Year 1945

__________ 

“One of the great souls of history.” 

Grace Tully on FDR

__________ 

President Roosevelt in 1937.

 

February: President Roosevelt returns from the Yalta conference. “Finally yielding publicly to his infirmity, he delivered his report to the Congress sitting down.” Heretofore, he had never allowed himself to be photographed with braces, or in a wheelchair. (1127-66)

* 

February 23: The battle for Iwo Jima rages, Hershel “Woody” Williams remembers lying in the black volcanic sand, doing his best to stay alive. “Suddenly, the Marines around me starting jumping up and down, firing their weapons in the air,” he told the Marine Corps History Division long afterward. “My head was buried in the sand. Then I looked up and saw Old Glory on top of Mount Suribachi.” 

Woody, 21, was from West Virginia, where he grew up working on a farm. At five feet, six inches tall, and 135 pounds, he barely qualified for enlistment in the Marines, but he made the cut in 1943. (He was from a family of eleven children, but six of his siblings died during the 1918-1919 flu pandemic.) 

It was now the fifth day of combat on the island, and Williams was about to forget all about staying alive. 

As The New York Times explained in his obituary: 

That afternoon, he wiped out seven Japanese pillboxes with flamethrowers, opening a gap that enabled Marine tanks and personnel carriers to break through the enemy defenses. He scurried from one pillbox to another, miraculously untouched by the intense Japanese machine-gun fire that bounced off his equipment — sounding, as he told it, like a jackhammer. 

During his four-hour foray, in which he received supporting fire from several fellow Marines, two of whom were killed during the mission, Corporal Williams returned five times to his headquarters to get new flamethrowers when his supply of diesel fuel and high-octane gasoline ran out.

 

Corporal Williams saw combat on Guam a year later, then arrived on Iwo Jima with the 21st Marines of the Third Marine Division. When Marine armored vehicles became bogged down in their attempt to penetrate the network of Japanese defense positions, his commander asked him if he could do something to support them.

 

Thus began his one-man flame-throwing foray.

 

He told Larry Smith for the oral history “Iwo Jima” (2008) that “you had to get within 20 yards of a pillbox, with machine-gun bullets kicking up.”

 

“One time, the men in one pillbox came out,” he recalled. “As they came running toward me with their rifles and bayonets poised, they ran straight into the fire from my flamethrower. As if in slow motion, they just fell down.”

 

Like so many other Marines, Williams was wounded eleven days later, but remained on the island. For his exploits, he was awarded the Medal of Honor, pinned on his chest by President Harry Truman, in October, and discharged from the Marines in November 1945. He would go on to live to be 98. 

Truman, the Times adds, would often tell recipients of the medal, “I would rather have this medal than be president.” 

Woody, himself, once explained to a gathering of veterans from the battle, “I claim to be only the caretaker of the medal. There were 27 medals awarded [to Marines and Navy personnel during the 36-day battle for the island], but there were countless others who did as much, if not more.”

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I think it might be worth discussing with your classes the PTSD so many combat veterans have experienced – including long before it was ever known as PTSD. What kind of nightmares might Williams have had, after seeing so much carnage on Iwo Jima, or the air crews, and the people they targeted (story below)?

The strains of war are very real.

 

*

The smell of burning flesh at five thousand feet.

March 9: The following description from The New Yorker is excellent. On this day: 

…an armada of more than three hundred B-29s flew fifteen hundred miles across the Pacific to attack Tokyo from the air. The planes carried incendiary bombs to be dropped at low altitudes. Beginning shortly after midnight, sixteen hundred and sixty-five tons of bombs fell on the city.

 

Most of the buildings in Tokyo were constructed of wood, paper, and bamboo, and parts of the city were incinerated in a matter of hours. The planes targeted workers’ homes in the downtown area, with the goal of crippling Japan’s arms industry. It is estimated that a million people were left homeless and that as many as a hundred thousand were killed—more than had died in the notorious firebombing of Dresden, a month earlier, and more than would die in Nagasaki, five months later. Crewmen in the last planes in the formation said that they could smell burning flesh as they flew over Tokyo at five thousand feet.

 

That night, Yoko Ono was in bed with a fever. While her mother and her little brother, Keisuke, spent the night in a bomb shelter under the garden of their house, she stayed in her room. She could see the city burning from her window. She had just turned twelve and had led a protected and privileged life. She was too innocent to be frightened.

 

The Ono family was wealthy. They had some thirty servants, and they lived in the Azabu district, near the Imperial Palace, away from the bombing. The fires did not reach them. But Ono’s mother, worried that there would be more attacks (there were), decided to evacuate to a farming village well outside the city.

 

Yoko’s father was Christian, rare in Japan, and she was also tutored in Buddhism and piano. Later, she attended elite public schools. Two of the emperor’s sons were classmates.

 

*

 Integration the hard way.

March 14: Lt. Harold Brown is strafing a German freight train from a low altitude, when his bullets cause a massive explosion. Shrapnel from the blast wrecks the engine of his P-51, and he has to bail out. 

Born in Minneapolis in 1924, Brown had once refused as a boy to keep taking piano lessons as his mother had wished. As a teen, he saved money from his job as a soda jerk and took seven flying lessons, instead. In 1942, he tried to enlist, as part of a program to train African American pilots. He came up four ounces short of the minimum weight of 128.5 pounds. (The average American soldier or sailor of that era was much lighter, averaging 144 pounds, and standing five feet, eight inches tall.) Brown eventually made weight, graduated from Army flight school and joined the 332nd Fighter Group, the famed Tuskegee Airmen. Captured after he had to bail out, a mob of Austrians surrounded him, produced a rope, and marched him to a tree, where he expected to be lynched. A constable intervened, however, and Brown was saved. He spent the rest of the war (fortunately, only a few weeks) in a German POW camp. 

It was the first time, he laughed later, that he ever spent time in an “integrated” military facility. 

He would later recall his return to the United States – to a base, Fort Patrick Henry in Virginia. “We got off the boat,” he explained, “everything was the same. Patrick Henry was still a segregated base, no changes, no nothing, just the way I left it.” 

Brown went on to fly combat missions in Korea. He later qualified as a pilot of B-47s, for Strategic Air Command. 

“What the Tuskegee Airmen did is not black history,” Brown later explained. It’s not military history. It’s American history.”

 *

April 10: Henry Kissinger, who had fled Germany in 1938, with his family, is serving with the 84^th Infantry Division, as American forces sweep across France and into Germany. 

The New Yorker explains: 

“He was more American than I have ever seen any American,” a comrade recalled. The work of the U.S. occupation, with its opportunities for quickly assuming positions of authority, thrilled him. In 1945, Kissinger participated in the liberation of the Ahlem concentration camp, outside Hanover, and earned a Bronze Star for his role in breaking up a Gestapo sleeper cell.

 

(Ahlem is a small camp, where prisoners had been forced to dig an underground facility to protect a rubber manufacturing plant. Several hundred prisoners likely died there, and only 200 sick Jewish and Russian POW men remained, when Kissinger’s division arrived.)

 

*

April 12: FDR passes away, at age 63. (It’s interesting to note that he had had three different vice presidents during his time.) 

George Wolfskill describes his impact: 

Many who admired Roosevelt, who approved the New Deal, could not have given any rational explanation for this if their lives had depended on it. Their response was uncalculated, intuitive; it had something to do with Roosevelt’s ability to communicate concern, with his enthusiasm, his optimism, his self-confidence. It also had something to do with his supposed feeling for the “little fellow” (look at the enemies he had made – and was making – among all those millionaires.)

 

…Over the years there developed between Roosevelt and literally millions of Americans a love affair that was simple and uncomplicated that bordered on worship, That approached idolatry. (1127/72)

 

Grace Tully, who had worked for Roosevelt, remembered him this way: “it was my good fortune to work for a man of straightforward simplicity, courage, passion and honesty – one of the great souls of history. (1127/203) 

He had his critics, of course, many of them using virulent terms. 

A short list of the milder epithets includes Communist, fascist, dictator, revolutionist, crackpot, weakling, opportunist, renegade Democrat, unprincipled charlatan, simpleton, swollen-headed nitwit, destroyer of capitalism, nigger lover, the Great Uncertainty, the Pied Piper of Hyde Park, the High Priest of Repudiation, “two-thirds mush and one-third Eleanor,” and perhaps the meanest of all, “that cripple.” (1127/79)

 

Free speech, at least, was in flower. Huey Long called the president a “liar and fake.” He said they should “hold the Democratic convention and the Communist convention together and save money.” He called the New Deal “the united order of crooks, thieves, and rabble-rousers,” “the blue buzzard government,” a brain-trust-bureaucratic-alphabetical conglomeration of everything except sense and justice.” Father Coughlin labeled the new deal the “Pagan Deal” and the “raw deal.” Of the two major parties, he said, “One was the left wing and the other the right wing of the same bird of prey.” He labeled the president as “that great betrayer and liar – Franklin Double-Crossing Roosevelt.” There were rumors spread about his having VD, by way of Eleanor, with a Negro. (1127/90-92)

 

This doggerel was widely circulated: 

What man said that woman?

You kiss the negroes

I’ll kiss the Jews,

We’ll stay in the White House

As long as we choose.           (1127/80)

 

John T. Flynn, in The Roosevelt Myth, published in 1948, would put it this way: “Little by little a nature not greatly unlike many well-considered public men of his type, disintegrated, until power corrupted him. In the end it corrupted him utterly.” (1127/203)

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: Wolfskill has a few interesting comments about textbooks, and how they cover the New Deal (and, as most of us know, many other topics). One text will vary from another slightly, 

But they will likely have two things in common: uninspired prose and inoffensive interpretations.

 

Which means that survey textbooks in United States history tend to be dull and uninteresting. I will not elaborate on a dark suspicion, developed over nearly thirty years behind the desk, that authors and publishers do not want to make anybody mad. They both know what sells textbooks. Since selling textbooks is big business, the strategy is not to antagonize customers. … textbook writers approached the New Deal with the blandness of an ulcer diet… (1127/205) 

He adds later, 

Suggested readings are part of the ritual of textbook writing, somewhat like playing the national anthem at sporting events – everybody expects it; it does not add much, but neither does it do any particular harm. I have often pondered their reason for being. Authors do not really expect students to pay any attention to them; most authors, being teachers, know by experience that even getting students to read the textbook is a miracle only slightly less difficult than turning water into wine. (1127/213)

* 

“A real dialogue between Franklin and the people.” 

One historian described the New Deal as “a revolutionary response to a revolutionary situation.” Rexford Tugwell complained, by comparison, that Roosevelt spent “a lot of time…planting shrubbery on the slopes of a volcano.” By comparison, one GOP lawmaker referred to Tugwell as a “Goddamn Communist.” He referred to Tugwell as “Comrade Tugwell, Brain Truster No. 1.” On one occasion, Sen. Simeon D. Fess of Ohio said Karl Marx “would, were he living, necessarily be compelled to apologize for his conservatism to Professor Tugwell.” As Wolfskill explains businessmen “would sigh and look back to 1933 as the fateful year when the United States traded its birthright of free enterprise and laissez-faire economics for the pottage of federal regulation, bureaucracy, and economic paternalism.” (1127/211, 120, 122) 

He comments on FDR’s “bedside manner,” and 

what it meant to national morale, the national convalescence. His real, most lasting contribution to the national rejuvenation was spiritual: a rekindled hope in the hearts of individuals; for the country, a renewed sense of destiny, a reaffirmation of the efficacy of democracy and capitalism in a tormented world. (1127/144)

 

And again: 

It was not just that Roosevelt was a strong leader; it was his rare gift of being able to reach people, move people (move them sometimes to heroic heights), inspire trust; it was his ability to “personalize” his leadership. It is probably true that no President, before or since, was able to evoke such an outpouring of popular support and confidence. (1127/158)

 

And: 

Eleanor Roosevelt related that, after the death of her husband, people would stop her on the street to say “they missed the way the President used to talk to them. They’d say ‘he used to talk to me about my government.’” There was, said Mrs. Roosevelt, “a real dialogue between Franklin and the people.” (1127/159)

 

He also credits the president’s wife: 

Eleanor’s life had not been a happy one. Her lonely childhood and growing awareness that she was unattractive, that she was awkward and homely and lacking in the social graces, made her early years miserable. The one bright spot was her marriage to the handsome young Franklin. Eleanor marveled at her good fortune. But the marriage was not a good one. The early years of having babies (six in all), of living under the critical eye of a domineering mother-in-law, of always having under foot her husband’s possessive friend, Louis Howe, and, finally, the shattering knowledge of Franklin’s relationship with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd left a deep sense of self-sacrifice and betrayal. (1127/161)

 

Wolfskill also outlines Franklin’s relationship with Lucy. She worked for Eleanor as a part-time secretary, starting in 1914. She was “beautiful and charming,” and had wide connections in D.C. “There seems little doubt that Roosevelt fell in love with Lucy, and that his love was reciprocated.” Roosevelt traveled to Europe, came home ill in 1918, and during his illness, Eleanor came across letters from Lucy, “confirming what she had long only suspected.” The three had a confrontation – with Franklin and Lucy agreeing not to see each other. “But the Roosevelt marriage had very nearly ended in divorce.” 

After Franklin was stricken with polio, his wife “became the eyes and ears and right hand for her husband, walked and talked in his place. But more, she became his conscience, and after 1933 the conscience of the New Deal as well.” (1127/161) 

FDR changed the presidency: “ like it or not, the chief executive had become chief legislator, and even so popular a president as Dwight Eisenhower could not change it.” (1127/166) 

He also changed the Democratic Party: 

The signs were clear. The classical Democratic Party was yielding to one that was more northern than southern, more urban than rural. It was a new combination of forces that appealed to labor, to traditionally Republican Negroes, to the ethnic groups of the New Immigration, to women, and to intellectuals. Roosevelt was constructing a new political edifice – one in which the South was the frieze, not the cornerstone. (1127/170)

 

There were failures, too, and other proposals went down to defeat. 

child labor legislation, an anti-lynching bill, a stronger food and drug act, a ship safety bill, crop insurance, a proposal to make the Civilian Conservation Corps permanent, an extension of the TVA concept to other parts of the country, and the transfer of authority over air transportation to the Interstate Commerce Commission. (1127/130)

 

And there was the danger of centralized power. Gov. O. Max Gardener of North Carolina, for one, warned that the New Deal was destroying local government and putting in its stead, an “all-powerful federal authority similar to the current dictatorship in several European countries.” (1127/171) 

On the other hand, former North Carolina Gov. J. Melville Broughton, summed up the necessity of the New Deal this way: 

Those of us who believe in the fundamental principles of states’ rights and local self-government may as well concede frankly that much of the almost terrifying expansion of federal encroachment upon the original domain of the states has come about because state governments failed to meet the challenge of the new day. Inadequate educational opportunities, archaic labor laws and regulations, unrelieved hardships and in equities suffered by the working people, low-pitched politics and unjust class and race discriminations have, all too frequently, caused the people to…call for relief from the Federal Government. (1127/185)

 

Wolfskill puts it this way, saying “what emerged from the New Deal was at least the beginning of a welfare state superimposed upon a capitalist foundation.” (1127/197) 

The New Deal, 

did reverse the pessimism of the depression era and restore faith in capitalism and democracy. It projected the country a long way down the road from its “rugged individualism” heritage toward a more humane, collective social action. It preserved freedom at home in a world made delirious by the fever of fascism and dictatorship. Without espousing revolutionary goals or resorting to radical methods, the New Deal achieved a level of individual security and well-being undreamed of as late as the 1920s. Its spirit is the driving force behind that deep yearning still abroad in the land for social change, for getting on with the task of perfecting a yet unfinished, imperfect society. (1127/200) 

 

He adds, that while the New Deal had “chastened business” and “shamed it,” it “had made little change in the structure of American business or in the locus of economic power.” (1127/133) 

Wolfskill summarizes Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s take on FDR this way, 

Schlesinger admires Roosevelt unabashedly. He is enamored of the “great man” concept and the ability of great men to shape the course of events. Schlesinger sees Roosevelt in this role, as a heroic figure rescuing democracy and capitalism from between the railroad tracks at the last possible second. (1127/210)

 

He continues: 

“Rejecting the platonic distinction between ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’,” writes Schlesinger, “he [Roosevelt] led the way toward a new society which took elements from each and rendered both obsolescent. It was this freedom from dogma which outraged the angry, logical men who saw everything with dazzling certitude.” (1127/211)

* 

Advice from the era: “The one way to get thin is to reestablish a purpose in life. … Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment.”   Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave.

 * 

“Everyman as president.” 

Harry Truman, suddenly elevated to the highest office in the land, once described himself this way. “I’m a homegrown American farm product,” he said. “And I’m proud of the breed I represent – the completely unterrified form of American democracy.” 

After he announced the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the socialite Susan Mary Jay was dismissive. “Truman looks like my dentist,” she said. 

Walter Lipmann, however, saw the strength in the man – and the goodness. While it was easy to get mad at the president, Lipmann wrote, “neither he nor his critics and opponents were able to keep on being angry. For when he lost his temper it was a good temper that he was losing. 

In a book called The Trials of Harry S. Truman, author Jeffrey Frank notes, as many have, that Truman was more bookish than many of the most-educated presidents. I have several quotes, myself, from Truman. This one, I have always liked: 

“Readers of good books, particularly books of biography and history, are preparing themselves for leadership. Not all readers become leaders. But all leaders must be readers.” 

A couple of others that resonate: 

“All government and all private institutions must be designed to promote and protect and defend the integrity and dignity of the individual.” 

“You are the government. I am only your hired servant.” 

“I’ve always felt that people are pretty much the same everywhere, but isn’t it a pity we have to be taught that.” 

 

 * 

“The Bride of Belsen.” 

April 15: British troops liberate the German concentration camp at Bergen Belsen. One of the lucky survivors is Gena Goldfinger, 18. She had spent time in several German camps, including a brief period in Auschwitz. One of the Brits who took the camp was Sgt. Norman Turgel, and he soon fell in love with the prisoner, even arranging to take her to dinner at the officers’ mess in the British camp. She remembers, “I turned ’round to this Sergeant Norman. “I said: ‘Do we expect any special visitors? What am I doing here?’ So he says: ‘You are the special visitor. This is our engagement party.’” 

They married six months later, and Gena became known as the “Bride of Belsen,” a light of hope in a world shocked by the horrors of war. But she knew the worst of the worst, once saying, “My story, the story of a survivor, is the story that six million others cannot tell.” 

The youngest of nine children, her father had died before the war, and she and the rest of her family were relocated to the Jewish ghetto in Krakow, after the Germans invaded Poland. The New York Times described her ordeal. 

Her other family members were not so lucky; one, a sister, was subjected to horrible medical experiments.

 

“I often ask, ‘Why were my brothers and sister shot? Why was my sister injected with petrol? Was I meant to be here to tell this story to people who didn’t know?’ Perhaps God guided me, put me under his wing.”

 

With her mother, she was moved to Bergen-Belsen after a brief period at Auschwitz. Another prisoner in her crowded barracks there was Anne Frank.

 

“Her bed was around the corner from me,” Ms. Turgel told the British newspaper The Sun in 2015. “She was delirious, terrible, burning up,” she said, adding that she had brought Frank water to wash.

 

Frank…died in March 1945 during a typhus epidemic at the camp. Ms. Turgel saw the effects of that epidemic up close: In an effort to ensure her and her mother’s survival, she had talked her way into a job at the camp hospital.

 

“The people were dying like flies — in the hundreds. Reports used to come in — 500 people who died. Three hundred? We said, ‘Thank God, only 300.’”

 

After the British liberated the camp, Ms. Turgel helped explain to them the needs of the sick. He husband was part of a unit tasked with finding German officers who had committed atrocities at the camp. Her husband died in 1995, but Ms. Turgel is survived was three children and grand- and great-grandchildren.

 

She once recalled the vows she had made to herself after her husband took her to England to live.

 

“I adopted three ambitions,” she said. “To learn the way of British life, and to learn the English language, and to write about my memoirs in case I forget. But how can one forget those atrocities?”

 

* 

Dachau: “It was very nice.” 

May 9: Germany finally surrenders to the Allies. 

Gudrin Burwitz dies in 2018, the daughter of Heinrich Himmler; born in 1929. Her father called her “Puppi,” or doll in German. She was his only child by her mother, though he had two by a mistress; and they adopted a son. She kept scrapbooks filled with his picture and called him “Pappi.” 

At least once he took her to see Dachau. “We saw everything we could,” she wrote in her diary. “We saw the gardening work. We saw the pear trees. We saw all the pictures painted by the prisoners. Marvelous. And afterward we had a lot to eat. It was very nice.” She was 11 or 12 at the time, 1941. 

March 5, 1945, she writes: “We no longer have any allies in Europe and can only rely on ourselves. The Luftwaffe is still so bad. Goring does not seem to care about anything, that windbag. Goebbels is doing a lot but he always shows off. They all get medals and awards, except Pappi, and he should be the first to get one.” 

April 19, 1945: “Daddy and all the others are there and remain for the moment now that the great battle in the East has begun. Daddy has found it terribly difficult with the incredible amount of work. The Fuhrer will not believe that the soldiers will no longer fight. Still, perhaps everything will turn out fine.” Her father is with Hitler at his bunker in Berlin. Her father had to flee in disguise after Hitler ordered his arrest, shaving his moustache, donning an eye patch; he is captured on May 20, kills himself (cyanide) three days later. She and her mother Margarete try to escape; are caught in N. Italy.

 

Eventually, she married, a right-wing political leader; she was also a member of Stille Hilfe (Silent Help), a secret organization that, according to the NYT, “was formed after the war to help former Nazis escape prosecution and provide them with financial assistance.” 

She was never apologetic—always felt her father was a great man. Her last name often caused her trouble, and even lost jobs; but she would not bow. Once, at a dance, no young man would ask her to the floor. “If Hitler had won the war, they’d all be clamoring for me,” she told a reporter in 1958. “And I – I am Gudrun Himmler; I am Himmler’s daughter. But now my father’s men pretend not to know me.”

 

*

Almost nothing was left in downtown Hiroshima.

She was never apologetic—always felt her father was a great man. Her last name often caused her trouble, and even lost jobs; but she would not bow. Once, at a dance, no young man would ask her to the floor. “If Hitler had won the war, they’d all be clamoring for me,” she told a reporter in 1958. “And I – I am Gudrun Himmler; I am Himmler’s daughter. But now my father’s men pretend not to know me.”

 

* 

August 4: Bert Shepard, a former fighter pilot, pitches in the first game of his big-league career. Called in for relief, the Washington Senators left-hander strikes out the first Boston Red Sox hitter he faces, to end the fourth inning. A crowd of 13,000 gives the one-legged hurler a standing ovation. 

Certainly, Shepard’s path to the majors was unusual. On May 21, 1944, he was flying his P-38 Lightning when he was shot down over Germany. As the Washington Post explains, 

He was scheduled to pitch for his 55th Fighter Group baseball team in England later that day, but as his plane went down, the 24-year-old pilot radioed his fellow pilots: “Tell the boys I won’t be back for the game.”

 

Shepard was flying 380 mph northeast of Berlin when he was hit; his right foot was shot off and he fractured his head. Shepard’s plane crashed into a field, and furious pitchfork-wielding German farmers surrounded him, but a German military doctor came to the young pilot’s rescue – keeping the farmers back at gunpoint.

 

Shepard didn’t see any of this. He was unconscious and woke up in a German hospital a few days later, his right leg amputated below the knee. After his transfer to a wounded POW camp, a Canadian medic fashioned a crude metal artificial leg, allowing Shepard to run, and throw with fellow prisoners.

 

In February 1945, the wounded pilot was returned to the United States as part of a wounded prisoners exchange. He still wanted to play ball, and was encouraged to try – as a way of boosting the morale of other wounded veterans. The Washington Senators gave him a chance to pitch batting practice – and even to pitch in an exhibition game.

 

Reporters gathered round to hear his story; and on August 4, he finally got into a real game.

 

In the end, Shepard pitched the last five innings, giving up three hits and one walk, and allowing one run.

 

It was his only appearance in the major leagues, leaving him with an excellent 1.69 earned run average for his “career.”

 

He later pitched several seasons in the minors and traveled the country – flying his own plane – giving talks to veterans injured during the war. In 1993, Shepard finally had a chance to go to Vienna, where he met Ladislaus Loidl, the doctor who had protected him from the angry farmers, a half century before. The old pilot told reporters he had prayed for the chance, adding “my dream has incredibly come true.”

*

August 6: The first atomic bomb, a 9,700 pound uranium device, is dropped by the crew of the Enola Gay on the city of Hiroshima. Sunao Tsuboi, a 20-year-old engineering student, is less than a mile from where the bomb lands.

As The New York Times explained in his obituary (Tsuboi lived to be 96), he

was too close to the blast site to see the mushroom cloud. There was a silver-white flash and a bang, and he was hurled into the air. When he gained consciousness, he found his body burned from head to toe.

In an interview with The New York Times, he described the aftermath of the attack as “a living hell on earth.” All around him, he saw people trying to walk and collapsing, people with exposed organs or missing limbs.

After being taken to a military hospital and lapsing back into unconsciousness, he slowly recovered. For some time, he could crawl but not walk. Scars covered his body and his face.

In Japan, survivors of the atomic bomb strikes became known as the hibakusha or “bomb-affected people.” Tsuboi became one of the most active survivors, often describing the horrors of that day for school children and other audiences. When he was 91, he spoke to President Obama, during Mr. Obama’s visit to Japan in 2016. In a speech that day, Obama called for a “moral revolution,” and for the world to do far more to combat the spread on nuclear weapons.

 

* 

“The boy with the red back.” 

August 9: The U.S. drops the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Sumiteru Taniguchi is one of the “lucky” ones in the city below. He survives. 

The New York Times notes, 

On the day of the bombing, Mr. Taniguchi, then 16, was delivering mail on his bicycle in the northern corner of the city, just over a mile from ground zero.

 

When the bomb detonated overhead, the force of the explosion tossed him into the air, and the heat it radiated melted his cotton shirt and seared the skin off his back and one arm.

 

Three months later, he was taken to a navy hospital, where he lay on his stomach for nearly two years. Bedsores formed on his chest and left permanent scars.

 

He spent a total of more than three and a half years in the hospital after the bombing. Sometimes he was in so much pain, he said, that he would scream to the nurses, “Kill me, kill me!”

 

In 1946, United States forces filmed his treatment. That footage was shared across the world, and Mr. Taniguchi became known as “the boy with a red back.” When giving speeches calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons, he would sometimes show pictures of his burns to illustrate the horrible suffering that resulted from the bombings.

 

A decade after the war, when Mr. Taniguchi had learned to sit up, stand and walk again, he joined a youth group for survivors and began working as an activist. 

 

He did recover, did marry, and did have two children, a boy, and a girl. During his life, he attended 396 protests against the use of atomic weapons.

 

* 

August 14: Jerry Yellin died in December 2017. He is remembered as the man who led the last air raid on Japan before the end of the war. He joined the Army Air Corps on his eighteenth birthday, February 25, 1942. On August 15, 1945 (Japanese time), he led a group of four P-51 Mustang fighters on an attack on enemy airfields. 

It was agreed by that time that a coded message would go out if the Japanese agreed to surrender. That would mean any planes in the air should turn back and abort. At noon that day Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s surrender. Yellin, flying from a strip on Iwo Jima said he never received a message. Only after his three-hour flight ended did he learn the war was over. 

Yellin long suffered after the war from what we would now call PTSD. He had seen sixteen men in his unit die. The aftermath of the fight for Iwo was horrible. “Body parts were everywhere and the smell of death permeated the air,” he said in 2014. Yellin also suffered a cruel loss in that last mission. Lt. Philip Schlamberg, 19, his Brooklyn-born wingman disappeared into clouds over Japan and was never seen again. “Because of our common Jewish heritage and because he was one of the younger pilots, I had naturally taken Phil under my wing,” he later said. 

Yellin had named his plane “Dorrie B,” after a girlfriend. On another mission, when he was grounded by the dentist to have painful wisdom teeth pulled, an inexperienced pilot took his plane on a raid and he, too, was lost. Captain Yellin was discharged in December 1945, with nineteen combat missions to his credit. “I was angry,” he remembered. “I could go to college. I had no desire to do that. I couldn’t hold a job. I had many, many jobs. I was depressed. Every symptom that they now diagnose as post-traumatic stress disorder, I had.” Ironically, before the war he had been working seven days a week in a steel mill to save for college.

 

He married Helene Schulman in 1949 but his emotional problems never entirely vanished. He did find great relief in 1975 after his wife suggested he try Transcendental Meditation. 

In later years he worked to help others overcome their post-war emotional struggles. In 1983 he was asked to come to Japan to speak on business. Reluctant to go, his wife pressed him. In Japan, Yellin was impressed by the people. Their son, Robert, visited Japan in 1984 when he was a senior in college. He fell in love with the country, and married Takako Yamakawa in 1988. Takakoa’s father had also been a pilot in World War II and the two vets struck up a deep friendship. “We became brothers, he and I,” Yellin said. “I went from thinking a group of people were my enemy to finding my best friend. It’s a lesson to remember that at the end of the day we are all human and have so much love to give,” he said in 2017. 

 

*

August 14: George Mendosa, a sailor who had served aboard The Sullivans, is celebrating in Times Square when news spreads that Japan has surrendered (it is already August 15, in Japan). Impulsively, he grabs a nurse and gives her a kiss, and they are caught in a famous photo. Mendosa is in uniform as is the nurse, in her white dress and white hose, the style of the time. Neither face can be clearly seen. 

Alfred Eisenstadt, who snapped the picture for Life magazine on August 14, was too hurried to get names. So for decades there were various claims. Three different women believed they were the nurse, with most experts who studied the photo finally concluding it was Greta Friedman who had been kissed. 

In 1980 the question came up again—and this time dozens of men said they believed it might have been them. Eleven seemed to have solid claims; and experts used 3-D imaging to compare facial constructions. Most decided it was Mendosa, and he later sued Life when the magazine refused to say it was him. “How many people in a lifetime do something famous?” he later explained. “There isn’t a Navy man alive who hasn’t looked at that photo and said, ‘I wish I were that guy.’ I was not looking for any financial gain. I only wanted the recognition.”

 

By 2014, as times changed, there were those who said the picture was nothing less than evidence of a public sexual assault. Ms. Friedman, however, has said some years before that, “It wasn’t much of a kiss, it was more of a jubilant act that he didn’t have to go back, I found out later. The reason he grabbed someone dressed like a nurse was that he just felt very grateful to nurses who took care of the wounded.” Friedman and Mendosa later became friends. In 2012, she commented again, “I can’t think of anybody who considered that an assault. It was a happy event.” 

Mendosa was born in Newport, R.I. in 1923, later dropped out of high school and joined his father, an immigrant from Portugal, to become a fisherman. In 1942 he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. His love for nurses, he said, came after he saw a kamikaze strike an aircraft carrier and he had to help more than 100 sailors picked up from the water reach a nearby hospital ship. As for the famous lip-plant, Mendosa was with a new girlfriend, Rita Petry, at the time. She reportedly saw the kiss, didn’t object. They married in 1946, started a family, and remained together until his death in 2019.

 

* 

Writing in The Crucial Decade, Eric Goldman notes details from that day of joy for most Americans: “…a St. Louis crowd, suddenly hushing it’s whistles and tossing aside the confetti, persuaded a minister to hold services at 2 a.m.” (1/3) 

“Whole families made their way to Times Square until 2,000,000 people were milling about.” 

“The nation was a carnival but the festivities, as a reporter wrote from Chicago, ‘didn’t seem like so much. It was such a peculiar peace. … and everybody talked of the “end of the war” not of “victory.”’” (1/4)   

“Americans tried to make jokes. The Japanese were suffering from atomic ache people giggled to each other.” As for the atomic bombs, themselves, the captured Nazi leader Herman Goring had a more sobering response. “A mighty accomplishment,” he admitted. “I don’t want anything to do with it.” (1/15)

 * 

August 15: Japan agrees to surrender. By this time, the United States, with a population about the third of its size in 2021, has spent $300 billion during the war. That would equal $4,609,800,000,000 in today’s dollars (calculated on 11/27/21). About a third of the cost was raised by sale of war bonds to the American people, themselves. 

Another source was the highest taxes ever imposed on the country, in the form of corporate income and excess profit taxes, excise taxes, estate and gift taxes, and personal income taxes and surtaxes collected on a pay-as-you-go basis through payroll deductions that commenced in 1943. (1127/63)

 

* 

“From altar to divorce court.” 

Between 1940 and 1945, five million people had left the farms, mostly tenants and poor farmers, either “to punch a time clock in a war plant or to greet each new dawn to a bugle solo.” That was one-seventh of the farm population. Wolfskill also argues that the drive to boost war production helped accelerate the growth of “corporate industrial capitalism” turning it into “a dominant institution of American society. No one could seriously believe there would ever be a turning back here, either – a slow-down of corporate expansion, a significant revival of small business.” (1127/136, 141)

Many couples married in haste, with war looming, in these years. As Wolfskill notes, 1 in 3 marriages in 1945 “led from the altar to the divorce court.” 

He adds, 

The incidence of venereal disease reached epidemic proportions, prostitution thrived (although law enforcement agencies waged continuous wars against it around military bases), and the sexual promiscuity of young girls (“victory girls”) was scandalous. Nearly 75 percent of all females who were arrested for sex offenses were under twenty-one years of age, and girls under nineteen accounted for over 40 percent of all reported cases of venereal disease. (1127/152)

On an entirely different note, 350,000 teachers, about a third of the nation’s educators, left the field during the war years, for higher paying employment in business, industry or government. (1127/152)

Church membership, which declined during the Depression began to rise again.

*  

Eric Goldman writes: 

All through the New Deal period and the war years, the powerful thrusts of minorities had been ramming more and more holes in the walls of discrimination. By V-J, Jews seeking admission to professional schools had a ten-to-fifteen per-cent [better] chance than the applicant of 1929. First generation Catholics of eastern or southern European backgrounds reported far less difficulty in purchasing homes in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. During the four swift years of the war, Negroes for the first time knew the white-collar kudos of working as sales girls in the swank department stores of the North, and Negro representatives on labor grievance committees were becoming accustomed to speaking up as freely as their white colleagues. 

If the upsweep was plainest among the minority groups, it touched the whole bottom of American society with a tonic sense of new possibilities. The GI Bill of Rights became law in 1944 and with the first release of veterans during the war, the legislation began working its revolution. Men who had entered the army as employees returned to borrow money from the government and set up their own businesses. Hundreds of thousands who had thought of the university as a preserve of the rich found themselves headed toward an A.B. – a in many cases toward the highest of professional degrees.

 

Women, too, were looking at the world differently. Maurice O’Connell told the LA Chamber of Commerce, “Rosie the Riveter isn’t going back to emptying slop jars.” (1/12-13)  

Fred Vinson, Director of War Mobilization and Reconversion, said, “The American people are in the pleasant predicament of having to learn to live 50 percent better than they have ever lived before.” (1/14) 

A problem after the war was: “reconversion” or getting back to a civilian economy. 

Three months after the Japanese surrender, the United Automobile Workers read out the declaration of war. Inflation or no inflation, forty-eight or forty hours’ work, the UAW demanded that its members should take home at the end of the week at least as much purchasing power as they received before V-J. 

Goldman says Truman’s mother would always send him off after a visit, “Now, Harry, hew to the good line.” (1/17) 

*

“Big dough.” 

Burlesque shows are big, and one of the biggest stars of all is Betty Rowland, who in 1945, is making $250 per week, or more than $4,100 in 2022 dollars. “She was known as the ‘Red Headed Ball of Fire,’ a title given her for her stature — she was a diminutive 5-foot-1 — and her fiery hair.” 

Rowland later described her earnings as “big dough,” said she never smoked or drank, and did her first show at 14, filling in for a performer who sprained an ankle. Betty was so focused on the music, she forgot to take any of her clothes off…and, what the hell...she was performing at 14?? 

As The New York Times writes: 

Ms. Rowland had a languid, balletic style (hers was a gentle grind) and she often threw in an undulating stretch and drop known as a German roll. Her costumes were elegant: She favored long skirts with a side slit to the hip, bandeau tops and evening gloves. After a slow burn, she shed most of her gear; but, like most burlesque stars, she kept her pasties and her G-string on.

 

One of her signature pieces was called “Bumps in the Ballet,” a spoof of a ballet routine that she liked to introduce to her audience with a bit of patter: “Let’s put a little juice in the Ballets Russes, and give the dying swan a goose. In a classical sort of way, might I put a bump in this ballet?”

 

Rowland was born in Columbus Ohio, on January 23, 1916, and had a stage career lasting into the 50s. She insisted, years later, that what she did was in no way pornographic. She was a “dancer,” she said. “It was the only thing I knew how to do, and I was a success at it.” 

“We teased,” she explained. “That was the name of the game. You become a fantasy to other people.”

 

* 

Second Lieutenant Julius W. Becton Jr. is stationed on the island of Morotai. He and his men are charged with using a bullhorn to call out to Japanese soldiers and tell them the war is over and they should surrender. 

They do not always respond well. 

“That took care of my first combat experience of being shot at,” Becton would later joke. 

The young African American officer would go on to fight in Korea and Vietnam, win two Silver Stars, and reach the rank of lieutenant general in 1972

 * 

Staff Sergeant Alfred Ireland, a Marine, sets a record for the Corps, no one would want to break. He is wounded five times during World War II, and awarded five Purple Hearts. He later fights in Korea, and is wounded four more times, the last so badly that he is medically discharged after he recovers.

 

* 

December 25: The first Slinky toys ever put up for sale sold out in 90 minutes, several days before Christmas, but 400 lucky boys and girls will have the new toy under the tree when they rise excitedly. 

    Richard James had first come up with the idea for the toy, in 1943, at a shipyard in Philadelphia, when a torsion spring fell off a table and flipped end over end on the deck. Mr. James, an engineer, went home to his wife and told her, “I think I can make a toy out of this,” and he did. His wife, Betty, searches through the dictionary, and lands on the word “slinky,” which she thinks best describes the toy’s movement. 

    The name, of course, sticks. Sadly, Mr. James does not. Fifteen years later, he joins a religious cult and leaves his wife and six children behind. Slinky sales never fail, including a version later modeled on a dog version in the movie “Toy Story.” In 2001, Pennsylvania lawmakers name the Slinky the “State Toy.”