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Children who had just graduated from high school, classes 41-44, died in North Africa, in the mountains of Italy, and on the coral reefs of Tarawa. Death by telegram knocked on his neighbor’s door, if not his own.
From our seats in 2020, we know how this Second Act ends. We have seen the movie; It’s no wonder Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains team up in the fog at the Casablanca airfield. But for those who tell it, who survived WWII, the end of its second act was never written.
Three and a half years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Allies had ended the Nazi reign, razed city after city, killed many Germans, and exposed the barbarity of National Socialism. For millions, VE Day, May 8, 1945, was a dream come true, a roar of joy at a great time for humanity, a day of peaceful parades and flyovers with sailors kissing nurses in the streets.
If only VE Day had been the conclusion of Act II. But for the thousands of Americans who continue to fight at the Pacific Theater (and their families at home), VE Day justified just a few paragraphs in Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper. There was still a war going on in places with more of the unfamiliar names that Americans had to look up in the World Atlas, plus little specks of black ink on a blue map. Where, exactly, is Okinawa? Why is there a battle in a place called Balikpapan?
“While it lasts” silenced the hype of VE Day, even as magazines and newspapers ran TV ads and new fads. War bonds were still advertised to “Help get the job done!” Facing pages with a piece that extols the charms of a recent debutante. To pretend that the war was over was to imagine that it would miraculously disappear.
In the winter of 1944 and ’45 and the spring of ’45, America’s new B-29 bombers dropped incendiary bombs on Japanese cities that ignited a whirlwind of fire, burning thousands of men, women, and children to death in landscapes. infernal directly from Dante. Plans had been drawn up for the invasion of Japan that would dwarf the D-Day landings in Normandy the previous spring. American troops, many of them veterans from the battlefields of Europe, were gathering on the west coast. As late as the first week of August 1945, the end of World War II was nothing more than a patch of cloudless sky on the horizon. From hell to heaven in ’47? Perhaps.
Without warning, in a moment beyond the comprehension of ordinary people, a scariest week brought the war to a sudden and shocking end. In a blink something reduced the city of Hiroshima to a landscape of molten glass, disappearing tens of thousands of its inhabitants, leaving no trace of them other than their shadows. Three days later, the city of Kokura would have suffered the same destruction, but the smoke obscured the fall of the bomb, so Nagasaki, the backup target, was annihilated instead.
