1945
VICTORY
W ars change peoples. World wars thus must change the world, and profoundly so. Up until spring 1945, for Americans, those changes mostly happened elsewhere. Their troops, their weapons, their resources were wreaking the fiercest of changes on ancient lands, delivering Adolf Hitler the bill for unleashing the greatest catastrophe Europe had ever known and hoping to dissuade Japan’s fanatical leaders from forcing the equivalent of mass suicide upon the people of their lovely yet mysterious islands. But in North Platte, and throughout the then-48 United States, people could look around and see homes, farms and communi- ties untouched by war. Unchanged. And, it seemed, unchanging. Their physical vistas were as unchanged in mid-August as when April began. Yet everything had changed. The women of the World War I Red Cross Canteen had treated and comforted wounded soldiers on hospital trains. Their World War II counterparts had done likewise from time to time before D-Day. Now hospital trains and their suffering passengers were far more numerous. And Canteen customers, healthy or otherwise, were telling tales or bearing personal
scars of the frighteningly new depths of inhumanity many had encountered. April, then May, brought dizzying changes. June and July offered a pause, a set change before the curtain lifted on the last and likely bloodiest scenes. In April, the president suddenly died. Then the two murder- ous dictators met their end — one by execution, the other by suicide. Europe collapsed into peace. Americans that summer steeled themselves for months, even one or two more years, of the worst fighting of all. Then, in August, one mushroom cloud, then a second, blos- somed over Japan with terrible fullness. That ended it. Americans boisterously celebrated victory, complete and total, the fulfillment of all they had sacrificed for three years and eight months. As the afterglow faded, the portents of those deadliest of mushrooms would become clearer. But now, at last, their young men and women were coming home. Their war was over. Still, North Platte, western Nebraska and northeast Colorado would not yet stand down. Not until all of them, or most, stopped by once more.
OPPOSITE: These service members, heading back from the Canteen to their troop train, had no idea World War II was in its last days. All photos in this chapter were taken from footage shot by a U.S. Signal Corps film crew while they visited North Platte in July and August 1945.
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