Yank Magazine

Articles from Yank Magazine

The Undeveloped Weapons of the Nazi Scientists (Yank Magazine, 1945)

The war was over when the U.S. Army Ordnance Department began snooping around all the assorted ÜBER-secret weapons labs and work shops where the pointiest headed Nazis were developing some truly far-seeing weaponry, inventions that they were never able to perfect (thankfully).

One of the most striking aspects of the attached article is the part when you recognize that it was the Nazi scientists who first conceived of such space-based weaponry as the Star Wars technology that was ushered in during the Reagan presidency (i.e.: the Strategic Defense Initiative). While in pursuit of their nefarious tasks, these same scientists also conceived of harnessing the powers of the sun in order to advance Hitler’s queer vision of the perfect world.


Click here to read about the firm belief held by the German Army concerning the use of motorcycles in modern war.

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U.S. Advertising During W.W. II (Yank Magazine, 1944)

If advertising is defined as the craft of convincing people they want something that they actually don’t care for, then World War II proved to have been the perfect challenge to the ad men of the 1940s. The wordsmith who penned this article regarding home front advertising chortled loudly when he saw the manner in which the bloodiest brawl in history was being marketed to the American consumers.

Advertising has gone to war… and the advertising profession not only knows what we are fighting for; it knows down to the last uplift bra, what we want when we come home…It is the copywriters of advertising who nurse the carefully guarded secret that this war is, in reality, a luxury cruise.


Articles about the importance of fashion models in 1940s advertising can be read here.

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The Wrong Armistice Day (Yank Magazine, 1945)

In the attached 1945 article an anonymous YANK MAGAZINE correspondent describes for his young readers how the last World War ended; the widely reported misinformation of a premature armistice treaty that was reported as being signed on November 7, 1918 – the retraction, and the subsequent announcement of the genuine armistice being signed four days later. General John J. Pershing recalled the scene in Paris:

It looked as though the whole population had gone out of their minds. The city turned into pandemonium. The streets and boulevards were packed with people singing and wearing all sorts of odd costumes. The crowds were doing the most clownish things. One could hardly hear his own voice, it was such bedlam.

Click here to read another article describing the Armistice Day celebrations in 1918 Paris.

Click here to read an explanation as to what was understood about the truce of November 11, 1918.

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The Australian Soldier (Yank Magazine, 1944)

Attached is a two page article concerning the basic lot of the World War Two Australian soldier: his pay, his kit, his battles and the general reputation of the Australian Imperial Forces (A.I.F.):

…the Australian Imperial Forces who have – and are seeing action all over the world…has fought in every theater in which British forces have been engaged…They have especially distinguished themselves at El Alamein in the North African campaign and in the Papuan and New Guinea campaigns.


Four years after the Pearl Harbor attack, a Japanese newspaper editorial expressed deep regret for Japan’s aggressiveness in the Second World War, click here to read about it…

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Late War Combat Training: Camp Wheeler (Yank Magazine, 1945)

The attached article weighs the way infantry basic training was conducted at the beginning of the war and how it had changed as the war progressed, evolving into something a bit different by 1945. The training period was originally a 13 week cycle in 1941, yet in time after carefully watching the soldiers in the field and finding that infantrymen needed a broader understanding of the tools at hand, the infantry training at Camp Wheeler, Georgia, had been extended an extra two weeks. One of the obvious factors involved a far wider pool of combat veterans to rely upon as instructors.


Five years after the war, many infantry replacement camps had to reopen…


You might also like to read this article about W.W. II cavalry training.

Statistical data concerning the U.S. Army casualties in June and July of 1944 can be read in this article.

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New York Theatre in the Forties (Yank Magazine, 1945)

An article about New York’s Broadway theater scene during the Second World War:

Show people will never forget the year 1944. Thousands of men and women from the legitimate theater were overseas in uniform -actors and actresses, writers, scene designers, stage hands – and all looked back in wonderment at what war had done to the business… Letters and newspapers from home told the story. On Broadway even bad shows were packing them in…


Click Here to Read an Article About KKK Activity in New York City

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The 6th Rangers on Luzon (Yank Magazine, 1945)

This notice was the Yank magazine account of what has come to be known as the Great Raid that was commanded by Lt Col. Henry A. Mucci (1909 – 1997). On January 30, 1945 Mucci lead a raiding party of 121 hand-picked men of the 6th Rangers accompanied by some 300 Filipino guerrillas into the jungles on Luzon (The Philippines) in order to liberate the survivors of the Bataan Death March from the Cabanatuan Prison Camp. At the loss of only two men, the raiders freed 510 American POWs.


Click here to read more about the Cabanatuan POW camp.

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The Afrika Korps in Retreat (Yank Magazine, 1942)

This article was penned by YANK correspondent Sergeant George Slim Aarons (1916 – 2006) concerning his travels throughout the Allied occupied portions of Tunisia in 1943. Aarons reported on the heavy presence of German military debris that could be found scattered throughout the deserts – evidence that spelled out the imminent eviction of the Germans from that continent:

Some of these tanks lay in groups, showing how they had clustered together and fought it out to the bitter end. Other iron carcasses were alone in the desert, burned and twisted – relics of a hopeless, single-handed struggle against the Allied forces.


Click here to read about the retreat of the German 7th Army from Normandy.

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Slim Aarons in Cassino (Yank Magazine, 1944)

Society photographer Slim Aarons (1916 – 2006) is remembered for chronicling the swells of Palm Beach and Newport during the 1960s for TOWN & COUNTRY, among other magazines, but before he was able to have those villa doors open for him he had to first pay his dues at Yank Magazine, photographing the dung and destruction of World War Two.
This is an article he wrote about all that he saw during the Battle of Monte Cassino (January 17, 1944 – May 19, 1944), accompanied by five of his photographs.

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