On August 8th, 1945, a city died and a new age was born. On that day, the Japanese city of Hiroshima was devastated in an atomic blast killing seventy eight thousand people. The bombing of Nagasaki occurred three days later leaving another twenty four thousand dead. With those events, the Imperial nation of Japan surrendered unconditionally to Allied forces.
The official surrender took place on the deck of the U.S.S Missouri at Okinawa. General Douglas MacArthur supervised the signing on behalf of the nine Allied nations engaged in the war against Japan - the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China, Australia, New Zealand, The Netherlands and Canada. Foreign minister Shigomitsu signed the treaty for the Emperor of Japan.
With the defeat of Japan came the liberation of twenty three thousand American and Allied prisoners from Japanese prison camps. Additional footage in this episode showed the release of prisoners from German concentration camps. Those held by the Nazis appeared to be in much worse condition, some literally unable to stand, much less walk as they received their freedom. One of my own uncles was a concentration camp survivor, and I was thinking of him as I watched. He and my father both served in World War II in Europe, along with another uncle aboard a naval ship in the Pacific.
It's to them I dedicate the past two weeks in my viewing of "Victory at Sea", and recapping the events of those twenty six episodes here on the IMDb. As the years slip by, there are less and less of those members of the Greatest Generation around to preserve the memory of those days, when patriotism was a grand ideal, and freedom and liberty were concepts worth going to war for and worth dying for. In a few hours, there will be a Memorial Day parade in my home town, just as there is every year. This time around, I'll have a much better understanding and appreciation of what it means to be an American.
The official surrender took place on the deck of the U.S.S Missouri at Okinawa. General Douglas MacArthur supervised the signing on behalf of the nine Allied nations engaged in the war against Japan - the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China, Australia, New Zealand, The Netherlands and Canada. Foreign minister Shigomitsu signed the treaty for the Emperor of Japan.
With the defeat of Japan came the liberation of twenty three thousand American and Allied prisoners from Japanese prison camps. Additional footage in this episode showed the release of prisoners from German concentration camps. Those held by the Nazis appeared to be in much worse condition, some literally unable to stand, much less walk as they received their freedom. One of my own uncles was a concentration camp survivor, and I was thinking of him as I watched. He and my father both served in World War II in Europe, along with another uncle aboard a naval ship in the Pacific.
It's to them I dedicate the past two weeks in my viewing of "Victory at Sea", and recapping the events of those twenty six episodes here on the IMDb. As the years slip by, there are less and less of those members of the Greatest Generation around to preserve the memory of those days, when patriotism was a grand ideal, and freedom and liberty were concepts worth going to war for and worth dying for. In a few hours, there will be a Memorial Day parade in my home town, just as there is every year. This time around, I'll have a much better understanding and appreciation of what it means to be an American.
