Bert "Yank" Levy

              LIFE Yank Levy
REG. U. S. PAT. OFF.


HOW TO BE A GUERRILLA
Yank Levy preaches the art he has practiced

The first U. S. training school for teaching guerrilla fighting was inaugurated this summer at Concord, Mass. under the supervision of Gen. Sherman Miles, commander of the First Corps Area.  The job of instructing 76 middle-aged State Guardsmen and 30 Army men was given to scrappy Bert (Yank) Levy (left), 45-year-old Canadian-born soldier of fortune.  Yank, a veteran of four wars and author of a textbook on guerrilla fighting, last year served on the staff of a British Home Guard school, and was recently asked by the British War Office to resume this post.

Guerrilla warfare is the term used to describe all the impromptu methods of fighting employed by people who live in an area occupied or surrounded by the enemy.  Its tactics embody all the harassing, irritating, hit-and-run kinds of fighting which irregular troops and civilians have utilized to sting and slow the organized machinery of the Axis in China, Russia, the Philippines and Occupied Europe.  According to Yank, the specific objectives of guerrilla warfare have been summed up best by the leader of a nation which is daily proving the value of behind-the-lines fighting, Joseph Stalin.  In an order of the day broadcast to the Russians after the Nazi invasion, Stalin proclaimed: In areas occupied by the enemy, guerrilla units must be formed … to blow up bridges and roads, to damage telegraph and telephone lines, to set fire to forests, stores and transport.  In the occupied regions conditions must be made unbearable for the enemy and all his accomplices.  They must be hounded and annihilated at every step and all their measures frustrated.

Most of Yank Levy's hand-to-hand fighting methods violate the Marquis of Queensberry rules.  Guerrilla warfare is neither easy nor pleasant.  It is more exhausting mentally, physically and nervously than any other form of combat.  A good guerrilla must be cool when the going is hottest.  He must weigh obedience, teamwork and initiative at every turn.  Besides knowing how to fight, he must know when and where so that he strikes against whatever the enemy lacks most.  To survive he must know every inch of his territory by day and night Against a better equipped enemy he must always make 




A veteran of the World War, a fighting man who did post-graduate work in Mexico, Palestine and Spain, tells how to stop the enemy in your own back yard

CORONET

Your Role as a Guerrilla Fighter
by BERT YANK LEVY*

EDITORS' NOTE: What you are about to read is really a treatise on how to commit murder and mayhem—how to destroy property—quickly and efficiently.  It is written by no arm-chair theorist, but by an experienced veteran of many a war in which guerrilla tactics were widely employed.  It would not be published at all in ordinary times.  Today, however, it is practical knowledge—tomorrow it might even be desperately timely knowledge.  As a matter of fact, similar information is currently being short-wave radioed to Denmark—in the hope it is not too late.  How much better had the Danes been able to receive such information before Denmark was invaded!

IT COULD happen here just as it has happened across the sweep of the world from Norway to the East Indies.  We could be invaded.  And if that should happen—then you might be a guerrilla.

Against that possibility, there are some things you should know.  Because then your own countryside becomes your battlefield.  With the enemy in your back yard you will then have to know how effectively to harass him, to cut his supply lines, to intercept messages and to destroy equipment and supplies.

In the last war, people came to believe that guerrilla warfare was a 


Figure


This article comes straight from the shoulder-holster of Yank Levy, the best practical instructor in Britain today on the art of guerrilla warfare.  Yank is a man whose life has been punctuated by gunfire.  Born in Canada, he was using real guns as an age when most little boys are playing with toy ones.  During the last war, he served as a deck-hand in the Merchant Service.  Afterward, bored, Bert went off to the Middle East to fight.  Next came a little gun-running in Mexico.  After that he served with the International Brigade in Spain.  Today he's quieted down temporarily, teaching guerrilla tactics to Home Guardsmen.

OCTOBER, 1942

* Based on his book Guerrilla Warfars, copyright, 1942, by Penguin Books, Inc.




LIFE'S COVER LIFE

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The tough-looking hombre peering through the daisies on this week's cover is Bert (Yank) Levy, one of the world's foremost authorities on guerrilla warfare.  Born in Canada 45 years ago, Yank has fought in wars all over the globe.  Now he's busy telling others how to take care of themselves in hand-to-hand fighting.  For information on how to be a guerrilla, see pp. 40–45.



Noted British Commando To Lecture Here
The noted soldier of fortune, Bert (Yank) Levy, whom the British war office and United States war department drafted to teach commando tactics to their respective soldiers, will arrive in Berrien county the day after Christmas to deliver two lecturers, Probate Judge Malcolm Hatfield announced today.

As soon as Yank Levy was old enough to handle a weapon he was, to use his own words, mixed up in Mexico.  He fought in the 39th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, during the last war in Palestine and in the desert beyond Jordan.  He then took part in the Nicaragua affair, but prefers not to refer to this incident for a thirty years' sentence still makes him pensive.  He served in the International Brigade in Spain and became an officer in the machine-gun company of the British Battalion.  He was wounded and captured on the Jarama and spent six months in General Franco's prisons.  Released by an exchange of prisoners, he had to be restrained by the British war office from returning to Spain.

It was the experience gained in Spain, fighting the Panzer divisions of Mussolini and Hitler that enabled Bert Levy to prove to the world that mechanized military forces with their armored spearheads have one great point of weakness.  By his constant attacks on the German and Italian lines of communication and supplies in Spain he demonstrated that tanks and dive-bombers can be made helpless if their gasoline supplies are destroyed by the citizens of the region through which they are fighting.

Recognizing that the practical means Yank Levy had formulated could be applied against the enemy in the event Great Britain was invaded, he was requested to join the War Office No. 1 School and demonstrate his newly devised commando methods.  Last summer he was loaned by the British war office to the U. S. war department for several months to teach army and state troop officers the practical methods he demonstrated in his book Guerrilla Warfare.



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REDPATH is proud to present to its patrons — BERT (YANK) LEVY – the most dynamic and colorful of all war speakers, for a full lecture season, beginning October 15, 1943...............

Judge M. Hatfield He was able to whip our local enthusiasm to a white heat, and did more to wipe out indifference and apathy than a dozen editorials.

Commandant, British War Office School, Osterley Park, Eng. BERT LEVY is without question the best lecturer – most convincing, most detailed and most practical – on the tactics of Guerrilla and Commando Warfare available in Britain.