Revisiting the V-J Day experience

Fifty-nine years ago today, on Aug. 14, 1945, the good burghers of Maine’s cities, towns and hamlets – like their counterparts across the country – awoke to find themselves beset by the competing emotions of joy and sadness. And with good reason.

Joy because the long-awaited V-J (Victory over Japan) Day had arrived at last, ending World War II and optimistically setting the stage for a surge of peace and prosperity the likes of which the nation had never known. Sadness because too many sons and fathers, husbands and friends had fallen on foreign soil and would be coming home in flag-draped caskets, if at all.

Down through the mists of time Aug. 14 has also played host to other occurrences of note: In the year 1040, according to Shakespeare’s version of things, the ambitiously evil Macbeth, nagged to a farethewell by his old lady, offed Duncan, King of Scots. In 1846, tree hugger Henry David Thoreau trifled with the tax man and was jailed for tax resistance. The Social Security Act became law on this date in 1935, and shortly afterward spendthrift Washington politicians began eyeballing the program as a source of funding for their pet pork projects. On Aug. 14, 1893, France became the first country to test motorists and issue drivers’ licenses. Not that anyone who’s had the adventure of matching driving skills with those of a Frenchman on his own turf would ever suspect as much.

But for the sheer relief that comes of having a millstone of gloom removed from around the national neck, none of the previous Aug. 14 happenings can match that of Aug. 14, 1945, when peace was delivered to a world grown weary of war. With that era’s version of the Axis of Evil (Germany, Italy and Japan) defeated one by one by Allied forces determined not to fail in their mission, American GIs would soon begin returning home to take up where they had left off in pursuit of The American Dream.

Most anyone with any serious mileage on his or her bones well recalls the impromptu celebrations that broke out in Maine’s cities, towns and hamlets when the news arrived, via radio, that the war was officially over.

Citizens turned out in the streets en masse to whoop it up, many aided and abetted by freely flowing adult beverages. Bands struck up spirited patriotic tunes. Fireworks, the possession of which would land a guy in deep doo-doo today, exploded intermittently, crowd safety be damned. Supercharged little kids and their dogs, taking their cues from their elders and sensing a special dispensation to push the envelope of allowable exuberance, raised hell on the village green. A whole lot of ladies got swept off their feet and ardently kissed multiple times, often by total strangers. On this night of peace and good will, even the hard-core troublemakers couldn’t get themselves thrown into jail.

And yet, behind it all after the hoopla had died down, there remained a pervasive sense of compassion for those families whose loved ones would never return, their potential never to be realized. (And, yes, a certain pity as well for the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki obliterated by the atomic bomb, mankind’s newest weapon of mass destruction.)

Renowned World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle spent most of the war covering American troops in Europe. But during the latter stages of the European campaign he transferred to the Pacific Theater. There, he wrote of V-E (Victory Europe) Day in May 1945: “And so it is over. The catastrophe on one side of the world has run its course. The day that it had so long seemed would never come has come at last.”

In a 1986 book of his dispatches from the front titled “Ernie’s War,” edited by David Nichols, Pyle supposed that emotions were much the same among Allies the world over. “First a shouting of the good news with such joyous surprise that you would think the shouter himself had brought it about. And then an unspoken sense of gigantic relief – and then a hope that the collapse in Europe would hasten the end in the Pacific…” He worried, though, that the American public “in the joyousness of high spirits” at war’s end might forget the dead.

Pyle was killed by a bullet from a Japanese sniper on the Pacific island of Ie Shima just four months before V-J Day. But were he with us on this 59th V-J Day anniversary I suspect he’d be reassured that America has not forgotten its World War II heroes. Nor is it ever likely to do so.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net