Seventy years ago, flags celebrated victory | Memorial Day
Seven decades ago this month, half of World War II ended with the surrender of Germany. The timing made May 30, 1945 – Memorial Day – particularly meaningful, and American flags played a major role.
You can see for yourself by watching a newsreel from that month. “As America shifts her armed might to finish off the last remaining Axis power,” the narrator intones, “she pauses to honor her heroes who were slain in this and in previous wars.”
The newsreel’s scenes include the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and a cemetery in Brooklyn. “Thousands pay their respects to the fallen heroes who lie there,” the film notes, adding that “Riverside Drive [in New York City] is the scene of the annual service parade, in which thousands…give honor to the flag and to the men who have died while defending it.”
Americans knew the connection between Germany’s surrender and American flags was strong. On May 10, a New Jersey daily reported on a chapter commander of the Military Order of the Purple Heart who said, “The American flag is a symbol of our pride of country and the principles for which it stands. When you fly Old Glory you are proclaiming to all that this is…our symbol and our banner.”
On Memorial Day 1945, thousands of people in Rockford, Illinois, turned out for a parade and heard a speaker remind them that an American flag had fluttered over Iwo Jima just a few weeks earlier.
“There is a lesson…for us in that scene,” he said. “The flag of the United States, whether it flies on the mountaintop of Iwo Jima or at the boundaries of our own nation, is still the flag of liberty.”
President Harry Truman used Memorial Day to remind Americans that Flag Day was coming in June. “Our flag has accompanied our fighting men on a hundred battlefields,” he said. “It flies over the friendly lands our arms have freed and over the hostile countries our arms have conquered. Our flag will be planted in the heart of the empire of our last remaining enemy,” meaning Japan.
On the last day of May 1945, The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio, carried this main headline: “Yanks Raise Flag Over Shuri Castle” on Okinawa, proving that the U.S. was one step closer to the August surrender of the Empire of Japan.