Yank Magazine

Articles from Yank Magazine

The Tiger Tank at the Aberdeen Proving Ground
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

The American army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground rests on 72,962 acres in Aberdeen, Maryland. Since 1917 it has been the one spot where the U.S. Army puts to the test both American and foreign ordnance and in 1944 the gang at Aberdeen got a hold of a 61 1/2 ton German battle-wagon, popularly known as the Tiger Tank (PZKW-VI). This is a nicely illustrated single page article that explains what they learned.


For further reading about the Tiger Tank, click here.

World War Two Hollywood
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

The attached article is a swell piece of journalism that truly catches the spirit of home front America. You will read about the war-weary Hollywood that existed between the years 1941-1945 and the movie shortages, the hair-pin rationing, the rise of the independent producers and the ascent of Van Johnson (4-F slacker) and Lauren Becall:

Lauren, a Warner Brothers property, is a blonde-haired chick with a tall, hippy figure, a voice that sounds like a sexy foghorn and a pair of so-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it eyes

Washington, D.C. During Wartime
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

Washington, D.C. has always been described as a pretty dull place and the only ones who ever seem to feel differently must have had a good deal of experiences in far worse locations. In this case, I am referring to Iowa and the war-torn portions of the South Pacific, which are the only two locations this YANK journalist had ever called home; so he liked Washington just fine. The author in question, Sergeant Merle Miller (1919 – 1986), does not ramble on about historic bone-yards or any other pedantic clap-trap, but rather presents useful information that a G.I. can apply to his life:

Of course, getting a fair date while you’re in town is no problem. A Canadian newspaperman recently discovered that, judging from ration-book requests, there are 82,000 single girls of what he called the right marrying age of 20 to 24 in town, and only 26,000 men of the same age Therefore, he concluded, a girl has only about a 30-percent chance of getting a husband — or, for that matter, a date


The missing period at the close of the article, I assume, is due entirely to war-time shortages.


To read about the VJ-Day celebrations in Washington, click here.

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British Attempts to Comprehend the American Lingo
(Yank Magazine, 1943)

Attached is small Yank Magazine article pertaining to a booklet titled, When You Meet an American that was distributed to assorted British girls by their government during the Second World War:

Try not to appear shocked at some of their expressions…if a lad from back home asks for a hot dog he actually means, ‘fried sausage in split rolls’…’Hi’ya baby!’ is legitimate.


Click here to read further about American teen slang.

Peace Comes to the United States
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Even though the war had ended some four months earlier, the American people were still receiving envelopes from the Department of War about the deaths and maimings of their sons when this article appeared.


These columns reported that peacetime took some getting used to, but day by day, the nation was slowly swinging into its post-war stride.



What if the Atomic Bomb had never been invented? When would the war have ended?


Articles about the daily hardships in post-war Germany can be read by clicking here.

VJ-Day and the End of the War
(Yank, 1945)

If you’ve been looking for a manifesto that would serve as a document of intention for the entire mass of Americans who make up the Greatest Generation, you might have found it.


While the other articles on VJ-Day on this site illustrate well the pure joy and delight that was experienced by so many that day, this editorial cautions the G.I. readers to remember all that they have learned from the war while laying the groundwork for the policy that would check Soviet expansion all over the globe.

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Americans Tell of Japanese Prison Camps
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

A well illustrated magazine article which relays the tale of two Marines who were captured at the fall of Corregidor in 1941 and spent the remainder of the war in a Japanese prisoner of war camp on the island of Honshu, Japan. The two men told Yank correspondent Bill Lindau all about their various hardships and the atrocities they witnessed as well as the manner in which their lot improved when their guards were told that Japan had surrendered.


Click here to read an article about the American POW experience during the Korean War.

Click here if you would like to read about a World War One German P.O.W. camp.

The Japanese Prison Camp at Cabanatuan
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Here is an interview with the American P.O.W.s who were strong enough to survive the abuses at the Japanese Prison Camp at Cabanatuan (Luzon, Philippines).These men were the survivors of the infamous Bataan Death March:

You were on the Death March? somebody asked him.

Is that what they call it?…Yes, we walked to Capas, about 65 miles. Three days and three nights without food, only such water as we could sneak out of the ditches. We were loaded into steel boxcars at Campas, 100 men to a car – they jammed us in with rifle butts…

The rescue of these men by the 6th Ranger Battalion (U.S. Army) was dramatized in a 2005 television production titled The Great Raid.

Click here if you would like to read more about the 6th Rangers and the liberation of the Cabanatuan P.O.W. camp.

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Prisoners of the Japanese
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

An escaped Australian Private, having been rescued by a U.S. Navy submarine, recalls how life was in the hell of a Japanese jungle P.O.W. camp, where all Allied prisoners were forced to build a railroad for the Emperor:

‘I often sit and wonder what I’m doing here’ reflected Pvt. James L. Boulton of Melbourne, Australia. ‘By the law of averages I should have been dead two years ago, and yet here I am smoking Yank cigarettes, eating Yank food with Yank nurses taking care of me. When I was a PW in the jungles of Burma I never thought I’d survive the beatings and fevers and ulcers.’

Click here to read articles about post-war Japan.

Kamikaze Attacks
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

A two page magazine article about the U.S. Navy destroyer Newcombe (DD-586), a hard-charging ship that suffered heavy damage from repeated Kamikaze attacks off of Okinawa on April 6, 1945 (the Ryukyu Islands):

Then the plane shot past them, ripped through the gun mount and shattered itself against the after-stack. There was a blinding flash. The Newcombe shuddered and rolled heavily to starboard.

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Fact and Fiction About Submarines
(Yank Magazine, 1943)

This article,‘Blow It Out of Your Ballast Tank’ was penned by Marion Hargrove and cartoonist Ralph Stein
in order to clear away some of the Hollywood blarney and set the record straight about the W.W. II submarine duty in the U.S. Navy:

To read articles about submarines, you’d think they were about as big as a small beer keg, and that the men worked curled around each others elbows. To see submarine movies, you’d think the sailors spent their time bailing water, gasping, sweating, hammering on jammed doors and getting on each other’s nerves.

This is really a lot of Navy propaganda, designed to keep surface fleets from being stripped of their personnel by a rush of volunteers for submarine duty.


Click here to read about a Soviet submarine called the S-13…

American Losses at Normandy
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

In the July 22,1944 issue of YANK the editors saw fit to release the numbers of American casualties that were racked-up during the first eleven days of the allied Normandy Invasion. In the fullness of time, the numbers were adjusted to be considerably lower than the 1944 accounting; Pentagon records now indicate 1,465 were killed, 3,184 were wounded, 1,928 were registered as missing, 26 were taken prisoner.
It is interesting to note that YANK did not sugar coat the report.


Of the total US figure, 2499 casualties were from the US airborne troops (238 of them being deaths). The casualties at Utah Beach were relatively light: 197, including 60 missing. However, the US 1st and 29th Divisions together suffered around 2,000 casualties at Omaha Beach.

FDR’s D-Day prayer can be read here

Additional facts and figures about the U.S. Army casualties in June of ’44 can be read in this article.

The GIs Hear About the Death of President Roosevelt
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Gathered from all the various battlefronts around the globe, the attached article serves as a archive of spontaneous reactions uttered by a smattering of stunned GIs when they heard that President Roosevelt had died:


Pvt. Howard McWaters of Nevada City, California, just released from the hospital and waiting to go back to the Americal Division, shook his head slowly. ‘Roosevelt made a lot of mistakes,’ he said. ‘But I think he did the best he could, and when he made mistakes he usually admitted it. Nobody could compare with him as President.’


Click here to read about President Harry Truman…

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An Interview with a Kamikaze Pilot
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

With the fall of imperial Japan, YANK correspondent Robert MacMillan was
one of the very first journalists to interview the Japanese Kamikaze pilot Norio Okamoto, which allowed his readers to gain some understanding as
to how the Kamikaze Corps operated:

Okomoto’s story took all the wind -the Divine Wind – out of the Kamikaze sails. Even the interpreter, a Japanese civilian, was surprised. He had worked for radio Tokyo and while he knew a lot of the propaganda stories were ridiculous, he had believed the Kamikaze legend.


Click here to read articles about post-war Japan.

The VT Radio Fuse
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Its been said that World War Two was the first high-tech war, and a passing look at many of the military tools used between 1939 and 1945 will bare that out to be true. It was not only th the first war in which jet engines and atomic bombs were used, but also the first war to deploy walkie-talkie radios, rockets, and radar. This article concerns what the U.S. Department of War classified as a weapons system just as revolutionary as the atomic bomb: the VT fuse artillery shell (a.k.a. the time proximity fuse). It was used with great success in various theaters: anti-Kamikaze in the Pacific, anti-personnel in the Ardennes and anti V-1 in defense of Britain.

This is a short article that goes into greater detail outlining the successes listed above and explains how the system worked; it also is accompanied by a diagram of the shell.


Click here to learn about the timing fuses designed for W.W. I shrapnel shells.

The American 4.5 Multiple Rocket Launcher
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

To the American G.I.s serving along the Italian Front, the presence of rockets was like a page out of a Buck Rogers comic book. They had grown accustomed to seeing them mounted on the wings of quickly speeding American fighter aircraft, but to see and hear them up close and personal when fixed to the turret of a Sherman tank (pictured) seemed altogether too bizarre. This article, Rockets in Italy, will allow you to learn about the use and deployment of the U.S. Army’s ground rocket-gun and how it amazed all the men who ever came near enough to see one.


Click here to read about one of the greatest innovations by 20th Century chemists: plastic.

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