http://www.etherit.co.uk/month/8/03.htm
September 3rd, 1945 (MONDAY)
UNITED KINGDOM: Sloop HMS Modeste is commissioned.
FRENCH INDOCHINA: In Laos, Franco-Laotian forces enter Vientiane and release interned French civilians.
NORTH-WEST PACIFIC: The Soviets sever all communications between Japan and the Kuriles and Sakhalin.
COMMONWEALTH OF THE PHILIPPINES: Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the commander of the Philippines, surrenders to Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright at Camp John Hay, Baguio, Mountain Province, Luzon, Philippine, Islands.
Off Wake Island, the Japanese surrender in a ceremony on board the destroyer escort USS Levy (DE-162).
Off the Bonin islands, Lieutenant General Yoshio Tachibana, the local commander, signs the surrender documents on board the destroyer USS Dunlap (DD-384) off Chichi Jima. General Tachibana is later convicted and executed for a particularly gruesome series of war crimes perpetuated against U.S. airmen who had been captured in the area during 1944-45.
U.S.A.: Top songs on the pop music record charts are
(1) “Till the End of Time” by Perry Como;
(2) “On The Atchison, Topeka And Santa Fe” by Johnny Mercer;
(3) “Gotta Be This Or That (Part 1)” by Benny Goodman and his Orchestra; and
(4) “You Two Timed Me One Time Too Often” by Tex Ritter.
Canadian Boner
So Lt. Gen. Wainwright is in Tokyo Bay on-board the Missouri on the morning of the Sept 2nd, and in the Philippines on Luzon on the 3rd. That's a long way to go in transport aircraft that barely broke 300 mph.
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Senior Thesis; “What I learned in Homer’s Class” (or, “Why I didn’t spend the time to look at my file more closely, Your Honor. I was posting on Homer’s Daily Thread. Again.”)
I learned a number of things reading the history of World War 2 day by day “as it happened” and it gave me some new perspectives as well. I know I will miss a few things that made me say “huh; I didn’t know that” but I can give a partial list here.
1. Nuclear physics and atomic research were widely reported as news items in the late 1930s. I was surprised at the depth of scientific reporting into atomic research, and the NYT was reporting on potential military applications of atomic energy. The tailgunner on Enola Gay knew enough to ask Col. Tibbetts “Sir, are we splitting atoms today?” The atomic bombs should not have been a surprise to the critical reader of the Times.
2. The reporting of the military situation on the Eastern Front was much more comprehensive than I had thought. It’s no secret to readers here that I have always been fascinated by the titanic death match between Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, but I had always assumed this was an “unknown war” to most Americans. Instead, Ralph Parker did a fine job of conveying the scale of operations in his reporting. There was no doubt that he was under a number of restrictions by the Soviet censors, but they didn’t appear to be any more rigorous than the restrictions by Eisenhower’s SHAEF. If the war in the east was an unknown war, it was because the American public forgot about it very quickly once the Cold War began.
3. Speaking of the Cold War, it’s pretty clear that began before World War 2 ended. I now put the official start of the Cold War in 1944 when Stalin established his puppet Lublin Committee as the official government of Poland. That showed how things were going to go in Eastern Europe..
3. Life went on. It was evident in the ads you saw, and I appreciate Homer’s inclusion of the regular ads from the NYT. I’m sure he could have easily clipped them out, but their inclusion gave a perspective to American life during the war. There were no automobiles, tires, large appliances or electronics available because of the war effort, but life in the United States was not bad, and far better than any other place in the world. The British were starving, the Japanese, Germans and Italians lived in rubble, and the Russians lived in holes in the ground. Think of the things we saw in the daily ads that could only be had on the black market at a staggering price, or could not be had at all, by the average citizen of the world.
4. Which gets me to next point, which is just how incredible our victory was, and the position it left the United States at the end of this war. We entered the war with the world’s largest economy, and when the war was over, we had over half of the world’s GDP. Even in the heyday of the Roman Empire, I do not believe any other country ever loomed so large over the entire world as did the United States in 1945. And no other country did so in anyways near a benevolent manner.
My dad, my uncles, the neighborhood dads, my male teachers and little league coaches all lived what we’ve been reading these past six or seven years. Because of what they did my life was so much better in material terms than any other generation at any time in the history of the world, ever. I marvel that God chose for me to be born in 1959 in the United States of America.
And that gets me to where we are today, and where we are going. Because much of the perspective in what I learned about this war has to do with its lasting legacy.
5. Was World War 2 the end of large scale armed conflict? I ask it as a question, because the “end of war” was predicted in 1910, too. But none has happened during the “Long Peace” of 70 years. Conflict will not end, it’s just going to be fought differently with different weapons. Today’s weapons are intellect, political will, and the human womb. Mass armies with rifles could well be obsolete.
6. European civilization is dead. The one-two punch of World War 1 and World War 2 killed it. The real men of Europe all died at Verdun, the Somme and Stalingrad. While Europe could have recovered from World War 1, given another fifty years of peace, it didn’t get the chance. It could not recover from World War 2. By about 2050, white ethnic Europeans will be in the same boat as the Copts in Egypt; an insular minority in countries they once called their own, they will hold no political power, and very little economic power. By 2100, there will be very few unassimilated white ethnic Europeans living in Europe. They just don’t have it in them to defend themselves and it’s all because of the destruction of World War 2.
There are a lot more things I learned in this class, and I look forward to reading what other posters/class members have to add.
Thank you for the excellent work putting this together. I cannot imagine the hours it must have taken to do this. It was wonderful watching events unfold in “real time.” The past week has been rough because I would always look for your post first thing each morning and now there is nothing. It’s also rough because my Dad’s involvement was being part of the occupation force and that was just getting ramped up when the series ended.
Thanks again for the yeoman’s effort. Now what will you do with all of your spare time?