Articles from Yank Magazine
…There were crowds in Piccadilly Circus and Leicester and Trafalgar Squares. Quite a few people got rid of their waste paper by throwing it out the windows, a sign that the need for saving such things for the war effort was just about over.
Click here to rrad about VE-Day in London.
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.
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.
No doubt about it: for the fashionable, young Deutchen Soldaten on the go, the preferred choice in pillboxes is the portable variety! And you’d best believe that when those slide-rule jockeys back in Berlin lent their lobes to what the trendy book-burning crowed in Italy and Russia were saying, they jumped to it and created this dandy, 6,955 pound mobile pillbox that was capable of being planted almost anywhere. Better living through modern design!
Four pictures and few well-chosen words concerning a German command and reconnaissance car as well as two Nazi half-tracks (one capable of carrying ten men, the other twelve).
Click here to read about the American Army half-tracks.
Here is the skinny on the Ford Motor Company’s M8 Greyhound Armored Car as it was presented to the olive-clad readers of YANK MAGAZINE in the summer of 1944:
Armored Car, M8, 6×6: the Army’s latest combat vehicle, is a six-wheeled, eight-ton armored job that can hit high speeds over practically any type of terrain. It mounts a 37-mm cannon and a .30-caliber machine gun in a hand-operated traversable turret…
All global tensions aside, the U.S. Army could not find any faults at all with the motorcycles that BMW was making for Adolf Hitler during World War II. After having spent much time testing and re-testing the thing, they reluctantly concluded, This is as good as any motorcycle in the world (it was probably a bit better…).
Click here to read about the firm belief held by the German Army concerning the use of motorcycles in modern war.
This posting remarks about a number of concerns: assorted factoids about the German PZKW II tank and it’s 1944 down-graded status as an offensive weapon to a reconnaissance car; tips for GIs as to how to drive German vehicles and, finally, the German interest in salvaging tank parts from captured enemy armor:
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.
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 Kramer
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.
D-Day for the lads of the U.S. Army Air Corps’ Eighth Air Force was a time of great excitement and anticipation. Despite the exhaustion that comes with a fifteen hour day, all concerned recognized well that they were participating in an historic event that would be discussed long after they had left this world, but of greater importance was their understanding that the tides of war were shifting in the Allies’ favor.
In his book Wartime, Paul Fussel noted that the Allies had placed as many as 11,000 planes in the skies above France that day.
Click here to read about the 8th Air Force and their bombing efforts in the skies above Germany.
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.
Those heady days of early T.V. broadcasting:
Television was about ready for immediate commercialization when Pearl Harbor forced the industry to mark time, but engineers agree that the war has hastened electronic developments to a point that could not have been expected for 15 years under normal circumstances.
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.
The 76th Division at Fort Meade learns the latest scientific methods of hand-to-hand slaughter and free-for-all street fighting that will soon be taught to every infantry outfit in the Army. The article concerns the hand-t-hand combat instruction of one Francois D’Eliscu – a U.S Army major made famous for his 11-point training plan.
Major D’Eliscu is one of the toughest men alive. He can kill with a flick of his elbow, maim with a pinch of his fingers. He imparts this toughness into the course he gave to the 76th Division instructors and to the Special Service officers from the other divisions.
A 1944 YANK MAGAZINE article concerning the destruction of the once mighty German 7th Army:
We have been told that the German Army, which fought so craftily and gave out to our men a share of death in Normandy, is now almost encircled by the great armored columns which broke through and swept around the enemy. But this army does not die easily…
Click here to read about the retreat of the Africa Corps.
In 1944, Karl Jay Shapiro (1913 – 2000) was pulling in the big-bucks as a U.S. Army Private stationed in New Guinea, but unlike most of the khaki-clad Joes in at least a ten mile radius, Shapiro had two volumes of poetry under his belt (Person Place and Thing
A year latter, while he was still in uniform, Shapiro would be awarded the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for poetry
In 1944, Karl Jay Shapiro (1913 – 2000) was pulling in the big-bucks as a U.S. Army Private stationed in New Guinea, but unlike most of the khaki-clad Joes in at least a ten mile radius, Shapiro had two volumes of poetry under his belt (Person Place and Thing
A year latter, while he was still in uniform, Shapiro would be awarded the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for poetry
