77 years ago today, the day the Nazis surrendered to our fathers and grandfathers in Europe. Of the millions who served in WWII, less then 100,000 are still alive today. They disappeared right in front our eyes.
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Was there even like a big celebration in America for V-E Day. You hardly ever see film of it.
Something tells me a lot of folks from that generation were glad that not everyone had a camera in their pocket. lol
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Americans and Russians meet at the Elbe 1945.

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It wasn’t as thunderous as VJ Day, but there were large celebrations.
Makes sense honestly. Everyone knew in the US that our war wasn’t over just yet.
The VJ Day celebrations were INSANE. Just about every named town and city in the entire country threw huge parades and city wide parties. I don’t think anything like that ever happened before and it certainly hasn’t happened since then.
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Both my grandfathers were in WWII. One in the Philippines, the other in France… man the stories they told….
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I had one great uncle (oldest of 11 kids) who served in Europe.
I never got to meet him. He died in 1980, bout 9 years before I was born. He became an extremely heavy drinker when he came back from the war. Liver damage got him.
My granddad said he never talked about it to anyone other than my great grandfather, and he apparently only did that one time right before he moved to Florida in the late 50s.
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My grandpa on my mother’s side was an island hopper in the pacific. He was also stationed in Korea in 1950. He would eat the food, but would never be caught dead using chopsticks. lol
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. I learned them before I went to Korea… part of my training!
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My dad taught me how to use them when he got home from South Korea. I was 4 at the time and I barely remember not being able to use them at this point. That was pretty cool of him.
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I had three uncles that served…two in the Pacific and one in Europe. One was killed on Saipan during the biggest banzai charge of the war. He and his brother were in Charlie co.105th inf reg 27th inf div.
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Is there a way to undelete my post? I fumbled my phone while trying to look at something.
It’s an absolute fact that one of the at least somewhat common responses to VJ Day was public sex. For real.
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NJBob
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My dad served with the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division in Europe. He lived to age 96. VE Day was always the bigger celebration.
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One of the most fascinating things about the war to me that it was an event that touched every single American family. Most had at least one person serve and even those that didn’t had close family friends who went.
16 million Americans served in World War II, from North Africa, Italy, and France all the way to the other side of planet on Okinawa, New Guinea, Saipan, and Iwo Jima among hundreds of other small pacific islands. 450,000 lost their lives.
It’s insane when one thinks about it. It took a special breed of people to do that on such an enormous scale. I imagine many of the guys who went had probably never left their home state or if they had they had only went one or two states over.
Then one day a big train ride to one of the country’s coasts and then onto a huge boat where they ended up in places that were just spots on a map before then.
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Everyone contributed to the war effort, whether they liked it or not.
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Yepp. Public sex, the largest parties this country has probably ever seen in its history (where entire towns were partying together for ten hours straight), even the dry counties in the Deep South pulling out the otherwise hidden liquor to serve out.
It had to be a once in a millennia event. I don’t think this country has ever partied that hard in its history.
The British partied pretty hard on VE Day. Those celebrations had nothing on the United States once VJ Day rolled around.
My Dad fought in the battle of Guadalcanal. When I was in my early teens he told me that I could ask him any questions I had. But after that he told me that he would never talk about it again. He hated our involvement in Korea and Vietnam. A few years back I was in Normandy on June 6th. Staying in the hotel was a gentleman from the U.K. who had participated in the landings on Juno beach. It was really interesting to hear of what he went through that day and the weeks following it.
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Seven of my mothers uncles served, one was in the Devils Brigade, that’s the only one that died in the war. Another was one of three men that first reached the locked gate at the concentration camp in Ohrdurf, he married one of the survivors.
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