Articles from Yank Magazine
Classified as 4-F, Edwin Taylor of Belleville, Illinois, was enraged when four GIs kidded him by singing a song about 4-Fs… he sent two to the hospital and the other soldiers are still running today.
This illustrated article appeared in Yank Magazine during March of 1945 and explained fully what fabric rationing was and how the American home front fashion consumer was affected:
The absence of cuffs and vests aside, pre-war styles in men’s clothing are still obtainable. A man can get plaids, stripes, herringbones and all sorts of weaves in brown, blue, gray and all the various pastel shades. …Women generally have had to make great changes in their dressing habits. In the first place the shortage of rubber has raised hell with the girdle, or foundation garment..
Click here to read more about fashion on the W.W. II home front…
Read a 1940s fashion article about fabric restrictions and the War Production Board.
When Michael Campiseno turned 18, he was pulled out of his senior class in Norwood High School and drafted. Mike was sore. He swore that if he ever returned, he’d throw his discharge papers on the desk of the board chairman and say, ‘Now, ya sonuvabitch, I hope you’re satisfied!’
Here is the skinny on Draft Board 119 of Norwood, Massachusetts – an average draft board that sent 2,103 men off to war (75 of them never returned).
Chicago, Illinois saw enormous changes take place during the war years, most notably the overnight construction of over 260 defense plants and the opening of its subway system (six miles in length, at that time). Half a million war workers arrived to toil in her new factories while it is said that each city block in Chicago dispatched, on average, at least seven of her sons and daughters for the armed services.
Nerves are taught with war tension. Hard work adds to the strain and increases the tempo. People walk faster in the streets. Stampedes for surface cars, and the new subway are more chaotic than ever… Five thousand block flagpoles have been erected by block committees of the Office of Civilian Defense. Listed in some manner near each are the names of all the GIs from the block. Some of the installations are elaborate and have bulletin boards that are kept up to date with personal news from camps and war theaters.
By the end of 1943 Major General Joseph Lawton Collins (1917 – 1987) was one of two U.S. generals to give battle to both the Japanese in the East and the Germans in the West (Curtis Lemay was the other general). In this two page interview with Yank Magazine correspondent Mack Morriss, General Collins answered the question as to which of the two countries produced the most dangerous fighting man:
The Jap is tougher than the German. Even the fanatic SS troops can’t compare with the Jap…Cut off an outfit of Germans and nine times out of 10 they’ll surrender. Not the Jap.
Click here to read another article in which the Japanese and Germans were compared to one another.
Click here to read an interview with a Kamikaze pilot.
This is a three page article concerning the city of New York from Yank‘s on-going series, Home Towns in Wartime.
The Yank correspondent, Sanderson Vanderbilt, characterized Gotham as being overcrowded (in 1945 the population was believed to be 1,902,000; as opposed to the number today: 8,143,197) and I’m sure we can all assume that today’s New Yorkers tend to feel that their fore-bearers did not know the meaning of the word.
New York was the home base of Yank Magazine and this article presents a young man’s view of that town and the differences that he can recall when he remembers it’s pre-war glory (Sanderson tended to feel that the city looked a bit down-at-the-heel).
Click here if you would like to read an article about the celebrations in New York the day World War Two ended.
Read a Vanity Fair article about New York during W.W. I
An enthusiastic Yank Magazine article about the Douglas DB-7/A-20 Havoc (the British called it the A-20 Boston): throughout the course of the war, there was no other attack bomber that was manufactured in greater quantity than this one (7,477).
An eyewitness report of a pre-invasion mission over the continent in one of the newest and most effective U.S. air weapons, an attack bomber that looks like an insect but moves and hits with the speed of a meteor…
When this article went to press the Pear Harbor attack was already over a year old – and like the articles that came out in ’41, these two pages capture much of the outrage that was the general feeling among so many of the American people. The article serves to give an account as to how the ships that were damaged that morning have largely recovered and were once again at sea (excluding the Arizona).
Five months after the Pearl Harbor attack the United States Navy defeated the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Coral Sea, click here to read about it…
A fascinating article reporting on the Baby Cage, the Allied prisoner of war camp that held some 7,000 boy soldiers of the German army, ages 12 through 17.
In light of the fact that so manyGerman youths had been indoctrinated from their earliest days in Nazi dogma and then dumbfounded to a far greater degree within the Hitler Jugend system, the Allied leadership post-war government believed that this group needed to be instructed in the ways of tolerance before being let loose into the general population.
Click here to read about the Nazi indoctrination of German youth.
The eight Nazi agents, who landed from U-boats on the shores of of Long Island and Florida, planning to cripple American war production, are in jail here [Washington, D.C.] under heavy guard, awaiting military trial on four charges that carry the death penalty.
In May 1942 Lieutenant General Joseph Warren Stilwell (1883 – 1946) made that frank statement after leading a tired, battered band of 103 officers, men and nurses on a 20-day march into India, refugees from the Allied rout in Burma… Stilwell’s return to Burma is the result of two years of careful preparation in which two major projects were developed. One was a Chinese-American training center in India…The other was the Ledo Road, a supply route from India by which Allied troops moving into Northern Burma could be equipped and provisioned.
The story behind the atomic bomb is a detective story with no Sherlock Holmes for a hero. The number of scientists who took part in the search was without parallel…The dramatic story begins with Dr. Lise Meitner (1878 – 1968), a woman scientist and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. In 1938 Dr. Meitner is bombarding uranium atoms with neutrons and then submitting the uranium to chemical analysis. To her amazement…
This article will come as a surprise to the historical revisionists who run the Chiang Kai-Schek memorial in Taipei where U.S. involvement in W.W. II is oddly remembered only as having been the nation that sold oil to the Japanese. It is a well-illustrated Yank Magazine article filed from India regarding the military training of Chinese infantry under the watchful eye of General Joe Stilwell’s (1883 – 1946) American drill instructors.
This article will come as a surprise to the historical revisionists who run the Chiang Kai-Schek memorial in Taipei where U.S. involvement in W.W. II is oddly remembered only as having been the nation that sold oil to the Japanese. It is a well-illustrated Yank Magazine article filed from India regarding the military training of Chinese infantry under the watchful eye of General Joe Stilwell’s (1883 – 1946) American drill instructors.
On the evening of March 26, 1944, fifteen O.S.S. agents were executed following a failed raid on Italian soil to blow-up an Axis railroad tunnel. The sabotage mission was in support of the allied attack taking place further south at Monte Cassino (Battle of Monte Cassino, January 17, 1944 – May 19, 1944) and had the tunnel been successfully blown, supplies to the defending Germans would have been cut off.
This YANK article reported on the first war crime trial of the post World War Two era: the trial of German General Anton Dostler (1891 – 1945), who gave the order to execute the O.S.S. prisoners. In his defense, General Dostler insisted that he was acting under the orders of General Gustav von Zangen, who denied the claim.
This article page from a 1943 YANK MAGAZINE concerns the American A-36 fighter-bomber of World War II. The article is accompanied by photographs and testimonial accounts as to how well the fighter aircraft performed in combat over North Africa and Sicily.
Built by North American Aviation, this ship is a dive-bomber version of that company’s P-51 Mustang fighter. The A-36 can climb at the rate of nearly half a mile a minute, with a ceiling of 30,000 feet. Powered by a 12-cylinder Allison engine, it has a flying speed in excess of 400 miles an hour…
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.
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.
