VJ Day 75 Years Later
Contrary to popular belief, the Second World War didn’t end on 8 May 1945. Kevin Telfer reveals how our ancestors coped with the momentous events between VE Day and VJ Day
Kevin Telfer explains how our families celebrated the end of the Second World War on 15 June 1945
The celebrations in the UK for Victory in Europe (VE) Day on 8 May 1945 may have been passionate and heartfelt, but they were also, in one vital sense, incomplete. The fighting was not over. Many of the people who celebrated that day still had loved ones waging war in the dense forests of Burma, where the Japanese forces were losing ground but not giving up. VE Day then also marked the start of a strange and desperate three months in which hopes of peace and prosperity competed with fears of division, further warfare and widespread poverty.
During the summer of 1945 the Allied forces harried the Japanese through Burma; Churchill, Stalin and Truman got together to decide the future of Europe; the British electorate voted Churchill out and Attlee in; and two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. There was immeasurable joy and terrible sadness in those months. Demobbed servicemen returned home to be reunited with their families. But in many instances these reunions were not as happy as husbands and wives had hoped they might be. There were also mixed reactions to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Time To Party
However, Victory in Japan (VJ) Day offered a chance to temporarily put all of these fears, misgivings and worries to one side. The war was finally over, and across much of the world it was an excuse for a huge party.
President Truman announced the formal Japanese surrender at 7pm Eastern Standard Time (EST) on 14 August, which was the middle of the night in Britain. Celebrations began immediately in the USA, and continued all through the night and into the following day. But it was only on 15 August that people took to the British streets in earnest.
The celebrations were especially raucous in the nations most involved in the Pacific conflict
– the USA, Australia and New Zealand. The streets of New York were filled with the biggest crowds the city had ever seen. People drank and danced, and they were covered in a cascade of ticker tape, torn paper and cloth thrown from the windows of high-rise buildings.
In San Francisco, celebrations quickly got out of hand and turned into a riot. Most of the rioters were young soldiers and sailors who got drunk and caused carnage. They smashed windows, raped women, and destroyed more than 30 streetcars. Eleven people were killed, and more than 1,000 were injured.
In Australia, where VJ Day was widely known as Victory in the Pacific (VP) Day, people celebrated in raucous fashion in the big cities. In Auckland, New Zealand, drunk servicemen smashed windows, and dozens of people were taken to hospital.
‘In San Francisco, celebrations got out of hand and became a riot’
In Britain there was also drinking and singing in the major city centres, and especially in London, where celebrations were heightened by the palpable relief of US and Australian servicemen who now knew they would not fight in the Pacific again. But according to many the overwhelming emotion was of relief, rather than celebration, and a sense, too, of tiredness.
One woman in Bognor who was writing a diary for the Mass Observation programme wrote: “We’re relieved it’s over. Everybody is for that matter, but we haven’t quite got the same thrill we had as when we heard that the war with Germany was over. The war with Japan’s been too far away and as far as we’re concerned the war was over when the bombing stopped. Of course we can’t feel the same as we did on VE Day – you never get the same kind of thrill a second time.”
The Government declared a public holiday in an earlymorning announcement that many people missed. In Hampstead, one housewife noted that there was “definitely much less excitement than on VE Day. The predominant feeling encountered among housewives at least in the early part of the day was annoyance at the shopping difficulties involved. By 09.30am enormous queues (30 and 40 people) were lined up outside bakers and greengrocers.”
In Central London large crowds gathered in the heat of the afternoon. Field Marshal Montgomery drove down Whitehall and through Parliament Square on his way to receive the Freedom of Lambeth. The crowds threw streamers over the bonnet, and waved flags at the windows.
Sailors and young girls marched down Piccadilly singing Land of Hope and Glory, and in the afternoon heat people queued for water at the two fountains in the wall by St James’s Church. However, one observer reported that “there is also an air of slight bewilderment and pointlessness about it all: it lacks the joyful spontaneity of VE Day”.
Richard Dimbleby was responsible for much of the BBC’s outside broadcast that day, but felt no joy: “When I look back tonight on the horrors and misery and the cruelty and the death that I have seen in the last six years, the unforgettable experiences I’ve had and how much older and tired they’ve made me, I just want to go and sit in a corner and thank God it’s all ending.”
‘Many people did not want to return to how things were before the war’
Three months previously, on VE Day, there was no doubt that Churchill had been an enormously popular figure. He had steered the country to victory. On 23 May, Churchill resigned and called an election, bringing an end to the Conservative-led wartime coalition.
A Demand For Change
Surprisingly, Churchill found the following month, in his own words, “hard to live through”. The truth was that a large number of people did not want to return to how things were before the war. And many soldiers returning home from putting their lives on the line for their country wanted a Government that was going to offer security for them and their families in the form of housing, education, health and job prospects. They wanted change.
The Labour Party promised “food, work and homes”, full employment and a national health service. Out of the ruins of Britain’s bombed-out cities, they planned to build a new Jerusalem. Their campaign slogan was “Let us face the future”.
Because many voters were still abroad, there was a gap of three weeks between the election on 5 July and the declaration of the result on 26 July. When it arrived, it marked a dramatic change.
“Socialists in” was the frontpage headline of the Evening Standard. The turnout was 73 per cent, and Labour had 393 seats to the Conservatives’ 197.
Writer Iris Murdoch captured the excitement for many after the election result was announced. “Oh wonderful people of Britain!” she gushed. “After all the ballyhoo & the eyewash, they’ve had the guts to vote against Winston! I feel really proud of them, & ashamed not having believed in them. I feel proud to be British. This is the beginning of the new world.”
In many ways it was already a new world by 26 July. The United Nations had officially come into being on 26 June, and the USA had secretly detonated the first atomic bomb in New Mexico on 16 July. Churchill found this out at a conference in Potsdam, a city just outside Berlin, the following day, when he came together with Truman and Stalin – the ‘Big Three’ – to decide the future of
Europe. The Soviet Union had advanced across the continent at great speed in the spring of 1945 and now completely controlled Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and the Baltic States, as well as holding large parts of Germany and Austria. There was very little that the British and Americans could do to stop the Iron Curtain being drawn down across Europe, except for trying to allow displaced people to return to their home countries in an orderly way.
The Husbands’ Return
That summer, and for months afterwards, British servicemen returned home to their families. According to the historian Juliet Gardiner more than two million women had lived without their husbands during the war. They had become independent, so a man moving back into the house meant making enormous adjustments. And for husbands coming home expecting tea on the table, roast dinners on a Sunday and everything to be the same as it was before the war, it was generally a disappointment. In 1943 Ernest Bevin, at the time Churchill’s wartime minister of labour and national service, had warned that decent housing would be necessary to build harmony into marriages that resumed after a long hiatus. However, the houses that Labour promised did not get built as quickly as planned, and young families remained marooned on waiting lists for many years.
The two bombs, nicknamed ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’, that were dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on 9 August respectively brought about the end of the Pacific campaign, but at a terrible cost to civilians. Attitudes had hardened against the Japanese after many atrocities against British servicemen, but not everybody accepted the bombs as a necessary evil. One diarist wrote, “When I first heard about the atomic bomb I felt a rather sick, horrible feeling; I felt that it was a dreadful thing that man had such terrific power to bring destruction to other men.”
In the summer of 1945 it was clear that the world that was approaching was going to be very different to the world before the war. People were now living in an age in which the biggest threats were nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union, rather than Nazi Germany and flying bombs. VJ Day may have been a day to celebrate, but few were under the illusion that life was going to be entirely carefree from now on.