… the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
On this last day of war, according to another story on page one, Japanese aircraft approaching the Pacific Fleet off Tokyo were still being shot down. Admiral William Halsey was quoted: “It looks like the war is over, but if any enemy planes appear, shoot them down in friendly fashion.” It seemed hard to shake off the martial spirit; just before the surrender announcement, the Times reported, the Japanese had sunk the American heavy cruiser Indianapolis, killing all 1,196 men aboard.
President Harry S. Truman, in declaring a two-day victory holiday, said: “This is a great day. … This is the day when fascism and police government cease in the world.” His mother told newspapermen: “I’m glad Harry decided to end the war. He’s no slow person. He gets where he’s going in short order.”
The Vatican announced that it was glad the war, in which fifty million people had died, was over. In Buenos Aires, in crowds assembled before the United States embassy to celebrate the end of the war, shouts of “Death to Franco” were heard. Syngman Rhee, president of South Korea, declared his gratitude to the United States government and to Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek, and said Korea was entering the world of free nations in the name of peace, justice, and democracy.
On this last day of the war, France sent notes to the United States, Britain, and the U.S.S.R. suggesting early agreement on France’s administrative take-over of Indochina.
Joy was reported among thirty-three Americans of Japanese descent living together in a relocation hostel in New York, after having been released from relocation centers in the West.
In Moscow, General Dwight D. Eisenhower said the United States and Russia should be the best of friends, and hoped Russia would understand that in his country, “under the principles governing our affairs, there is no censorship of the press. … I, like every other soldier of America, will die for the freedom of the press. …” Alongside the general’s observations appeared the announcement that the Office of War Information, which had handed out official propaganda stories to newspapers throughout the war, was about to disband. Elmer Davis, the OWI director, spoke of the “psychological warfare” that had taken place during the struggle; he now voiced hope for “an era of free exchange of information and ideas among all peoples of the world.” Another story announced the closing of the United States Office of Censorship.
Hanson W. Baldwin, the Times’s military editor, wrote on page 10: “War, to the United States, has been conducted as a big business—not a game of chess. …”
A man was electrocuted at a Barnum & Bailey circus. One of the fighting Murphys, seven brothers from Great Falls, Montana, was missing in action. The public was warned about a polio epidemic, and advised that it could now look forward to luxuries and certain essentials it was deprived of during the war. Books published on this day included Freedom’s People: How We Qualify for a Democratic Society by Bonare W. Overstreet.
A playground was being built in Lancashire in memory of thirty-eight schoolchildren who had died when an American bomber crashed into their school. British children, in New Zealand for the war, were on their way home.
Field Marshal General Wilhelm Keitel said he was still loyal to the Führer, and that he knew nothing about atrocities until the end of the war. The Führer gave all the commands, the story reported him saying, and he “merely saw to it that they were carried out by the Wehrmacht.”
A list of “latest war casualties” was given on page 13.
Rehearsals began for “Girl from Nantucket.” She was to join, among others, “Bloomer Girl,” “Up in Central Park,” “Follow the Girls,” “Oklahoma!” and “Hats off to Ice.” Motion pictures: “Military Secret,” “Anchors Aweigh,” “Rhapsody in Blue,” “Junior Miss.” Mayor Fiorello La Guardia conducted the Philharmonic in a group of marches.
On the sports page, Arthur Daley looked back sadly on the decline of sports during the war, but eagerly anticipated a new era with the return of healthy young men from the war zones. In the business section, Senator Claude Pepper of Florida was reported off to Europe and the Middle East to check on business possibilities for Americans.
That day in August, 1945, the United States was powerful and confident. It had built up a colossal industrial apparatus, it had entered a war proclaiming the right of all sovereign nations to be free of foreign domination, and it had defeated the war machines of Germany and Japan. The people of the United States had never been more fully employed, more prosperous, more united in a single cause. Then what happened? What happened within the span of one generation? Peter Berger, a social philosopher, wrote in 1968:
… in 1945, almost everywhere in the world, an American uniform represented the armed might of justice, liberating men from one of history’s darkest tyrannies. … Around 1960 American society still seemed a massive and massively stable structure. Today one has the feeling that the whole structure may come tumbling down at any moment; that even our most basic values are tottering.
The war itself, if Americans had stopped to think, could have told so much about that structure. But the United States was overcome with the grandeur of its mission. It was, all Americans acknowledged—omitting the handful of Nazi sympathizers, and the few pacifist fanatics who went to jail—the most just of wars. Only a master inventor of horror tales could have concocted an enemy as grotesquely evil as Adolf Hitler and the sieg-heiling, goose-stepping Nazi myrmidons. Who could have trumped up, even with the most fiendish imagination, the blitzkrieg conquest of Europe; the figures of Goering, Goebbels, and Himmler; the frozen Russian corpses in the snow as the German armies rolled eastward; the Stuka dive bombers screaming down on London and Warsaw and Rotterdam; the gas chambers, the ghastly operating rooms at Dachau and Auschwitz? Or the Japanese slaughter of Chinese in Nanking and Shanghai, the stunning attack on Pearl Harbor? The total evil of the Axis side certified, without question or condition, the total righteousness of the Allies.
World War II was a perfect example of that one-dimensional moral judgment so characteristic of human history: all evil on one side, all virtue on the other. Without a second thought, the dagger must be plunged not only into the foe but into everybody and everything remotely associated with him.
But what is the cost of a psychology of vengeance, in a war presumably waged for humanity? And what are the real interests of the victors, behind their speeches? World War II was fought, we all assumed, to preserve life, to end tyranny, to foster equality. Did it? And what values, what states of mind were strengthened by the war? Were they the values of peace and friendship?
Complicating factors are forgotten in the glow of a crusade. Thus, the Revolutionary War emerges from our history books without the viewpoint of the black slave, whose condition grew worse after that glorious victory for freedom. And what was the real point of the Civil War, in which more than six hundred thousand died? To slightly simplify and exaggerate: it was fought so that a single economic market could develop the most rapacious capitalism in world history, and so that a single political power from one ocean to another could become the most domineering nation in the world. The black person, presumed beneficiary of that crusade but really the pawn in a game in which competing interests vied with one another, was removed from one state of subjugation to another—one that was less crass, more flexible, more firmly anchored to the social structure.
All wars of the United States were not splendid crusades, perhaps; Americans admit doubts about the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, and even World War I. But not about World War II; it was the third of America’s unquestionably virtuous wars.
Even