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S.Ī third man said he was in a prisoner-of-war camp in the mountains of Japan, where he and others had recently noticed an unusual haze. Suddenly, the ship made a U-turn and headed back to the U.
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But weary of the war, the soldier just shrugged when he saw ongoing street celebration and continued on his way home.Ī second man told me he was on a troop ship that had recently left a port in California to cross the Pacific Ocean en route to the planned invasion of Japan. But on now, on V-J Day, he happened be returning home to Rhode Island, and he stepped off a train in downtown Providence, which indeed was going wild and crazy at the news. One of the most profound of those assignments was very specific: I was to get hold of some veterans, people who had actually been in the Navy, Army or Marines and ask them “What were you doing on V-J Day, also known as Victory Day?”Īn Army man, who had been in the European phase of the war, said the war for him ended on V-E Day (Victory in Europe) months earlier, on May 8. In some years, the paper’s editors assigned a junior staffer – me – to jump into the newspaper’s Way Back Machine, to find out what was happening on the day itself in 1945. The newspaper believed one of its missions was to keep its readers informed about the finer details of their strange August holiday. My appreciation of the holiday was acquired second-hand, by way of employment – as a reporter for the Providence Journal. It wasn’t until I moved to Rhode Island a couple of decades later that I began to learn the significance of Victory Day, which is a holiday in Rhode Island, but nowhere else in the country, one of the reasons that it remains a matter of contention, which I hope will always be the case. Not only was I way below the age of memory, I lived in a bucolic college Vermont town, where, if there had been a wild and crazy celebration, it couldn’t have been too wild and crazy, since there were only about 3,000 of us around at the time and some were my age. So I can’t tell you first-hand about the how the news was received. 14, 1945, a hugely important moment in human history that was often referred to during and after the war as “V-J Day,” shorthand for “Victory over Japan Day.” I had just turned 3 when World War II ended on Aug.