The same went for those already serving, though Even with VJ Day, there still remained an array of military tasks to be performed out east, such as running British Military Administrations in reconquered colonies, repatriating Prisoners Of War (POWs), and reoccupying allied colonies, which could involve fighting. we youngsters were not going to get caught up in a fighting war. In the orchard at the back we built the customary bonfire around which customers drank while the beer lasted. When the second bomb went off we were staying at a pub, on the outskirts of Monmouth, run by friends.
It was with little emotion therefore that one heard of the detonation of the first atomic bomb and the huge casualties it caused.
‘It was predicted the war with Japan would last until 1950’, recalled English schoolboy Norman Hurst, because it was said that her troops would indulge in a suicidal defence of her territory, island by island. Perhaps we were wrong, but on the night the war ended I don’t think any of us gave a damn. The bombs were dropped ‘as we were packing up an exhausted looking tramp steamer in Bombay harbour for the invasion of Penang Island. Resident medical officer to 5 Commando near Poona, the unit was training to fight the Japanese. Doctor Sholto Forman was in Bombay, on his way to the war, when it happened. The atomic bombs brought relief to those expecting more hardship and danger as the war with Japan looked set to drag on for months if not years. Even as VJ Day was declared, these forces were attacking Japanese targets, and being attacked in turn, as South East Asia Command prepared for its own D-Day, the long-anticipated amphibious assault on occupied Malaya. By early 1945, the most powerful Royal Navy fleet in operation was the British Pacific Fleet, enduring kamikaze attacks along with US forces as they pushed towards the Japanese home islands. With the war in Europe over, the British were pivoting their military strength towards the Pacific, while also preparing for the final battles in Burma and the recapture of the Malay peninsula. Eight British planes ‘scored seven hits on the track, and killed 200 Japs who were caught standing in formation along the railroad’. In an attack on a Japanese-controlled strategic railway. On that day, 13 May, British bombers had successfully mined the Yangtse River. The ‘ferocity of the war against Japan’, writes Martin Gilbert’, ‘did not abate’ after VE Day.The casualties in the Okinawa campaign, for instance, up to 13 May, included 6,634 American and 137,557 Japanese dead. Some village sports and damp bonfire and floodlit green.’įor those with relatives stationed out east, the end of the Japanese war was, naturally, as significant as the end of the war in Europe back in May. American came to luncheon and signed Randolph up for highly profitable daily column. Randolph made a bonfire and Auberon fell into it. Hangover, Winston a boisterous boy with head too big for body. On the following day he wrote: ‘Another public holiday. On the same day, the novelist and soldier Evelyn Waugh was at his family home in Ickleford, Hitchin. On 15 August the family watched a torchlight procession at Penninis – ‘like a pagan festival’ – held to celebrate VJ Day.
“The whole world is now at PEACE!”, we said to each other. ‘Shouts, more trumpets, rockets and then maroons going off with a deafening whoosh followed by an echo like a whole town collapsing. On the evening of 13 August she was in bed with her husband when they heard the noise of a procession making its way to the pier, and the hooter of the Scillonian, the vessel that ferried people to and from the Scilly Isles, blasting away in the harbour. Frances Partridge, pacifist and Bloomsbury group member, was on holiday at St Helen’s in Cornwall. Other British people were far more interested in the Japanese war than Harold Nicolson.
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