Today is Aug. 14. Just another midsummer day with no particular significance, right?
Well, it sure is special to me. Fifty-eight years ago, Aug. 14 was the happiest day of my life, and probably in the lives of millions of other Americans.
It was the day Japan surrendered. It was the end, after many long years of struggle and suffering, of World War II.
It was the day when I gratefully realized that maybe I did have a life ahead of me, after all. Until that moment, I and most of my GI buddies had many doubts about that. Our future was on hold, and had been for a long time.
At the time, I was an 18-year-old infantryman in the Philippines with the 25th Division, a battle-hardened Army outfit that had been among the first to see combat when the Japanese launched the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
Later, the division, nicknamed "Tropic Lightning," fought in the South Pacific on Guadalcanal, Vella Lavella and New Georgia in the Solomon Islands, and finally on the plains and in the rugged mountains of Luzon.
We had just come off the lines in the Caraballo Mountains after 165 days of continuous combat, one of the longest tests of battle endurance in Army history. After a breather of a couple of weeks, we began intensive training for the planned invasion of Japan, an undertaking that struck fear - when we allowed ourselves to think about it - into every man.
We didn't know it, but we were scheduled to hit the beaches on the first day of the invasion at Miyazaki, on the southernmost island of Kyushu, with the 33d Division in what was to be called Operation Olympic. The entire operation would be bigger than the D-Day invasion at Normandy, with 550,000 troops involved.
The invasion, they told us later, was to have taken place Nov. 1, 1945, only about three months away. We learned that the Japanese had decided to change their tactics in the Pacific from defensive to offensive, and to hit our invasion force with everything they had, including explosive-laden suicide boats, flying Baka bombs, and thousands of kamikaze planes, right on the beachhead landing sites.
Although we were in intensive training, few of us talked about the invasion. We were fatalistic about the whole thing. Perhaps we thought if we didn't mention it, it would somehow go away. I really don't know.
