touches on the importance of these structures during the previous war and what kind of flotsam and jetsam the GIs were able to find as they wandered about the forts (like a W.W. I skeleton). Of particular interest was a wall that was covered with the names of various combatants from all sides and from both wars:

The American names are big and black and seem to blot out the others. One of them says:

Austin White, Chicago, Ill., 1918 and 1944.

This is the last time I want to write my name here.

Click here to read more magazine articles about the African-American efforts during the First World War.

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A Post-War Interview With Ike (Yank, 1945)

This is a conversational General Eisenhower article that primarily concerns the plans for the Allied occupation of Germany, coupled with every American soldier’s wish to simply get in boats and go home:

I’m just as bad off as any GI today, General Eisenhower said quietly. I don’t want to be here. I’m 54 years old and I lead a kind of lonely life.


The third paragraph makes reference to a pretty British secretary named Lt. Kay Summersby.


Recommended Reading: Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight Eisenhower_by_Kay Summersbystyle=border:none

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VJ Day in New Orleans (Yank Magazine, 1945)

In a city prone to revelry, New Orleans had prematurely celebrated the end of World War Two on three previous occasions; not willing to go down that path a fourth time, the residents were in a state of disbelief when the news of the Japanese surrender began to circulate all over again. However, when it was understood that this time the rumor proved true everyone seemed grateful for the rehearsal time.

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Iva Toguri of California (Yank Magazine, 1945)

Throughout the course of the war in the Pacific, there were as many as twelve Japanese female radio commentators broadcasting assorted varieties of demoralizing radio programming to the American and Allied forces from Japan. However the Americans knew nothing of this collective and simply assumed that all the broadcasts were hosted by one woman, who they dubbed, Tokyo Rose.


The story told in this article begins in the late summer of 1945 when:

…one of the supreme objectives of American correspondents landing in Japan was Radio Tokyo. There they hoped to find someone to pass off as the one-and-only Rose and scoop their colleagues. When the information had been sifted a little, a girl named Iva Toguri (Iva Toguri D’Aquino: 1916 – 2006), emerged as the only candidate who came close to filling the bill. For three years she had played records, interspersed with snappy comments, beamed to Allied soldiers on the Zero Hour…Her own name for herself was Orphan Ann.

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The Doodlebug Tank? (Yank Magazine, 1944)

That crack team of linguists who loaf-about our Los Angeles offices here at OldMagazineArticles.com have assured us that the Doodlebug was not the name assigned by the Nazi engineers for this minute, remote-control tank that made it’s appearance on the Anzio beachhead in 1944, but rather a NICKNAME that was authored by the stalwart G.I.s who opposed it. The gizmo packed with explosives in order to destroy Allied tanks.


Click here to read about the Patton Tank in the Korean War…

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‘Invasion Fever” (Yank Magazine, 1944)

As increasing aerial bombardment of Nazi-occupied Europe mounted in Fury day after day, every American civilian was talking last week about when and how the actual land invasion of the continent would begin.

Newspaper editors were already dragging out their largest headline type, and when more than 40 top Washington correspondents were called to the White House for what turned out to be a routine announcement, telephone lines from a dozen National Press building offices were being kept open in case this was ‘it’

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Pre-Invasion Bombs (Yank Magazine, 1944)

Invasion, however, will not begin until the Nazis have been virtually knocked out of the sky. The target of the moment, therefore, is the German air force. …From 500 airdromes scattered throughout Britain, Allied planes fly night and day – frequently every hour of the 24 – some in fleets of a thousand or more to battle the Luftwaffe…Air war as such is almost over in Europe; the Allied infantryman is preparing now to march across a continent, battling along a ‘road’ already cut wide and long by bombers and fighters four miles upward.

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