Not many among us are old enough to remember the day World War II ended as the Japanese formally surrendered aboard the USS Missouri 70 years ago.
More Top Picks Best Rolling Clothes Racks For Closets
There are fewer still of the soldiers who fought for our freedom. Most World War II vets are in their 90s and, according to Veterans Affairs, one of them dies every three minutes.
Therefore, these days, it’s left mostly to museums to share the tales of terror and triumph — and of how the Allies, led by the Americans, finally ended the war on V-J (Victory over Japan) Day, Sept. 2, 1945.
A fascinating mix of museums stretching from one end of the country to the other explains how sheer grit and new technology ultimately turned the tide and led to surrender.
A good place to begin is where the war ended, aboard the ship called the “Mighty Mo.”
Moored at Honolulu’s Ford Island right beside Pearl Harbor, the USS Missouri sits just a few hundred yards from the bow of the USS Arizona. The Arizona is the most famous of the American ships sunk Dec. 7, 1941, the day the Japanese attacked and the U.S. entered the war.
Visitors now stand on a deck of the Missouri beside a bronze plaque marking the spot where Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Adm. Chester Nimitz led a 22-minute surrender ceremony while anchored in Tokyo Bay.
“On the surrender day, all of the guns here were locked and loaded because nobody knew if this was a trick or not,” said Mike Carr, president and CEO of the Battleship Missouri Memorial. “In fact, there were almost a thousand planes in the air at that time, with either landing sites or bombing targets designated.”
On lower decks, restored crew quarters, exhibits and an excellent film share the stories of the sailors who served on the warship.
“We hope that people leave with a sense of history and a sense of how instruments of war such as the Missouri can also become a platform for peace,” Carr said.
More than 4,500 miles away in tiny Dana, Ind., Phil Hess agrees that war stories need to be preserved and told.
“History is fragile,” said Hess, one of the volunteers who run the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum.
Pyle, who grew up in a farmhouse that’s part of the museum, was one of the most famous war correspondents of all time.
“He had about 40 million daily readers. He was in 700 newspapers,” Hess explained. “He spent his time with the enlisted guys. He’d go up to the front lines. He’d go to the repair shops. He’d go with the truck drivers. … People who read (his column) felt like they were reading a letter from their serviceman.”
The museum features dioramas of the various places from which Pyle wrote his columns — North Africa, Normandy, France, and the Pacific included. Near the end of a visit, guests arrive at a mural depicting the ditch in which Pyle was killed by Japanese machine gun fire April 18, 1945. In a pocket was his final dispatch, in his handwriting, that eloquently described the horrors of war.
“Dead men by mass production — in one country after another — month after month and year after year.
“Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.
“Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.
“Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them.”
Though most Americans nowadays have probably never heard of him, Pyle was so famous that Harry Truman, who had become president just six days earlier, announced his death.
“More than any other man, he became the spokesman of the ordinary American in arms doing so many extraordinary things,” Truman said.
It was the new president who ultimately made the decision to drop atomic bombs on two Japanese cities — Hiroshima and Nagasaki — in August 1945. The devastating blasts brought the empire to its knees.
The impact of unleashing the then-new technology is shared in an exhibit at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History, strategically located in Albuquerque, N.M. The atom bomb was developed in the “secret city” of Los Alamos, N.M., and the first test detonation occurred near Alamogordo, also in New Mexico.
In a compelling new display, images of the devastation in Hiroshima are seen through the windows of a typical Japanese home.
“We just relate facts,” curator David Hoover said. “We let people draw their own conclusions.”
The battle against Japan and the country’s eventual surrender will be told in a new exhibit opening this December at The National WWII Museum in New Orleans.
The “Road to Tokyo” galleries will follow the trail of GIs — beginning at Pearl Harbor and then hopscotching across the islands of the Pacific over nearly four years of combat. The exhibits will explore not only the grueling conditions soldiers faced but also the impact of facing an enemy from a vastly different culture.
In the lobby of the Louisiana museum, aging veterans greet guests at a small table to share their wartime experiences.
More Top Picks Best Medical Alert Systems For Heart Attack Risk
“We’re all hoping that some of it will rub off on them,” former paratrooper Tom Blakey told me in December. “History will repeat itself … when people don’t remember.”
One month later, on Jan. 15, Blakey became one of the nearly 500 World War II vets who die each day. He was 94.
The National WWII Museum (945 Magazine St., New Orleans; 504-528-1944; www.nationalww2museum.org) $24 adults, $14.50 children.
Jay Jones is a freelance writer.
If you go
The Battleship Missouri Memorial (808-455-1600, www.ussmissouri.org) is reached by shuttle buses that regularly depart the Pearl Harbor Visitors Center (1 Arizona Memorial Place, Honolulu; 808-954-8777; www.nps.gov/valr). Adults $25, children $13.
The Ernie Pyle museum (120 Briarwood Ave., Dana, Ind.; 765-665-3633; www.erniepyle.org) is open Friday, Saturday and Sunday May 1 through Veterans Day (Nov. 11). Adults $5, children $3.
National Museum of Nuclear Science and History (601 Eubank Blvd. SE, Albuquerque, N.M.; 505-245-2137; www.nuclearmuseum.org). Adults $12, youth $10.