VJ Day

I had just turned 19 and I'll never forget this day . I was stationed at Langley Field and at mid-afternoon it all started with two B-24's buzzing the base and doing some un-B-24 maneuvers, one almost in the main street as it flew through. The next 24 hours were the worst that ever could be imagined. All hell broke loose with a never ending uncontrollable riot of violence. I have written about it and put it away somewhere because I don't think that anyone would believe me. I was a base MP at the time and my fellow MP's and I weren't sure that we would survive without injury or worse. The only person that I knew that could verify it died several years ago. Jack T. lived in Lake Stevens nearby. He was assigned to the base hospital and said that he remembered me when I was bringing in casualties in the never-ending stream of injured people, most of them women. Things calmed down by 1700 the next day and I crashed for the rest of the night. My uniform was ripped, stained with blood and vomit. It was thrown away but I still got a statement of charges for it and had to pay for a new set of suntans. Such is the military. For weeks after, the atmosphere was weird because everybody wondered what the heck to do next now that the war was over.

 

Yes. It was anything but nice like that and it was a good lesson in human behavior. All were not bad but some took advantage of the situation to do what they could get away with. We recognized some that were trouble makers before the place went nuts. Never understood most of it.

 

During the night we saw some absolute carnage from those who had no reason to do what they did. Then we were called to the barrack in which veteran ground crews were billeted and they were having their own beer party celebration within the barrack and caused no problem with anybody.