Saturday marks the 75th anniversary of VJ Day. I cannot fathom the joy and pathos accompanying the victory — joy over peace and pathos for what was lost.
Edward VIII — urged to abdicate because he was pro-Nazi, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the Munich Conference — “Peace for our time,” Joseph Kennedy at the Court of St. James — another Nazi sympathizer in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Pearl Harbor — “Yesterday, December 7, 1941 a date which will live in infamy...” Everyone knows the road to war like the back of one’s hand.
The battles fought, the Blitz, Edward R. Murrow’s CBS radio broadcasts from London, meetings between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, concentration camps, the Manhattan Project, and ruined countries in Europe are equally well known.
I saw Opera Australia’s production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific,” at the Sydney Opera House, in August 2013. The curtain contained a map of the South Pacific. The march of Japanese troops was documented with every set change, through their defeat at Kokoda, on Papua, New Guinea, 1500 miles from Australia. Never was “South Pacific” as painful as seen in the South Pacific.
Reflecting upon VJ Day, on the day that I created this column, “All Things Considered” contained a segment on “Fallout,” a new book focusing upon John Hersey’s monumental “Hiroshima” [ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima ] delineating detonation of “Little Boy” on August 6, 1945. John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” Eugene Sledge’s “With the Old Breed,” William L. Shirer’s “The Rise and Man of the Third Reich,” Raul Hilberg’s “The Destruction of the European Jews,” Primo Levi’s “Survival at Auschwitz,” and books by Stephen Ambrose are the acme of amazing World War II histories. I reread “Hiroshima,” on August 6, to honor the memory of civilian victims.
“Fallout” author Lesley Blume allowed, “[Hersey felt] that he... contributed to deterrence.... [T]here has not been another nuclear attack... in the vein of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.... Hersey said..., ‘What has kept the world safe from the bombs since 1945 has been the memory of what happened at Hiroshima.’ And thanks in large part to him and those brave enough to share their stories of survival with him, we know what really happened in Hiroshima and how horrible it was. So, in many ways, Hiroshima has become... a pillar of deterrence.”
So too have the successes of the Breton Woods Agreement, the United Nations Charter, the Marshall Plan and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights kept the planet at peace, in unprecedented measure, for the 75 years since VJ Day. People must remember the dangers of forgetting the nightmares leading to these institutions’ creation and the benefits bestowed, in the face of those disparaging bulwarks of prosperity and security, seeking their dismantlement.
President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address aptly allows, “It is for us the living... to be dedicated.. to the unfinished work... so nobly advanced[,] to be... dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they... gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain...”
I urge each reader to spend time, during the weekend, discussing the wartime service of family members and friends. Most GI’s returned. Some did not. None of my Mississippi family was injured or killed. Four members of my Alabama family died; their lives remembered in the names of males of the next generation, honoring each of them. American democracy exists because of the sacrifices of service members. Please remember their heroism with gratitude and prayers of Thanksgiving.
Jay Wiener is a Northsider.
