Crowds of people celebrated around the world. In Paris, American soldiers read the news in a French newspaper.
V–J day in Times Square, a photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt, was published in Life in 1945 with the caption, “In New York’s Times Square a white-clad girl clutches her purse and skirt as an uninhibited sailor plants his lips squarely on hers”.
tagged as military WWII V-J Day always relevant
happyforjane | jesusplayingolf | ellephanta | interwar
American soldier kissing a French girl as they embrace on the hood of a half-track, 1944. ph. Ralph Morse
tagged as military WWII via agloriousjane
waycider | ophelian | toasterspasm
Two American soldiers take time out to comfort a frightened french child. June 1944
Who was the tougher World War II enemy, the Germans or the Japanese?
Yesterday I was reading the transcript of comments Gen. J. Lawton Collins made at Fort Leavenworth in 1983. “Lighning Joe” Collins was one of the few generals to fight in both the Pacific and the European theaters in World War II, and to my knowledge, the only one successful in both. (Generals Eugene Landrum and Charles Corlett, not so much.) So I was interested to see Collins conclude that the Germans were better fighters:
They were radically different. The German was far more skilled than the Japanese. Most of the Japanese that we fought were not skilled men. Not skilled leaders. The German had a professional army… . The Japanese army was very much like ours in a sense. They had a small corps of officers who were professionals. But the bulk of their people were not professionals in the sense of knowing their business and so on. They didn’t have the equipment that we had. They didn’t know how to handle combined arms-the artillery and the support of the infantry-to the same extent we did. They were gallant soldiers, though. They fought to the end and you had to knock them off-that was all there was to it. And we had to do that right on Guadalcanal… . The Japanese were very gallant men. They fought very, very hard, but they were not nearly as skillful as the Germans. But the German didn’t have the tenacity of the Japanese.”
Tom again: Still, I think the Pacific war, conducted on remote islands where the enemy would fight to the death, probably was the tougher fight, even if the foe wasn’t as skillful or as well-equipped.
Peter Smoothy, 86, who was a leading writer in the Royal Navy on D-Day visits the grave of a fallen comrade on June 6, 2010 in Bayeux, France. Across Normandy several hundred of the surviving veterans of the Normandy campaign are commemorating the 66th anniversary of the D-Day landings which eventually led to the Allied liberation of France in 1944. (Matt Cardy/Getty Images)
American soldiers on Omaha Beach recover the dead after the D-Day invasion, June 1944. (U.S. National Archives)