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In May 1945, spring had only recently arrived at the remote prison in Manchuria, where the Japanese kept their highest-ranking American prisoner, Army General Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright IV. During the three years since he had surrendered the Philippines for fear the Japanese would have massacred what remained of his garrison, Wainwright had endured beatings, starvation and temperatures as low as minus 49 degrees. The pain from an old lower back injury he aggravated during the second week of that month would become so debilitating he had no idea whether he would survive a war he feared might last at least two more winters.
News of Germany’s surrender that same week did not reach Wainwright and, even if it had, would have brought no end to his struggle. “If this keeps up, I know I can’t survive. Thin and weak as I am and no proper food, I doubt if I can endure this pain for any long period of time,” Wainwright wrote in his diary more than a month later on June 19.
Wainwright’s prison diary — which now resides at an Army archive in Carlisle, Pennsylvania — offers a poignant rebuke of President Trump’s plan to rebrand Victory in Europe Day, marking the surrender of Germany on May 8, into something called “Victory Day for World War II.” As every high school student should know, World War II did not end until Japan finally surrendered four months and two atomic bombs later.
The president argues the revision is necessary because Americans have forgotten how to celebrate their history. “We never celebrate anything,” he wrote on the social media platform Truth Social. “That’s because we don’t have leaders anymore, that know how to do so!” Apparently not, as Trump has unwittingly proved by issuing an official proclamation for his newly named holiday and making no mention of the war in the Pacific or the more than one hundred thousand Americans who died in that theater.
If this is what the president meant when he issued an executive order promising to restore “patriotism” to history classrooms, he has the concept exactly backwards. By skipping ahead to the part of the story where the United States achieves ultimate victory, the president does not celebrate America’s achievements but diminishes them.
By contrast, Trump’s predecessor Harry Truman knew exactly how Americans should celebrate the original V-E Day: by rededicating themselves to the task of achieving victory in the Pacific. “We can repay the debt which we owe to our God, to our dead, and to our children, only by
work, by ceaseless devotion to the responsibilities which lie ahead of us,” Truman said. “If I could give you a single watchword for the coming months, that word is work, work, and more work. We must work to finish the war. Our victory is only half over.”
To prematurely celebrate the anniversary of America’s final victory in the largest war ever fought is to insult those who heeded Truman’s call: the Americans still battling for an island called Okinawa; the servicemembers preparing to redeploy from Europe for the Pacific; the generals planning a massive invasion of Japan’s main islands of Kyushu in the fall of 1945 and Honshu in early 1946; the policymakers trying to predict how many thousands of Americans would die in these operations; and the scientists racing to test an atom bomb that would upend all these calculations by persuading an enemy that didn’t believe in surrender to do so.
Even Americans with the best sources of information could not know how the war might end, but Wainwright, like his fellow prisoners of war, had only the worst sources — that is, the occasional tidbit from prison guards in Manchuria, where he received no letters, newspapers or other sources information from the outside world. Nevertheless, Wainwright tried his best to guess when the war would end and arrived at an estimate of no earlier than 1947.
By June of 1945, he had good reason to doubt whether he would live to see it. The pain from the injury to a joint between his lower back and pelvis had become so severe that he could neither rise from bed nor fall asleep. “It is very bad, and seems to get worse,” he wrote.
A man who had never known desperate odds before might have given up, but Wainwright was not such a man. Even when his commanding general, Douglas MacArthur, had received orders to escape the Philippines after the Japanese invaded the archipelago at the start of World War II, Wainwright had made a vow to stay and share the fate of the tens of thousands of starving and besieged American and Filipino forces fighting together under the United States flag. The memory of the doomed five-month stand that he had made with them gave him the fortitude he needed to confront adversity again in Manchuria.
“I will make a fight for life, as I fought against overwhelming odds in the Philippine Islands,” Wainwright wrote in his diary. “No one called me yellow then, and, by God, I won’t be now.”
There is a much-needed lesson in these words for Trump. Through his thoughtless attempt to abridge the end of World War II so as to make it easier to celebrate, he would cheat Americans of a richer and more valuable inheritance: the story of the full measure necessary to achieve victory in both Europe and the Pacific and a reminder that at no point before was the outcome ever guaranteed. Until the end, it had required struggle and sacrifice.
Trump likes to talk only about winning. But when the moment of supreme triumph finally came in the Pacific on September 2, 1945, the organizers of the ceremony aboard the USS Missouri made certain to include a reminder of the hardships and humiliations America had endured along the way. If Trump looks at photographs, he will see MacArthur signing the instrument of surrender and, behind him, an emaciated general: the newly liberated Wainwright. His war had finally ended. And so had America’s.
At a time when freedom and democracy face new threats — and the outcome once again looks far from assured — let Americans mark the 80th anniversary of V-E Day, as their forebears at the time marked the original, by vowing to carry on the cause for which so many sacrificed so much.
English (US)