Posted on 05/26/2012 7:46:49 AM PDT by Doogle
How it was 1945, on VJ Day. Kodachrome 16mm film. Honolulu.
(Excerpt) Read more at vimeo.com ...
ping
Thank you so much for posting. Seeing it in color makes it look so different than most WWII-era videos——much more recent, more “real”, somehow. And it makes me cry, because my dad was still in Europe then, and I wonder what he was doing that day.
My dad had mostly recovered from burns suffered in a crash landing of his C-46 in India and had been informed that his services might be required again in the planned invasion of Japan in late 1945. He was a Hump Pilot in the CBI Campaign.
I can only imagine the relief he and others felt when the VJ news was made public.
God bless your dad....those injuries must have been awful.
The Japan invasion would definitely have happened. My dad was in the Battle of the Bulge, and after a rest, he would have gone, as well. Neither of us would probably be here if they hadn’t bombed Hiroshima & Nagasaki.
Great!
Janey... You’ll love this!
Hi - saw it several months ago. But yeah, it’s great. My eyeball peepers are full of sand about now so gonna hit the bed. Take care ... Janey
Good stuff. Thanks.
Pretty cool footage. Of course, most of the time I was watching I couldn’t help but think “Yeah, nowadays, they’d be ticketed, they’d be arrested, ticketed, ticketed, arrested...”
Yep that's the way it was. I had been part of that too. We were in occupation in Austria awaiting orders. No one had been released from the Army. But now the war was over we could go home. It was August I was 19. I couldn't vote. Nine months to go for my turn to go home. Then Life begins. Thank you Pres Truman.
I had some ‘short snorters’ which my uncle sent me shortly after the war. He was a navigator on a B29 flying bombing missions over Japan. Upon his death many years ago, I gave them to his eldest son, my younger cousin.
As I recall, it was Chinese paper money taped together in a string, signed and dated by his fellow crew members after each mission. I wonder if this tradition is still carried on in today’s USAF?
Thank you so much for your service.
It was 1946 before my dad made it home.
They built the airfields just behind the front lines across the pacific. Saipan, Okinawa and others I no longer remember. They were close enough to the fighting on Okinawa that my father said they would occasionally get a stray artillery shell landing on the field.
Some truly could not bear it and went on to shoot or stab themselves to death after the Emperor came on the air at noon, 15 August 1945. Others believed the fascist Imperial Jap Tojo-clique propaganda that said once the hairy, drunk, stinky huge Americans arrived in Japan in droves they would a) rape all the small, local women (with their large prowesses--no kidding, they said this), and b) eat the Japanese kids. So many of them also went into hiding, smeared human excrement on their bodies (the pretty looking Japanese women who also cut their hair short and put on men's clothing), and others who sadly and uncessarily committed suicide for fear of being violated by the landing conquerors. Tokyo was one huge flat, bombed out parking lot. A real contrast to ebullient downtown Honolulu with pretty girls in cut offs and happy, shirtless, suntanned guys. Total victory and jublilation on one side, and total loss of a face and dejection on the other. This is the kind of absolute victory that Obama once said made him "uncomfortable about America." Traitor.
I was in Sagamihara and Yokohama, 1951-1961 and recall large areas of blackened, bombed out areas near Camp Zama.
There was a family living in a large cave not too far from our home. Japan didn’t really recover from the war until the 1960s.
bingo
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