May I encourage everyone here to consider displaying their (American) flag on Friday, May 8th in observence the 75th anniversary of V-E Day?
Do any of the ancient contributors in here (I’m looking at you, Dave Klepper & others!) have a first hand recollection of that day? Any good anecdotes handed down from dad & mom or the grandparents?
Do you recall the photo of the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square? What a day for the USA (and our allies!)!
Consider it done at the “Fortress Flintlock!”
And the flag will have 48 stars! “The Flag of Liberation.”
I’m a few years short of remembering that first hand, but if my mother were alive, I’m sure she’d have plenty to share. My late father was an Army MP at the time in Washington, DC.
As for my flag - we’ll have to see if I can get the new pole planted by then.
I really do not remember that day very well; I was nine years old. V-J Day sticks a little more in my mind.
Still, it was a glorious summer.
This is a major anniversary, too – it has been a very long 75 years since that day. Perhaps it’s a sign of the pandemic that much more isn’t being made of it.
100 years since the influenza pandemic wound down, too…
Good one, Zug! I wonder if Grampa Simpson’s from Kansas?
(I’ve got two 49 star flags myself! No disrespect intended toward “Missoura”!)
Mod-man, the pandemic’s got everyone distracted from everything. Considering how “hot” World War Two is right now it’s about the only thing that could have caused that kind of distaction.
The Russians had a big shindig planned for Red Square on May 8th, they’ve had to push it back to a future date due to coronavirus. British and French commemorations have been postponed as well.
If he were still alive, it would be interesting to hear my father’s memories of V-E Day, if he had any specific ones. He was certainly old enough to remember, but my guess is he was too busy to pay much attention - on 5/8/45 he was still on Okinawa, and the fighting was still going on.
The men I knew who were Pacific Theater veterans certainly knew about V-E Day, and were glad to hear about it, but as you put it they were too busy with the Japanese to do any celebrating. V-E Day didn’t affect them at all.
The only consolation for guys in the Pacific was if they had any friends or relatives fighting in Europe they didn’t have to worry about them anymore, at least that burden on their minds was lifted.
A similar story would come from my late father-in-law. He was a copilot of a B-17 in the US 15th Air Force based out of Foggia, Italy and had a new bride back in S.D. Think for a moment about the relief he and his fellow airmen must have felt at the time. I doubt if we’d be where we are now if it weren’t for men like them.
Train related story, told at their 50th wedding anniversary: Opposites attract- After their short honeymoon in 1944, my in-laws took a train from their hometown of Aberdeen, S.D. to a military base somewhere in Florida. As Margie the new bride sat quietly in her seat, Ken went seat to seat and struck up a conversation with everyone else on the train. I’m a Margie. My wife is a Ken.
Like Johnny, I was nine and have no specific memories of that day There are some faint recollections that there were celebrations for V J DAY in late Aug or early Sept.
The program on a local radio station every Saturday afternoon, which devotes itself to old-time radio shows, etc., has been following the events of 75 years ago with news reports, etc. I’m sure VE Day and its aftermath will get its share of coverage this Saturday.
(WDCB, 90.9, for Chicago-area folks interested…Saturday afternoons, 1:00-5:00 p.m.)
My dad had been in the Pacific Theater, but–judging from the celebratory pictures I can remember from the album we can no longer find–he was Stateside when VJ Day took place.
(Today, May 6, would have been my dad’s 98th birthday. Sadly, he died at 55.)
The paper in my dad’s eastern Montana home town has a column of 25, 50, 75 and 100 years ago. A couple of months back, the 75 years ago section mentioned my dad finished officer’s school and being commissioned as an Ensign in the USN. The 100 years ago portion had a couple of notes of one family recovering from the flu and another family losing an infant to the flu.
With one uncle based in the south Pacific (USAAF), my dad shipping out in the Pacific and my grandfather working a few months at Hanford, VJ day was much more important in my family than VE day.
I do like the idea of flying the flag on the 8th.
Based on what I heard from Dad over the years, V-E Day was an event but it wasn’t quite that improtant. He had finished his combat tour (32 missions) some time after Operation Overlord and was waiting for his next tour. He did say once that he was about to be assigned to Air Transport Command flying supplies to Alaska when the 509th CG dropped the big ones.
Lest we forget, many American GI’s were coming back stateside to await orders to the Pacific theater for the push into Japan itself. I had a cousin who was a major in Italy received his orders to the Pacific, I believe, Okinawa where my dad was awarded the silver star. Fortunatly, the atom bombs ended that part of WWII.
One of my brothers was a radar operator on a minesweep (AM55) that swept mines in the Mediterranean.
After VE day, his ship was moved to the San Diego area, with the intent to send it to the action in the Pacific. His next move was in April of 1946–when he was discharged.
Probably with the sure understanding that the United States would experience a million or more casualties ‘finishing the job’ with the Japanese empire.
I do think there is something to the revisionist idea that the Russian invasion of Manchuria was a significant part of the Japanese surrender. The actual military effect of the early fission weapons were less (as has been occasionally stated) than distributed incendiary raids on Japanese cities. For strategic reasons much of the horror of sustained intentional incendiary bombing (the most dramatic probably being Hamburg after Churchill ordered ‘opening the window’ to incapacitate the air defenses; the most literarily famous probably being Dresden … but Tokyo by most measures dwarfing both for suffering) was not played up as much as the prompt effects of Just One Bomb, but it seemed clear to me that a national government unresponsive to the threat of sustained Tokyo-style raids would not be initially cowed by the effective ability of a ‘weather-flight’ size raid to accomplish a somewhat smaller version of the same thing. As we know now, there were only two more weapons in reserve, one nowhere near deployment, with only one more in about a six-week window of completion – if this had resulted in stoppage of further atomic raids (the next probably on Kokura, more of a legitimate military target) I think there might have been a higher likelihood of ‘no surrender’ up to the first stages of home-island invasion … after which there might have been tragic levels of sacrifice on both sides of the predicted level, followed by a far less generous postwar policy (at least as severe as that in pre-Marshall Germany) rather than what MacArthur et al. developed.
Much of the added joy at VJ day reflects that cloud bei
As I read years ago, there were only three A-bombs on hand. Hiroshima and Nagasaki got the first two. The third was being saved for the invasion of Kyushu and Tokyo was the intended target to wipe out or seriously disrupt or cripple Japan’s centralized command and control. Bomb goes BOOM, then the troops go in.
It hardly matters, at least it didn’t have to be done.
Concerning V-E Day, I remember my mother telling me (She’s a New York City girl) that the V-E celebrations in the city were a lot bigger than the V-J Day ones. She said V-J Day was almost anti-climactic, the common (mis)conception being that once the Germans were beaten the Japanese couldn’t last much longer. If they only knew!
Guys in the Pacific weren’t saying “Home alive in '45!”, they were thinking “The Golden Gate in '48!”
I’ve read a couple of books that stated a third weapon was being flown from Los Alamos August 14th, with the flight stopped at Hamilton Field. The operational plan called for four bombs to be ready in September (“Whirlind” by Barrett Tillman). I wonder what the end of WW2 would have been like if UofChi MetLab hadn’t screwed up with their heavy water reactor (only running it 8 hours a day), which would have allowed the Pu production reactors at Hanford to start in Sep '44 as opposed to Dec '44.
A little remarked episode with respect to the invasion of Saipan was that an IJN sub was carrying bubonic plague infested fleas to be used against the invading forces. Fortunately for Japan, the submarine was sunk before it could deliver its cargo. The US retaliation would have been horrendous as we had massive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.
V-J Day [shortened from Victory over Japan] Was the formal notice surrender, on the afternoon of 15 August 1945 by the Emperor [Hiorhito] in a national radio broad cast. “…“Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in the ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation,” Hirohito said, “But would also lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”…”
The first Atomic Bomb was dropped at Hiroshima on 6 August 1945: killing approx 70,000. The second bamb was dropped on 9 August 1945: killing approx 40,000.
At that time the predictions were that the allies would lose approximately, an estimated 1,000,000 troops. President Truman was said to be 'haunted by the size of the numbers" (?). In anticipation of those losses, the U.S. Government had ordered some 500,000 extra Purple Heart Medals struck in advance of that invasion. See linked @ http://theamericanpresident.us/images/projections.pdf
That supply of Purple Heart Merdals lasted until the conflicts in the Middle East into 2000.
Bearing in mind that much of the loss of forces was in the aftermath of the invasions of Saipan,Okinawa, and the other battles of the island hopping campaigns of the Pacific.
My interest in Operation Downfall is purely historical. I did not get to Okinawa uintil 1967, and into Japan 1968. Brief visits, to be sure, but was able to see how it was at that time. Prior to that, it was in WWII history in the Med. My Dad was there for 22 months on an LCI, and was there until just after Operation Dragoon{Invasion of Southern France in Aug of 1944].