Remembering Victory in Europe Day

On this day in 1945, my parents gave me, at age 7, a small American flag and we joined the celebration in Times Square. Needless to say, the atmosphere was “joy and bedlam.”

May 8, 1945, was also the birthday of then President Harry Truman, as well as my dad’s 37th.

In 1944, the FBI did a background check on my dad, a naturalized American citizen, born in the Dresden-Leipzig area in Germany. Upon clearance he was summoned by the Pentagon to Washington, D.C. His assignment was to interpret aerial photographs of German industrial areas for U.S. Air Force bombers. He was able to determine that the Nazis had disguised the cemeteries to appear as factories (from the air), and the factories as cemeteries.

Air Force bombers took over and the rest is history.

Later that same year, my dad, Kurt Schumann, was drafted at 36. Shortly thereafter, Uncle Sam said thanks, but no longer necessary. (Found out later that the progress in developing the atomic bomb was going to curtail the conflict in the Pacific). It did, after bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrendered.

Ken Schumann

Stowe