"What a time to be alive! What a glorious time!"
—Jeanette Meyer Davis, Omaha, NE
Army Nurse Corps at 187th General Hospital in England
At the end of World War II, Nebraskans looked forward to the return of their loved ones and to a world at peace. In North Platte and all over Nebraska, both V-E (Victory in Europe) and V-J (Victory in Japan) Days were celebrated out on the streets.
"V-J Day was totally different for me. We had some tin pie pans which we beat to make noise as we watched people walk down Farnam Street to the downtown district of Omaha. We had been expecting peace because the two atom bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few days before."
—Frederick Walters, Grade School Student, Omaha, NE
"Oh, we were so excited. There were people all over the streets, filling the street, and you just wanted to be out."
—Sylvia Iwanski Chalupsky, Ord, NE
"It was summer — August 15 — and the word came about six o’clock in the evening. Everybody went downtown. It was just absolute insanity. The police were powerless. They couldn’t do anything; they weren’t trying to do anything. Everybody was jolly, jolly . . ."
—Barc Bayley, High School Student, Lincoln, NE
"You never saw so many hardened, seasoned, old battle veterans crying in your life. They just cried and cried for happiness, knowing that we would be saved from that barbarous, bloody invasion of Japan."
—K. Roy Bailey, Schuyler, NE
