Articles from Yank Magazine
Written for those far-flung, home-sick Brooklynites of yore who were cast hither and yon in order to repel the forces of fascism, this two page article from 1945 is illustrated with seven pictures of a Brooklyn that had been out of sorts since the close of the 1944 baseball season, when the Dodgers had finished 42 games behind.
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.
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.
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.
War correspondent George Burns reported on the momentous day when the American Army came to arrest the former Prime Minister of Imperial Japan, General Hideko Tojo (1884 – 1948). Tojo served as Japan’s Prime Minister between 1941 and 1944 and is remembered for having ordered the attack on the American naval installation at Pearl Harbor, as well as the invasions of many other Western outposts in the Pacific. Judged as incompetent by the Emperor, he was removed from office in the summer of 1944.
This article describes the efforts of Lt. Jack Wilpers who is credited for prolonging the life of Tojo after his amateur suicide attempt and seeing to it that the man kept his date with the hangman. Nominated for the Bronze Star, he was decorated in 2010: read THE WASHINGTON POST article.
Attached you will find a few well-chosen words about that famous 1943 photograph that the censors of the War Department saw fit to release to the American public. The image was distributed in order that the over-optimistic and complacent citizens on the home front gain an understanding that this war is not without a cost.
A haunting image even sixty years later, the photograph depicts three dead American boys washed-over by the tide of Buna Beach, New Guinea. The photographer was George Strock of Life Magazine and the photograph did it’s job.
Click here to read General Marshall’s end-of-war remarks about American casualty figures.
After four hard years of watching sappy Hollywood drivel about the war and the home front, the censorship machine was finally dismantled – which allowed the servicemen to speak their minds about what they REALLY thought about those movies…
A group of women of Latin-American extraction took the Army oath before more than 6,000 persons in San Antonio’s Municipal Auditorium to become the second section of the Benito Juarez Air-WAC Squadron, named for the hero who helped liberate Mexico from European domination in 1862.
Led by an honor guard from the first Latin-American WAC squadron, the new war-women, marched into the auditorium to be sworn in and to hear words of greeting from Colonel Oveta Culp Hobby (1905 – 1995) and from Mrs. Dwight Eisenhower (1896 – 1979).
The first Hispanic WAC was Carmen Contreras-Bozak.
Click here to read about some of the Puerto Ricans who served with distinction during the war.
From Amazon:
Dressed for Duty: America’s Women in Uniform, 1898-1973
An account relaying a bloody slice of life lived by the officers and men of the U.S. Second Armored Division. The story takes place on the tenth day following the D-Day landings as one armored battalion struggled to free themselves of the hedgerows, placate their slogan-loving general and ultimately make that dinner date in far-off Paris. Yank correspondent Walter Peters weaves an interesting narrative and the reader will get a sense of the business-like mood that predominated among front line soldiers and learn what vehicles were involved during an armored assault
Writing about the bitter fighting on Okinawa some years after the war, Marine veteran Eugene Sledge remarked that he and his comrades had been reduced to Twentieth Century savages. Much of what he said is confirmed in the attached Yank article from 1945 that clearly illustrated the terror that was experienced by G.I.s and Marines on that island after the sun went down.
