Yank, the Army Weekly

Yank, the Army Weekly was a weekly magazine published by the United States Army Persian Gulf Command during World War II. The Persian Gulf Command was the United States Army’s service command point in the Middle East during World War II. It was established already in 1941 when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers established the U.S. Military Iranian Mission. The following year, it was converted to the Persian Gulf Service Command, and in December 1943 became the Persian Gulf Command.

The purpose of the command was to facilitate the supply of U.S. lend-lease war material to the Soviet Union through the so-called ‘Persian Corridor.’ Controlling the Gulf was of extreme importance to the different warring parties. The British and Russians had established oil infrastructure before the War, but Hitler believed that the German Army would be able to take control of these vital resources following a successful invasion of Russia. As we all know, the Russian campaign did not fare as Hitler had imagined, and once the Americans established a military presence in the Gulf, there was no longer any realistic scenario in which the oil and petroleum resources would fall into German hands.