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Yank The Army Weekly

© Earl Rickard

This topic's September 2003 article described LIFE magazine's first issue. This month's article looks at the final nine months of a temporary magazine that boasted worldwide distribution: YANK THE ARMY WEEKLY.

Like the GI army that spawned it, YANK magazine was temporary -- for the duration of the war. Most of World War II's servicemen were civilians at heart, serving in uniform only to win the war. YANK was conceived as the voice of those millions of citizen soldiers. Distributed around the world, YANK served the army until the war's end and then went out of business after its GI readers went home. To the end YANK lived up to its motto, "written by the men... for the men in the service."

From the beginning, realism and a straight forward writing style emerged as the hallmark of YANK's articles. Home front magazine editors were sensitive to the mores of polite society. YANK's staff writers saw the raw realities of war and reported them. This literary freedom helped influence post-war American journalism.

A good example of YANK's gritty style appeared in the 30 March 1945 Iwo Jima story. Sergeant Bill Read described in graphic detail the vicious fight for Mt. Surabachi on Iwo Jima: "There were dead Japs in every conceivable contortion of men who meet death violently. Their arms and legs were wrenched about their bodies and their fists were clenched and frozen." The article included pictures of dead marines. Home Front magazines and newspapers sometimes printed pictures of dead Japanese and Germans but rarely dead Americans.

YANK's 6 April 1945 issue switched focus to the ETO (European Theatre of Operations) with Sgt. Ralph G. Martin's article, "Roer to Rhine," describing the Allied armies swift advance in the spring of 1945. "The speed of it even excited some of the battle-weary boys... maybe we'll meet the Russians in Berlin next week. Maybe we'll be home in a couple of months."

With victory close at hand, even the battle hardened veterans who thought they had seen all the horrors of war had one last shock. "Most of us were brought up to be suspicious of 'atrocity stories.' Our suspicions carried over into this war." So wrote YANK's editors on their lead to "German Atrocities." The article left no doubt about the horrors uncovered. "This camp is a thing that has to be seen to be believed, and even then the charred skulls and pelvic bones in the furnaces seem too enormous a crime to be accepted fully."

In a spring filled with momentous headlines the next shock turned all eyes toward the home front. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's death on April 12, overshadowed all

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