THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 3, 1995 TAG: 9509030039
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Long : 107 lines
The world remembers Sept. 2, 1945, as the day World War II formally ended. That day in Tokyo Bay, on the deck of the battleship Missouri, a stiff-lipped Gen. Douglas MacArthur carried several pens to a felt-covered table and led a brief treaty-signing ceremony with Japan that closed history's bloodiest war.
``Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world,'' MacArthur said, closing the solemn ceremony, ``and that God will preserve it always.''
MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied powers, then broadcast a radio message proclaiming, ``A great victory has been won.'' All of America listened in and rejoiced.
The Douglas MacArthur Memorial in downtown Norfolk re-enacted the V-J Day signing Saturday. A few hundred people crowded the rotunda in which MacArthur's body is entombed, and watched as a khaki-uniformed portrayer of the general lip-synced his famous words. Several choked back tears.
Those present who'd fought in the Pacific - and especially those who'd been imprisoned by the Japanese during the war - were grateful for the occasion recalling the war's end.
They donned old uniforms and medals. Some traded stories for hours after the re-enactment ended. But each man's personal tale was of a war that didn't end as neatly and boisterously for American soldiers and sailors as popular history now suggests.
These men's war - horrible, heroic, humbling - trickled to an end, amid suspicions and fears.
Their war's end was first hearsay, then well-founded rumor and finally fact. Some didn't let loose whoops of joy and relief until their ships set sail for home. In some cases, that was many months after that early September day when Japan's leaders formally surrendered.
George H. Bergmann, 68, was working in the engine room of the Wilkes-Barre, which on Sept. 2, 1945, was anchored not far from the Missouri. ``I came up on the deck every so often,'' he recalled, ``sneaking off watch.'' He doesn't remember any cheering that day.
``People say, `Why?' It was because we were all keeping an eye out. . . . We kept saying `Something is going to happen.' '' He and his shipmates simply didn't believe the Japanese had capitulated.
The barrel-chested Bergmann, of Virginia Beach, served more than 20 years in the Navy, retiring at age 37 in 1964. He was only 16 when he enlisted, lying that he was older. In his wallet, he carries a card for an organization he belongs to, the Veterans of Underage Military Service. On the back of it, he has scribbled words that he said Adm. Jeremy M. Boorda, now chief of naval operations, once uttered: ``You don't have to be very old to grow up fast.''
William Jeffries of Virginia Beach can attest to that. He's ruddy-faced and muscular at age 75. But slaving as a POW in an Osaka steel mill at age 22, he wasted down to about 100 pounds on his 5-foot, 11-inch frame. About 400 Americans entered the mill's POW camp with Jeffries. Only 137 were left alive by the time the war ended, he said.
It's a wonder that more didn't die, Jeffries added. The prisoners slept on rice mats on the wooden floor of a platform that jutted out over boiling vats of sulfuric acid.
In December 1941, Jeffries had been a disbursing clerk aboard a submarine tender when Japanese bombers raided the Manila Bay naval yard. Jeffries was off delivering pay records to another vessel when the attack hit, and he couldn't motor his launch back fast enough to catch his evacuating ship.
``If I'd stayed on my ship, it would have been an entirely different life for me,'' he said. His ship made its way toward Australia and stayed largely out of harm's way during the war.
Jeffries ended up in a ragtag battalion largely made up of sailors, like himself, who were left behind when Navy ships left the Philippines. The sailors never quite mastered the art of ground combat, he said. He was captured at Corregidor in May 1942 and spent the rest of the war as a POW.
Retired from the Navy as a warrant officer in 1960, he's now the state commander of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor, whose purpose is to keep alive the memories of Pacific veterans of the war.
For POWs like Jeffries, the war's end often came strangely and silently. They'd wake up one morning and find their Japanese captors had simply disappeared.
That was the case for William Wells, a Navy chief gunner's mate who was at a prison camp at Maibara in Japan. It was a brutal camp, Wells said. He was beaten many times for the slightest perceived misstep. Then one morning in late August 1945, after the heavy bombing of Japan that culminated with the dropping of two atomic bombs, ``the gates were wide open and the guards were gone,'' he recalled. ``We just said, `Well, it's over.' ''
Wells ended up in charge of more than 200 men. They quickly spelled a large ``PW'' in sheets and rags atop one of the camp buildings, then waited. Within a day or so, a Navy dive bomber flew over and waved its wings in recognition. Shortly after that, a couple of more swooped low and dropped sea bags stuffed with candy, cigarettes and other goodies.
More food drops followed every day for a few more weeks. It wasn't until Sept. 9 - a full week after the peace agreement's signing on the Missouri - that they left the camp for the long journey that would eventually take them all back home. There wasn't any revelry, Wells said. The men were too weary for that.
Wells, 81, retired from the Navy in 1957 and lives in Virginia Beach. Tall and thin, he smiles when he remembers the chocolate bars - huge bars - that the airplanes dropped to the grateful prisoners more than 50 years ago.
Freedom never tasted so good. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
TAMARA VONINSKI/Staff
At the Douglas MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk on Saturday, Eric
Gibson, a military historian, played the part of Gen. MacArthur
during a re-enactment of the treaty-signing ceremony with Japan that
ended World War II.
by CNB