Articles from Yank Magazine
YANK correspondent, Sergeant Ed Cunningham, filed this report concerning all that he saw during the earliest stages of the German counter-attack in Bastogne; some Americans were leaving, some were staying, new ones were arriving – and all the while the Belgian townsfolk watched in confusion and hoped for the best.
An interesting article, written with a sense of embarrassment regarding the injustice done to the Japanese-Americans, and published a few weeks shy of VJ-Day. The article reports on how the former internment camp families were faring after they were released from their incarceration. 55,000 Japanese-Americans chose to remain in the camps rather than walk freely among their old neighbors; one man, Takeyoshi Arikawa, a former produce dealer, remarked:
I would like to take my people back home, but there are too many people in Los Angeles who would resent our return. These are troubled times for America. Why should I cause the country any more trouble?
Important references are made concerning those families who had lost their young men serving in the famed 442 Regimental Combat Team: a U.S. Army unit composed entirely of Nisei that was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation for it’s fortitude displayed in Italy, France and Germany.
…On, on, on it went into the night and the next night as the biggest city in the world went its way toward picking up the biggest hangover in its history. It was a hangover few would ever regret.
Click here if you would like to read an article about the VE Day celebrations in Europe.
Click here if you would like to read about the VE Day celebrations in the United States.
A short paragraph about the M-Dogs of the American Army during the Second World War and how they were trained to locate both plastic and metallic mines during the course of the war.
An additional paragraph can be read about the Hollywood starlet who volunteered her dog for military service, only to be informed that the pooch had given the last full measure on behalf of democracy and a grateful nation.
Click here to read an article about re-educating the captured German boys of the war.
An eye-witness account of the first major American battle to be fought on German ground during World War II. Aachen, the Westernmost city in Germany was defended by some 44,000 men of the Wehrmacht as well as assorted elements of the First SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Division which combined to offer a stubborn defense that lasted nineteen days. This article, written by Bill Davidson, who witnessed the most vicious kind of street combat, believed that the battle for Aachen was simply a re-staging of the battle of Stalingrad and he supports this point throughout the article:
Godfrey Blunden,the Australian war correspondent, was here in Aachen…he was immediately struck by the similarity between the two battles. ‘There is is the same house-to-house and room-to-room fighting, the same combat techniques, the same type of German defense.’
Years later, historian Stephen Ambrose remarked that the Battle of Aachen was unnecessary.
A segment from a longer article regarding the 1944 presidential election and the widespread disillusionment held by many Black voters regarding the failings of FDR and his administration:
…the Negro vote, about two million strong, is shifting back into the Republican column.
The report is largely based upon the observations of one HARPER’S MAGAZINE correspondent named Earl Brown.
The group that advised FDR on all matters involving the African-American community was popularly known as the Black Brain Trust…
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.’
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.
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 Summersby
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.
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.
Kind words regarding the M-1 Garand rifle were written in a 1945 report by the Department of the Army; it was widely believed in those circles that this American weapon was one of the primary advantages that lead to victory.
Click here to read about the mobile pill boxes of the Nazi army.
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…
The story of Sergeant Frank Kwiatek, a W.W. I veteran who remained in the U.S. Army long enough to serve in the next war and have-at the Germans all over again. His distaste for German snipers was remarkably strong.
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’
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.
The attached column is a 1945 magazine profile of Clement Attlee (1883 – 1967: U.K. Prime Minister: 1945 – 1951) it appeared just a few weeks following the long over-do wrap-up of the Second World War and the hasty ouster of Conservative Party Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965).
You might also want to read an article about Soviet Foreign Minister Andre Gromyko.
The attached column is a 1945 magazine profile of Clement Attlee (1883 – 1967: U.K. Prime Minister: 1945 – 1951) it appeared just a few weeks following the long over-do wrap-up of the Second World War and the hasty ouster of Conservative Party Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965).
You might also want to read an article about Soviet Foreign Minister Andre Gromyko.
