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This Friday is the 69th anniversary of VJ Day, victory over Japan. I would like to tell you of my impressions leading up to that memorable day, which doesn’t seem all that long ago.
It was late 1941. I had just turned six. The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, and World War II had just begun for America. It had been raging in Europe for more than two years.
I had seen the newsreels at the movies of the bombing of London and the goose-stepping Nazis. I was afraid.
I would shout back at the radio when news of the war events was announced. I would tell my mother when I came in from play that I helped hold up the wall that kept the enemy away.
I cried at night when a plane flew over, thinking it would drop a bomb on our home. My mother assured me that, since our house was made of brick, the bomb wouldn’t hurt us. Although this didn’t make too much sense to me, I decided to believe her.
The war years marched on, and we kids collected cans, scrap metal, old tires, bundled newspapers and even empty toothpaste tubes for our scrap drives for the war effort.
At school, we religiously bought defense stamps at 10 cents each and, sometimes, had enough in our stamp books to buy an $18.75 war bond.
We played war with a vengeance, using wooden guns and rifles, because we couldn’t get metal ones. The kids who played the enemy were always vanquished.
Some of us lost someone in the war. The death of my cousin Arden in a plane crash especially hit home.
In spite of the supposed joys of childhood, the war weighed heavily on my shoulders. In spite of my efforts in collecting, buying stamps, painting patriotic posters and writing childish letters to my cousins and friends on active duty and overseas, I just couldn’t do enough to help the war effort.
Then, it finally came. I was now 9 years old, going on 10. I was sitting in the garage in the cockpit of my homemade airplane fuselage when I heard a distant train whistle blowing and blowing incessantly. My dad was sitting on the back porch swing listening to the radio. He turned it up. Lowell Thomas was announcing that the war was over. It was VJ Day, victory over Japan, Aug. 15, 1945.
You can’t imagine the joy. That mantle of fear, that wearisome burden was instantly gone from me.
This was wonderful. My cousins and friends would be coming home. No more gas rationing, no more twice resoled shoes that no longer fit, no more air raid sirens, no more blackouts, no more toys made of wood and cardboard, no more scrap drives.
Our family piled into the old Buick and drove downtown. What a joyous noise. Church bells rang and rang, every car was blowing its horn, people were singing and hugging. A ’37 Chevy riding on its rims threw cascades of sparks as its driver gunned it to keep up with the horn-blaring, bumper-to-bumper traffic on East Market Street.
We parked the car and joined the jostling impromptu throng of people gathering in Courthouse Square. I had never seen so many people gathered in one place at one time. I never saw, nor probably will ever see again, such an outpouring of sheer, tearful joy. All of us seemed to share that same unifying thought: Thank God, the war is over.
Mumford is a Warren resident. Email him at editorial@tribtoday.com.