End of WW II Remembered.

A commemoration of the end of World War II 60 years ago started at Victory Square, continued with a parade along Pender Street and ended at the Chinese Cultural Centre. Apart from veterans of the war, there were soldiers on active duty and Royal Canadian Mounted Police; all in uniform including the RCMP in the famous red one, that nowadays seems reserved for special occasions like this. I had taken my (newly acquired) neat little digital camera, but also my campaign medals from the war. They were in my pocket; but since all the others wore theirs, I put mine on, too. That was only the third time that I wore those (visibly; underneath I had them on more often) and only the first time for an official occasion.



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Having taken quite a few pictures at the Victory Square stage, some pretty good ones, I was aiming the camera at army jeeps advancing near the head of the parade; but a jeep stopped, and I was made to get in and throw nickels they had in a big can at fellow civilians cheering /applauding the parade of which I had suddenly become a part. As far as I can recall, that was my first time in a jeep since the 1940s. Another benefit was that I participated in the last stage at the well air conditioned Chinese Cultural Centre, unlikely otherwise; and I really need air conditioning in the ever hotter Vancouver summers; hence the decision to get an air conditioner, unlike most West End apartment dwellers here.

In relation to the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that had preceded the surrender of Japan, there were more articles questioning especially its moral justification. I shouldn't add to that, regardless of the way it looks in retrospect. At the time I /we were happy that we were now unlikely to be sent to the jungle disease infected Burma front. We had just delivered some American GMC trucks from Milan to an American base outside Rome (on the road to Ostia), presumably also for shipment to the Far East, and a few of us, including my brother and me, had gone to the Opera Reale outdoors at the Baths of Caracalla (Cavalleria Rusticana and I Pagliacci). The next morning -it was my 20th birthday- the news of the new kind of bomb was all over the papers. I had had no scientific education yet, so certainly never had the kind of guilt feelings attributed to some physicists. And even those directly involved in the Manhattan Project apparently didn't quite realize the long term effects of the radiation released. Isn't it stranger that many nowadays, well into the "nuclear age", are not aware of the long term dangers from low level radiation from nuclear power plants; which people like Prof. Gofman of Berkeley's Lawrence Radiation Lab made public decades ago?

You may have surmised from this that I also passed my 80th birthday; so I no longer need my months as an unborn baby to validate my octogenarian credentials.