This day in history - August 14

[seamusTX]

1848 - The Oregon Territory was established.

1935 - President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act

1945 - Japan surrendered unconditionally.

1980 - A strike began at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland, ultimately leading to the creation of the Solidarity labor movement and the fall of communism.

- Jim

[Jeff B.]

ewww... Social Security! The beginning of the end...

Jeff B.

[ELB]

1945 - Japan surrendered unconditionally.

- Jim

Hokay, this triggers yet another story/memory. I mentioned in a previous post that my Dad was an Army Air Corps => US Army Air Forces airplane mechanic in the Pacific theater. I can't remember off hand which island he was on when the Japanese surrendered, but I do remember him telling me a bit about how things suddenly changed. It was almost unbelievable -- the US had been massively at war for more than four years; he himself had been in the military since December 1941. Suddenly, no war. Of course there were still some issues, Japanese soldiers that hadn't gotten the word yet and all that, but in his area, things came to a screeching halt. Suddenly fixing planes and getting them back in the air no matter what it took was no longer driving events. Everybody just wanted to go home.

Remember, no airlines really, the vast majority of troops moved by ship, so it wasn't real fast, and every ship was needed for troop transport. Ships that arrived that had brand new airplanes on them simply dumped the planes over the side into the water -- warplanes were no longer needed, no one wanted to take time to put them together and make them airworthy, they just needed space on the ships. Broken airplanes that couldn't fly out on their own, planes they had been bustin' tail to fix before the surrender, got bull-dozed off to the side of the runways.

It took awhile to work things out. Soldiers got angry at delays, discipline slacked off a lot, some fights. The military came up with a point system to prioritize who got to go home first. So many points for each month overseas, for type of job, etc. Each soldier got a number, and once they ran out of work, they sat around in their tents waiting for their numbers to be called out over a loudspeaker. They were afraid to go out of range of the loud speakers, fearing they would miss their call.

Dad ended up going back to the States on a battleship -- dang it, I can't remember which one. He was impressed how it would cut straight thru big waves/swells in a storm, submerging the bow sometimes, instead of wallowing up and down. There was very little room for people on a battleship, even less when you cram in a bunch of soldiers in addition to the crew. Dad had some stripes by then, said that let him hang out in "chief's country" where there was a little more room.

He had been a farmer before the war. He never went back to it -- after working for his dad in a gas station for awhile, he one day heard some P-51s buzzing around, went to see about it, and ended up joining this new organization called the Illinois Air National Guard. Spent the rest of his life associated with the Air Force somehow -- Guard, Reserve, civil service... eventually had a son who also went Air Force.