Articles from Yank Magazine
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.
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
When Tokyo heard that Nazi Germany had cried uncle and surrendered to the Allies on May 8, 1945, the Imperial Japanese spin-machine digested the news and simply decided that it was a non-event.
Articles about the daily hardships in post-war Germany can be read by clicking here.
Eyewitness accounts of all the excitement that was V.E. Day in Paris:
On the Champs Elysees they were singing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,’ and it was a long way even the few blocks from Fouquet’s restaurant to the Arc de Triomphe if you tried to walk up the Champs on VE-Day in Paris. From one side of the broad and beautiful avenue to the other, all the way to the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe in the Place de l’Etoile, there was hardly any place to breathe and no place at all to move. That was the way it was in the Place l’Opera and the Place de la Republique and all the other famous spots and in a lot of obscure little side streets that nobody but Parisians know.
Click here to read about the liberation of Paris.
Click here to read the observations of U.S. Army lieutenant Louis L’Amour concerning 1946 Paris.
Assorted reports from various European capitols concerning the capitulation of Hitler’s Germany:
Finally, when Paris believed the news, it was just a big-city celebration –crowds and singing and cheers and lots of cognac and girls. People stopped work and airplanes of all the Allied forces buzzed the Champs Elysees. Pvt. Ernest Kuhn of Chicago listened to the news come over the radio at the 108th General Hospital. He had just been liberated after five months in a Nazi PW camp and he still had some shrapnel in his throat. I listened to Churchill talk, he said, and I kept saying to myself, ‘I’m still alive. The war is over and I’m still alive’ I thought of all the guys in the 28th Division Band with me who were dead now. We used to be a pretty good band.
A report from Portland, Oregon, Houston, Texas, Los Angeles and San Francisco, California as to how those cities celebrated the surrender of Germany in May of 1945.
New Yorkers milled around the Wall Street district and Times Square, and over a loudspeaker Mayor Fiorlello H. LaGuardia told them to behave themselves…
Click here to read about the VJ-Day celebrations around the world.
A report from Boston, Atlanta, Baltimore, Cleveland, Minneapolis, St Louis and Springfield (Mass.) as to how VE-Day was celebrated (or not) in these cities:
To get an over-all view of VE-day in America, YANK asked civilian newspapermen and staff writers in various parts of the country to send an eye-witness reports. From these OPs the reports were much the same. Dallas was quiet, Des Moines was sober, Seattle was calm, Boston was staid.
Assorted yarns told by liberated Allied soldiers as to the types of games played in Japanese prison camps between bouts of malaria, dysentery and gangrene:
We had a big fellow with us in camp, a guy named Chris Bell, who was 6 feet 2 and the rocky sort. The Jap guards were having a wrestling tournament at the guardhouse and they wanted Bell to come down and wrestle one of those huge sumo men. These sumo wrestlers weigh about 300 pounds and are very agile…
This was NOT the first time that a Japanese baseball team had faced Americans.
Click here to read about that game.
Suggested Reading:
POW Baseball in World War II: The National Pastime Behind Barbed Wire
