At seven in the evening of August 14, 1945, Tuesday, President Harry S. Truman opened the doors of his office to journalists and confirmed before the cameras what was already suspected: Japan had surrendered unconditionally. After six years of fighting and at least sixty million dead, World War II was over.
The journalists ran towards the telephones, and three minutes later, the news was already on the illuminated signs of Times Square, in New York, where two million people took to the streets to celebrate it. In London, Prime Minister Clement Attlee got the British out of bed at midnight to confirm over the radio: "The last of our enemies is out of the game."
The relief soon turned into a global party: there were street celebrations in style in big cities like Shanghai, Nairobi, Brisbane or Paris, but also in airfields lost in the middle of the ocean, in prison camps within Japan itself and, of course, , in thousands of small towns where sirens and bells rang for hours. Of course, in many of those places alcohol ran rampant, and the party got out of hand.
In Washington, the Army had to surround the White House to prevent a festive crowd from invading it chanting “We want Harry!” but they were unable to disperse the crowd until President Truman came out in person to say hello. In Australia, for their part, they were careful to close the bars, but in Auckland, the largest city in New Zealand, so much was drunk that the cleaning services collected no less than fifteen tons of glass from the street.
In Chicago, a million people joined in the celebration, and in Los Angeles, even Hollywood stars joined the party. According to a testimony from the time, "nobody went to work the next day."
Yet nowhere did the joy run wilder than in San Francisco. Some shops already predicted a good party with signs in the windows that read: "Closed for the end of the war, we will open when we are sober", but what began with confetti and dancing in the street degenerated into wild riots that left at least thirteen dead and a thousand wounded.
The crowd, with too many drinks too many, just overturned a car that ripped off the doors of the town hall. And they took such a fancy to climbing on the roof of the trams that, by the end of the party, they had killed at least thirty. The police, who had been expressly ordered not to spoil the party for the people and content to minimize the damage, found that every time they went to arrest someone, they were stopped by a mob of drunks.
Only after two days of riots, and with the help of the Army, were the streets of downtown San Francisco cleared and peace returned to the city. Tiredness, hangover and the decision of the military authorities to revoke the permits of the soldiers and sailors to return to their bases also helped.
Despite the deaths and allegations of abuse, no one was charged or convicted. The authorities did not want to tarnish the victory celebration.
It is no coincidence that the worst excesses occurred precisely in San Francisco, a city that was full of recruits and that had been the last stop for around 1.6 million soldiers before boarding a ship to go fight at the sea. Peaceful. That Tuesday, August 14, no one felt more relieved than the twelve million Americans in uniform who were fighting the Japanese or who didn't know until that day if they would have to soon.
Many of them had already gone through the war in Europe or Africa, and they took it for granted that they would also have to land in Japan, because their surrender still seemed far away. In fact, during the battle of Iwo Jima, out of 23,000 Japanese soldiers, barely 216 had surrendered, less than 1%, and in each confrontation it was always an overwhelming majority that resisted to death or suicide. The emperor's capitulation would only come after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
For this reason, the allied soldiers received the news of the end of the war with more joy than anyone: the sailors jumped into the water from their ships, and the cannons launched flares as fireworks. American anti-aircraft batteries in Okinawa fired into the sky that day knowing they no longer had to hit any enemy planes, while Royal Navy ships in Sri Lanka turned on all their lights and water cannons without fear of attack. saboteurs.
From Pearl Harbor, the US base whose bombing, on December 7, 1941, had caused 2,400 deaths and the entry of the country into World War II, trucks full of soldiers went out to parade through the streets of Honolulu, and the military canteen distributed free food for twelve thousand people. The soldiers, who had celebrated the death of Hitler without daring to think if they would return home, breathed easy on August 14, 1945. They had survived the greatest fighting in history.
For millions of soldiers, the news that they would no longer have to fight was a great joy, but surely no one felt more relieved at the end of the war than those who were about to regain their freedom after years of torture, starvation and slave labor, that is, the 32,000 Allied POWs still in Japanese camps on the day of the surrender.
Between American and British soldiers alone (including those from other Commonwealth countries), Japan had come to take around 220,000 prisoners. Their captors had no respect for them, since in Japanese military culture falling alive into the hands of the enemy was a tremendous humiliation. With the setbacks of the war, the Japanese army had been transferring some prisoners to at least one hundred and fifty internment camps within Japan itself, where they lived through the end of the conflict.
They were true survivors: the conditions of their confinement had been so harsh that, of the 27,000 Americans taken prisoner during the conflict, 40% had died before being released. By comparison, only 1% of Americans who fell into the hands of Nazi Germany lost their lives.
After several years working from dawn to dusk in the mines or in heavy industries, surviving on just two bowls of rice a day, the nightmare ended. Most were unable to celebrate on the 14th, because the news took time to reach the camps, but they did notice some immediate changes: unaware of the surrender, their treatment by their jailers suddenly became much better.
In the remote Hanawa camp, the prisoners knew that the end of the war was near, but that did not reassure them. A guard had shown them the orders they had been given to execute all captives as soon as US troops landed in Japan. When they were told on the 14th that they no longer had to go down to the mine, it seemed strange to them, but it took a week for the camp commander to officially communicate the armistice and a month for them to be rescued.
The commander was one of many Japanese soldiers who tried to endear themselves at the last minute. In his announcement of the end of the war he wished the prisoners "a pleasant return to your lovely country with my best wishes", but that did not prevent his arrest for war crimes. A committee of Hanawa citizens also wanted to invite them to their homes so that they "would have a good impression of them before returning to the US", but they replied that their opinion had already been well formed for a long time.
On Omori, an artificial island built by the prisoners themselves in Tokyo Bay, they organized themselves to write messages on the roofs and have allied pilots drop them food, medicine and soap by parachute. When, two weeks later, an American ship arrived in the camp, it was an outburst of joy, even if some were not able to enjoy it. “Interrogated, beaten, starved and tortured, my father was too weak to join the celebration. He weighed forty kilos and had anthrax, boils, hepatitis, jaundice, dengue fever, dysentery, malaria, beriberi and nervous neurosis. Bill Dixon Jr. talks here about his father, William Dixon, a crew member of a B-29 shot down in September 1944.
"PEACE! VICTORY!” read the huge headline in the Los Angeles Times the next day, while the Boston Globe summed up the spirit of the moment with “FINALLY PEACE”. The London Daily Express opted for "PEACE ON EARTH," and the San Francisco Chronicle simply for "PEACE!" in huge letters. Japan's surrender and all that it entailed was the best news the world had received in ages.
The soldiers had a lot to celebrate, but the party went further, to all the homes that had suffered the war in one way or another. In the US, for example, it meant the beginning of the end of rationing. In many of those newspaper front pages that spoke of peace and victory, the headlines also picked up more mundane, but important aspects: "End gasoline rationing and canned food."
On August 15, many celebrated the end of the Axis by treating themselves to filling up their gas tanks and driving for hours on end. Mobility had been one of the great sacrifices of the war effort: for three years, buying a new car was difficult, as car factories were making tanks and other military vehicles, while used cars were also a luxury item. Drivers were limited not only on the gasoline they could buy, but also on tires, a restriction that took a further six months to lift after the victory.
Nylon is another example: it was needed to make parachutes, ropes, mosquito nets..., and that made women's stockings impossible to find during the war. When it was over, American women who for years had painted a parting down their legs to simulate a seam were willing to do almost anything to get it. Without going any further, in a Pittsburgh store, still a year after the surrender of Japan, forty thousand of them lined up sixteen blocks to buy a pair. It was another way of celebrating peace.
For millions of people around the world, the announcement of August 14, 1945 also promised a return to a normality that had disappeared when the war began; even earlier, with the Great Depression. It would take Americans two more years to put as much sugar as they wanted in their coffee, and the British would not see the end of food rationing for eight years after Japan's surrender.
The celebration of life, however, was almost immediate for the winners. In 1942, shortly after the US entered the war with an uncertain fate, nearly two million Americans married; many, just before embarking for the fight. That record (82% more than in 1932) became another when the soldiers returned victorious. In 1946, 3.4 million babies were born, 20% more than the previous year. In 1947 there were 3.8 million, in 1952 3.9 million were born, and between 1954 and 1964 every year a minimum of four million were born. The baby boom generation.
The party that had begun on the White House lawn, the one that had filled the streets in cities around the world, the one that had brought relief to millions of soldiers and freedom to prison camps, was the greatest burst of peace that the world had ever seen. world has lived That party gave way to a Cold War where the world was several times on the brink of the abyss, but until today a similar conflagration has not occurred again.
