Ah, the good old days, when we incinerated "Japs" gladly

A pile of donated newspapers tell Ogden the story of the war in 1945.

OK, the headline is a bit harsh. Politically incorrect, for sure..

I mean: Japs?

No No No No No. Rewrite would have a cow. The publisher would be on the phone. Job security would be dicey.

But that is now.  Now is when we're all careful to talk about folks nicely, even if they're our enemies. Notice we never refer to folks in the middle east rudely, even those Islamic State head choppers? We write lots of stories saying they're evil, and brutal, and not nice, but nobody calls them "turbaned tootsies" or whatever.

Because that would be rude.

We're careful to eschew violence, too.  "Collateral damage," which means innocent civilians, is never approved of, even when we do it.

And if we do do it, well, we call it "collateral damage" to make it sound nicer. "Blew innocent folks to smithereens" has such a harsh sound.

But in 1945, that's how it was. Japs were Japs and the US of A was quite open that it was doing its best to incinerate people. Bragged about it, even. "Burning like all hell," says the news story.

People bought bonds
to pay for the war.

We were incinerating Tokyo, and Yokohama, and anywhere else we could find in Japan that looked as if it needed incinerating.  We were at war,  Japan they had bombed Pearl Harbor, war is very ugly and we, the American people, were doing our level best to make it uglier..

This sort of thing always makes me wonder at those folks who are nostalgic for the past.

Wartime rationing of tires

Which past? A past where entire cities were being incinerated?  Where folks were dying in the Dust Bowl? The 20s were booze was illegal? The teens where we had World War I? the 50s in the US was kind of peaceful and prosperous, sort of, if you ignore the racism, the Korean War and the first stirrings of Vietnam.

And folks who think it has never, ever, been worse than it is right now need to get out more, go spend some time wandering around the microfilm collection at the library and get a little perspective.

What got me thinking this way was a box of old newspapers sent to Union Station's archive by Robert Smith, former WSU provost and now running the Idyllwild, California, historical society.

Robert was going through a box full of donated newspapers a while back and came across this pile of Standard-Examiners.

Would we like them? Absolutely.

The newspapers are from May and June of 1945. They were originally mailed to L. J. Gratton, 2929 Rodeo Road, LA. After Mr. Gratton got done reading them he apparently piled them away.

Now they're back in Ogden, having completed a journey of several thousand miles and 69 years.

They're fun for the perspective on the lives of our parents and grandparents that they give.

Sure the news is full of war, but it was good news.

In 1945 the war in Europe was won and the war in the Pacific was rolling to a victorious conclusion. Admiral "Bull" Halsey was smashing up the Japanese Navy, the Air Force was sending 500-plane waves of B-29s over Japan, raining fire and death.

Why did newspapers use what we now consider an epithet -- Jap -- to refer to the Japanese? After all, weren't there a lot of Japanese Americans who might be offended.

Nope. Remember, in 1945 everyone who looked Japanese was still regarded with suspicion. The US had rounded up all the Japanese-Americans on the West Coast and hustled them off to concentration camps in Utah and other places. This was pure racism -- Why weren't Germans rounded up? -- and anyone who qualified deserved no respect.

The S-E cheers the torching of a massive city.

It didn't hurt that "Jap" was a nice short word. Newspaper headline writers love short words when they're writing heads for one-column stories:

"Japs Crumbling
In Southern
Okinawa Defense"

(An aside -- when I started in newspapers in the late 70s the paper I was working as a copy editor called the US Supreme Court the "High-9" for the same reason.)

It wasn't all bloodthirsty news, though. Frank Francis, former Ogden mayor and founder of the Ogden "Examiner," later merged with the Standard, wrote a daily column called "News and Views."

His column for one day, May 29, 1945, has the expected cheering for more demolition by fire of Japan and the attendant roasting alive of the folks there. "This is the proper procedure by which to take the war conceit out of the Japs," he said. "For a long time after Pearl Harbor they were a cocky people, who accepted tghe war as leading on to a glorious finale. Now they are being made to realize the dreaded side, and the roaring flames do much to impress them with wars horrors."

Take that!

Wartime rationing even hit beer making.
That's how you knew the war was serious.

But his column also had time for a more pleasant note.

Francis spent a lot of time here at Union Station, perhaps even visiting the folks who worked in the office I now get to work in. He would stop and look around, if only to escape the horrors of the world's news, and what he saw was what I see, sitting here right now.

"Every day travelers off the trains stand at the eastern entrance to Union Station entranced at the majesty of the Wasatch range looking down on them," he said.

"Strangers express a dsire to stroll to the mountains. Many are deceived by distances in the view. They would attempt to walk to the hills, if they had only a few minutes and, thus impelled, find themselves defeated."

"By the way, many postcards are on sale at the newsstands, but none of them do justice to the snow-capped mountains at the edge of Ogden."

Then he went back to talking about the war.