Nova Scotia/Nunavut Command of The Royal Canadian Legion www.ns.legion.ca 177 VJ Day and the end of the Second World War continued ... The repatriation of demobilised Japanese soldiers exacerbated these starvation conditions. In a letter to a friend, Sherwood R. Moran, of the United States’ Navy wrote, ‘Tokyo, the first war casualty I’ve seen, is a devastated , immodest mess, but the silence is what gets me most…’ Germany: Aerial view of damage to Cologne Cathedral after an Allied bombing raid. In common with other German cities, Berlin had been flattened by Allied bombing and fighting which had scarred much of the country. The damage to dwellings resulted in homelessness for many German civilians. The British poet Stephen Spender wrote of Cologne’s inhabitants: ‘….digging among the ruins for hidden food, doing business at their black market near the cathedral…..’ Hunger was stalking the land in Germany. The adult population were provided with food ration cards in exchange for work. A report in the United States’ armed forces magazine, Yank, described the family of one Berlin manual worker subsisting on a cup of tea and a slice of bread each for breakfast. Their dinner was a potato soup made from one onion, one potato and a half-pint of milk, garnished with a tiny bit of cauliflower. The survivors in the liberated concentration camps struggled to survive the effects of starvation. British troops encountering the emaciated figures at Bergen-Belsen, initially offered their own rations. The food was too rich for intestines which had shrunk so severely. The diligent efforts of British doctors and medical students, found the right combination of fluids and foods to nurse the survivors back to health. British Empire: The Atlantic Charter, issued jointly by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill in 1941 - when the United States was still neutral - expressed the “wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.” The leaders of independence movements in the colonies ruled by European nations drew inspiration from this. In colonial capitals across the British Empire, VJ Day was marked by military parades such as the one in the photograph to the left. continued ... A parade of 5,000 troops was part of Nairobi's VJ Day Celebrations.
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