A Boy’s Rembrance of V-E Day By Richard Sale

"During World War II, my older sister and I helped my mother to plant a victory garden in the backyard of our house in Greenwich.  We raised squashes, potatoes and other things that I can’t recall.  Things were rationed, like butter and aluminum. The squashes were lying on the ground, and my older sister picked one and handed it to me.  “Mom wants this,” she said with authority.  I dutifully took it into the kitchen and with satisfied pride handed to my mother who reacted in horror.  Why did you pick this? I replied my older sister had picked it and asked me to take it in.  My older sister was called in.  She blandly denied that she had picked it, and pointed to me as the villain, and I was thrashed. My older sister had a mean-streak. 

During February of 1945, milk deliveries appeared at our door, thanks to a neighborhood milk man.  One day he was talking to my mother about a place called Iwo Jima, and he said that his son was a Marine who was fighting there. I had no idea of the Pacific War.  I had seen bodies of Marines lilled at Tarawa thanks to my grandfather. In August of 1945, I was taken to the movie Thunderhead, a sequel to My Friend Flicka, both dramas about horses, and there was a newsreel that showed Japanese planes crashing their aircraft into U.S. ships.  I found this dismaying. I knew the Japanese were dying in the crash, but I could not grasp why they were doing it. Later I learned that the crashes were part of  the battle of Okinawa but I had no idea of where that was taking place, and neither did my mother.  I recoiled at the savagery of crashing a plane into a ship. What sort of a man did a thing like that? 

But I do remember vividly the end of the war in Europe.  I remember my sister and I piling into our mother’s Cadillac convertible with its red leather seats. We rode with the top down. There was joy in the air; happy, carefree delight was stamped people’s faces – Hitler had died, and the murdering Nazis had been defeated.  In those days, the old Boston Post Road was the main road running straight up to Boston. There was as yet no I-95.  So our cars edged into the traffic that filled the Post Road from curb to curb; car horns were blowing, people were yelling and making jubilant noises. I remember car horns were blowing incessantly, without cease, the din splitting the ears.  I had first heard about the war from my mother when I was about three, when she told me about a young man from Pelham, New York, where I lived as an infant. Kenny Muir had been in the merchant marine and his ship had been shelled by a surfaced German submarine before the war began, and he had been mangled and killed while manning a gun mount. My mother never got over the death of Muir. She must have known him. As the war began, my father was a ham radio operator who recorded the battle of France, making vinyl records of Walter Cronkite’s reporting of the 1940 the debacle in France, “The fighting is raging nar the center.” 

As a boy I was given a set of post cards, each one displaying the sunken or damaged battleships at Pearl Harbor. My mother also gave me a record that played all the anthems of each of the U.S. Armed Services, Army, Air Corps, the Marines, and the Coastguard. 

So on V-E day, we crawled along in the midst of a torrent of vehicles, everyone cheering with relief and joy and triumph. Church bells were ringing in celebration. But the image engraved on my mind was this – we were sitting up on the back trunk of the car with its top down, and came to a row of poor, drab gray houses that had porches fronting the Post Road.  On one porch, there was a gnarled, grizzled old woman who had no front teeth. She was wearing a huge baggy gray dress. She was sitting in her rocker on the porch, rocking back and forth, and in her hand she held an old bell that had no tongue, and she was hitting it with a small hammer, sending out the bells’ small tone over and over as she grinned an exuberant grin, hitting the bell again and again until she passed out of our sight and hearing. Evil, murdering evil had been crushed. It was a grand day. Everybody talked about it for weeks."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLg83QMmlGs&list=RDMLg83QMmlGs&index=49

Why Katusha first?  The Red Army captured The Bunker.  They lost 5,000 men in the last mile. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDBJ_FW8ato&list=RDyDBJ_FW8ato#t=0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCRH-BB5flA 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu3eSNi__4w

 

Comments

[BabelFish]

Thank you, Richard. My dad was on Tinian, when VE day happened. I can just remember him speaking about it. They were glad that it had happened but they were really worried about the possibility of having to invade Japan's main islands. His brother was also in the Pacific and, after the Sullivan brothers disaster, they could not serve together.

These scraps of memory I try to pass on to my children, in hopes that they will understand the valor, the simple courage of all these men and woman rising up from the cities and the small towns in America to help end these evils.

[William R. Cumming]

Born 8 months and 27 days after PEARL HARBOR BARELY REMEMBER VE or VJ days. I vaguely remember learning that my father had been evacuated from Iwo Jima.

I have visited a number of US military memorials in Western Europe.

At age 18 registered for the draft and worked that same summer with a man that had joined the Marines in 1940 and did not return home until 1946.

My father also discharged 1946 and in 1947 went with him when he turned in his 1911 .45 caliber pistol.

[ex-PFC Chuck]

Richard, your post resonated with my memory of VE Day, which is mainly of an impromptu parade of honking cars in my small southern Minnesota home town. I was five years old.

My dad had been in the Navy in WW I and came out an ensign. Most of his peers at his last posting (the USS Kansas, IIRC) were recalled to duty but he was too old by just a few weeks. He was active in a local civil defense organization. His duty station was a bridge about two blocks away from our house that spanned a channel between two lakes. It was never clear to me what he was supposed to do there, considering our town was over a thousand miles from salt water to the east and fifteen hundred to the west. The badge of dad's civil defense authority was a white-painted helmet liner with the civil defense logo imprinted on the front. After the war it became a frequently used prop in the war games my friends and I played.

The story of how dad became an officer is hilarious. The tl/dr version is that while at anchor in Chesapeake Bay, at dad's initiative he and another guy saved their captain from a very irate wife who otherwise would have confronted him in flagrante delicto in his cabin with his paramour. A few weeks later at sea dad was summoned to the Old Man's cabin. He feared he was going to get chewed out for his peripheral involvement in a minor snafu a few days earlier but instead the captain told him that the ship had received two slots to award in an upcoming OCS class, and that because of his exemplary record one of them was his if he wanted it, which he did. The other was awarded based on a written test.

[rjj]

German broadcast of 70th anniversary parade in Moscow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFIa0PiEhjQ

[The Twisted Genius]

This was long before my time, but I believe elements of the ethos of wartime America lasted into the 60s. I describe it as a make do, pull together and suck it up mentality that seemed to exist until Kennedy's call to "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." went out of style. That admonition was emblazoned in large letters outside the principals office in my grammar school. In the town where I grew up, Prospect, Connecticut, everyone had a garden. In my own family, each of us was given a small plot as we came of age to grow what we pleased. One year I grew popcorn. Another year I grew watermelons from irradiated seeds I bought at the New York Worlds Fair. In the Fall our school lunches often featured baked Hubbard squash from Mrs. Tibbitts' garden. I watched those massive blue gourds grow across the road and knew we were in for a treat soon after Mr. Tibbits started harvesting them.

We were still unabashedly patriotic, but without the divisiveness and self-adulation of today's flag waving version. We were humble and introspective in our patriotism. Every year the first and second graders would make shakos out of construction paper in preparation for an annual tradition near Memorial Day. We would march in a circle around the soldiers monument on the town green carrying small American flags and singing songs. I remember seeing pretty good crowds of parents and other townspeople at these events. The events were respectful and restrained as you would expect in a New England town steeped in Puritan heritage. I remember these times fondly and am grateful I experienced them.

[Richard Sale]

Your memories of these things are invaluable, and I thank you for sharing them from the bottom of my heart.

Richard Sale

[turcopolier]

All

I was a couple of weeks short of my fifth birthday on VE Day and I remember someone mentioning it but that is about all... pl

[oofda]

Victory Day Parade Moscow- 70th anniversary. The initial units marched in WWII-era uniforms and there was even mounted cavalry, with the riders bearing sabers. Also WWII tanks and SP-arty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mkz7WlR2ld8

[William R. Cumming]

Richard! A movie I once saw but cannot remember the title depicted youngsters in London area playing in rubble while observing the BATTLE OF BRITAIN from the ground.
Depictions graphic but did seem to capture that moment in time.

[Jill]

"The Hope and the Glory" perhaps? Based to some extent on Producer/Director/Writer John Boorman's childhood experiences.

"The Empire of the Sun" was the movie based on J. G. Ballard's childhood experiences in an internment camp (Shangai).

[J]

Here is a clearer broadcast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rclvn-s-eA

[J]

Colonel, TTG,

The Army Times has a write up on the new Russian tank T-14 Armata that was displayed in the Moscow parade:

http://www.armytimes.com/story/military/2015/05/05/armata-soviet-parade-t14/26915519/

[turcopolier]

raven

Both the VN War and the WBS have been much discussed on SST over the last 10 years. I find it unproductive. pl