PD Editorial: From a day of infamy to a historic victory

“War in Pacific over!”

The oversized headline stood atop The Press Democrat’s nameplate 70 years ago today, Aug. 15, 1945, trumpeting the end of World War II.

“Santa Rosa went mad - deliriously mad - along with the rest of the world,” according to a story below that described “semihysterical crowds … at every street intersection” and flag-bedecked firetrucks racing through downtown as word spread that Japan had delivered a note to a Swiss delegation, and President Harry Truman was preparing to make an announcement at the White House. “That was enough for Santa Rosa!”

And also for the rest of the nation, as pandemonium followed the news that, three years, eight months and eight days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the apocalyptic struggle was finally over.

People who were not alive then cannot fully appreciate the sacrifices of that time.

More than 16 million Americans served in the armed forces during World War II, and more than 400,000 lost their lives on the battlefields of Asia, Africa and Europe, where V-E Day came about three months earlier.

Millions more pitched in at home - a sharp contrast to the Gulf wars, when nothing was asked of most Americans. During World War II, women entered the work force in large numbers for the first time, food and fuel were rationed, and civilians collected scrap metal, rags, even bones and grease to be recycled into weapons and other material for the war effort.

The global death toll, soldiers and civilians, was at least 50 million and, if those who died from war-related disease and famine are counted, as high as 80 million.

With a dwindling number of people who lived through those times - the youngest veterans are approaching 90 years old - the war years are fading into memory.

Before long, World War II will be a chapter in a history book, a setting for Hollywood action movies, a faded black-and-white photo in a scrapbook or an old newspaper; the first-hand accounts gone along with those who fought the battles and built the peace that followed.

But those years and the people who lived them must never be forgotten.

Freedom truly was threatened around the world by the rise of fascism in Europe and imperial Japan in the Pacific, and victory for the Allies wasn’t guaranteed.

The Allies did prevail, preserving democracy and cementing the United States as a global superpower, even as World War II gave way to a Cold War that lasted a half-century and a nuclear arms race that continues to this day.

Elsewhere in the V-J Day paper are a solemn tribute to 200 Sonoma County men who “aren’t ever coming back,” a cartoon acclaiming the might of the atomic bomb and editorials calling for immediate repatriation of American prisoners of war and predicting - incorrectly, as we now know - a future of agrarian poverty for Japan. There also were a few unfortunate examples of the casual racism of the day, but most evident was the relief and joy that greeted the end of the war.

To mark the occasion, Santa Rosa planned a parade for 2 p.m. the following day - “if peace celebrants are up by that hour!”