Old Soldiers (rest in peace)
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The Vietnam Women's Memorial is a memorial dedicated to the women of the United States who served in the Vietnam War, most of whom were nurses. It serves as a reminder of the importance of women in the conflict. It was designed by Glenna Goodacre and dedicated on November 11, 1993. (1/16/2017).
Fence railings at Higginson Park.
Over 5,000 poppies have been made by about 20 people in the Marlow Poppy Display Group over the course of a few years and are proudly brought out each year for Remembrance – alongside 300 new poppies made for people to find around the town and keep.
These poppies are displayed on the railings of Marlow's All Saints Church and Higginson Park fences, honouring local servicemen and servicewomen.
"Honoring the Multitudes" was accepted for Photo Story 2018, Photojournalism Category - Photo Club Kumanovo (Kumanovo, Macedonia)
A statue by sculptor Helen Lillian Granger Young (1922-2023) of three servicewomen was unveiled 04 July 1976 in Memorial Park in downtown Winnipeg.
The statue honours women of the British Commonwealth who served or died during the First World War (1914-1918) and the Second World War (1939-1945),
The monument was erected by the Women’s Tri-Service Service Association WWI & II Veterans of Winnipeg.
Information courtesy of Manitoba Historical Society.
1.) A trinket box. Sold in craft stores. Usually displayed in a living room or a hallway at one's residence.
2.) A box where medals are displayed. Used by someone-anyone, ie: athletes, servicewomen and servicemen to display their medals.
3.) Many many years and wars ago, servicemen believed if one saw their shadow on the ground, prior to their boots hitting the ground, they would be coming home "just a shadow in a box."
Today is Memorial day in the USA. Many honor with remembrance the fallen soldiers that have served our country. We have ceremonies, parades and Memorial Day Sales!!!!! We play baseball, have the 1st BBQ of the year, and we open the pool. We "put the flag out."
Banks, post offices and governmental buildings are closed. Its a Holiday. Its the American Way.
Today is Memorial Day in the USA. Many honor with remembrance fallen anti-war activists that have served our country.
May our shadows, globally, never be seen.
Marvin Gaye - Whats Going On
April 25 is Australia and New Zealand's war memorial day, ANZAC Day ** and is marked by dawn ceremonies, street parades and commemorations right around both countries in memory of those who served and those who paid the supreme sacrifice with their lives. I have chosen a different shot to commemorate this special day with a mural dedicated to them and those who helped and continue to help those who have returned and those left behind by the curses of war. That we should see our world engulfed in another as we speak after all the lessons we should have learned to avoid them is absolutely shameful.
Lest We Forget.
A Life Long Promise - Jodi Connolly (2018)
Jodie Connolly’s moving mural, A Life Long Promise, honours the integrity, history and the unwavering service to the community of Legacy House, a community pillar for the many Brisbane families who lives were affected through war over the past century. It’s tucked away in small commercial area, just off Fish Lane, opposite Saccharomyces Beer Cafe. The poem in the centre is particularly poignant.
The promise to care for and support the families of those who served their country and did not make it home, or were incapacitated, came from one "Digger"* to another in a foxhole in WWI at the battle of Pozieres, France in 1916.
In Brisbane this promise has been honoured and maintained by dedicated people in our community for nearly a century. Legacy House provides essential services and support to a vast number of our Australian servicewomen and men's families. This mural pays tribute to those who served, supported and committed themselves to the original promise all those years ago.
Apologies about the tight shot but it's a big mural in a very narrow spot!
* About the word "Digger"
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digger_(soldier)
** About ANZAC Day
Join us for a Party every night in the Army OneSource Sims.
slurl.com/secondlife/Army OneSource VIII/94/102/32%c2%a0
We now have 4 public Sims. Come explore!
Album: 1940s Weekends. 2012-2022
[4K] Bolsover 1940s Fest. Oct 2022
YouTube: youtu.be/CDLEI30RcRA
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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander War Memorial
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island servicemen and servicewomen fought and died for Australia.
They have served in every conflict and most peacekeeping missions in which Australia has been involved from the Boer War until the present day.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have served in defence of our country, but service policies have not always provided the opportunity for them to identify their cultural heritage upon enlistment.
This memorial is sited on the land of the Kaurna people adjacent to the River Torrens: Karrawirra Pari-ityangka “in the vicinity of the red gum forest river”, to recognise and commemorate the service and sacrifice of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have served Australia.
Today, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Servicemen and Servicewomen continue to represent their people and their country as valued members of the Australian Defence Force.
Lest We Forget.
Dedicated by Her Excellency the Honourable Quentin Bryce AC CVO, Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia and Marjorie Anne Tripp, formerly WRANS, 10 November 2013.
Album: 1940s Weekends. 2012-2022
[4K] Bolsover 1940s Fest. Oct 2022
YouTube: youtu.be/CDLEI30RcRA
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1986. Land Rover. C117 PUX. Green. 2500cc. Diesel.
Event: Bolsover 40s Fest. October 2022
Album: 1940s Weekends. 2012-2022
[4K] Bolsover 1940s Fest. Oct 2022
YouTube: youtu.be/CDLEI30RcRA
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Memorial Day
Seaport Village, San Diego, California
With the retired aircraft carrier the Midway as a backdrop, the life size statues depict Bob Hope, as he did so frequently, expressing his thanks and entertaining men and women of the armed services.
Nikon D800
Nikon 24-70 f/2.8 at 26 mm
1/200 sec at f/5.6 ISO 100
Memorial Day, May 29, 2017
Excerpt from www.kitchener.ca/en/resourcesGeneral/Documents/DSD_ECDEV_...:
Jenny Wren // Frances Gage // 1972 Bronze Cambridge Libraries & Galleries, Queen’s Square
Artist, Frances Gage is well known for her commemorative sculptures. Jenny Wren is a national monument to the women who served in Canada’s Navy during World War II in the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service. Between 1942 and 1945 over 6,000 Wrens from across Canada came to what was then Galt for their basic training before going to their wartime assignments.
Excerpt from cambridgepoppyproject.ca:
Jenny Wren Statue - Queen's Square Idea Exchange (Galt)
Team Lead: Danny Ingrouville
Located in front of the Idea Exchange near the Cenotaph, this statue was given to the city of Galt in October 1972 by the Women's Royal Canadian Naval Service (or Wren's) who completed their basic training in Galt during WWII (1943-45). This was the first statue to commemorate servicewomen in Canada. Our installation around Jenny will feature poppies incorporated in an original work of art by Artist Danny Ingrouville.
Each year on Memorial Day those of us in the United States honor our military men and women who have fallen in service to our country.
"Anzac Day, 25 April, is one of Australia’s most important national occasions. It marks the anniversary of the first major military action fought by Australian and New Zealand forces during the First World War.
ANZAC stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. The soldiers in those forces quickly became known as Anzacs, and the pride they took in that name endures to this day.
Australians recognise 25 April as a day of national remembrance, which takes two forms. Commemorative services are held across the nation at dawn – the time of the original landing, while later in the day, former servicemen and servicewomen meet to take part in marches through the country’s major cities and in many smaller centres. Commemorative ceremonies are more formal, and are held at war memorials around the country. In these ways, Anzac Day is a time at which Australians reflect on the many different meanings of war.
It is often suggested that the Dawn Service observed on Anzac Day has its origins in a military routine still followed by the Australian Army. The half-light of dawn was one of the times favoured for launching an attack. Soldiers in defensive positions were woken in the dark before dawn, so by the time first light crept across the battlefield they were awake, alert, and manning their weapons; this is still known as the “stand-to”. As dusk is equally favourable for battle, the stand-to was repeated at sunset.
From tiny outback hamlets to the capital cities, the solemn strains of the Last Post will sound as wreaths are laid and heads bowed in contemplation of war time loss."
This small video is just a snippet of the Dawn Service held at Montville, Qld that I felt was quite uniquely Australian.
First World War memorial, unveiled in 1921, designed by J S Gibson and W S A Gordon, with sculpture by C S Jagger; the builder was Samuel Salter. The memorial was partially reconfigured in the 1970s.
MATERIALS: Portland stone ashlar, with bronze plaques and sculpture.DESCRIPTION: the memorial takes the form of an exedra, with a semi-circular screen enclosing a sunken area. To the inside of the screen are fixed, slightly curved bronze plaques bearing the names of around 4500 of the dead, with those who served in the army to the north, and those who served in the navy to the south; a panel was reserved for the Royal Air Force, and the names of servicewomen are placed in a central position. In the architrave above the plaques is the inscription, ‘THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE’. There are two round-arched openings, each with a wrought-iron gate. The arch to the north leads to a passage under the railway and into Victoria Park; that to the south leads to an area to the north-west of Guildhall Square. At either end, the screen terminates in a segmental rusticated niche with flanking rusticated piers; within each niche is a bronze-painted urn above a stone seat. Above, set within the broken entablature, is a carved trophy – clustered weapons bristle above a shield flanked by oak and laurel branches, surrounded by scrolled acanthus, the whole topped by a crown. At the centre of the memorial three stone steps surround the cenotaph pier, which has relief carving of wartime scenes on land and at sea to each side, including marching soldiers, and a naval gun crew in action; there is a Greek-key cornice above. The pier is surmounted by a gadrooned sarcophagus urn. A plaque on the cenotaph reads, ‘THIS MEMORIAL WAS ERECTED BY THE PEOPLE OF PORTSMOUTH IN PROUD AND LOVING MEMORY OF THOSE WHO IN THE GLORIOUS MORNING OF THEIR DAYS FOR ENGLAND’S SAKE LOST ALL BUT ENGLAND’S PRAISE. MAY LIGHT PERPETUAL SHINE UPON THEM.’ The front of the memorial is partially enclosed by a stone balustrade, completing the circle; the balustrade originally extended to the east, curving inwards. Part of the balustrade has been reused to create a screen between the memorial and the north-west part of Guildhall Square. The entrance to the memorial, to the east, is marked by stone pedestals, each holding a seated sculptural figure: to the south is a sailor with a Lewis gun and to the north is a soldier with a Vickers gun. These sculptures were originally set parallel to each other, facing forwards and flanking the entrance when it was further east; in their new position they are slightly angled, opening out the entrance. A plaque on the north plinth notes that the memorial was erected by public subscription; a plaque on the south plinth commemorates its unveiling. A stone tablet on the north plinth was placed in 2003: ‘TO HONOUR ALL THOSE WHO DIED / SERVING THEIR COUNTRY IN / TIMES OF PEACE OR CONFLICT / ‘WE WILL REMEMBER’’.
Kodak T-Max 100, 4" x 5", 80 iso, Normal development in 510 Pyro Developer, 1:100, 7:45 minutes, 24C. Taken August 2022, Ebony SV45TE 4" x 5" Field Camera. Fujinon W 125mm Lens.
This photo shoot was a lot of fun. It was for a local breast cancer charity. We dressed up a dozen ladies as Rosie the Riveter, and posed them with a World War II Spitfire. This was an attempt to replicate an old vintage photograph of a group of servicewomen in WWII posing with a similar aircraft.
1986. Land Rover. C117 PUX. Green. 2500cc. Diesel.
Album: 1940s Weekends. 2012-2022
[4K] Bolsover 1940s Fest. Oct 2022
YouTube: youtu.be/CDLEI30RcRA
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Aberdeen Scotland has many iconic buildings dating back many years with a magnificent documented history archived, this lodge or as some refer to the building as gatehouse at Trinity Cemetery in the heart of the city is my favourite, the sun was bright and shone directly on the cemetery as I drove past on my way to Aberdeen Harbour on Saturday May 29th 2021, I parked my car and spent an hour to capture and archive the views.
I have a dedicated album to this site here on Flickr where I have archived my shots from various visits over the years , please peruse to appreciate this magnificent well maintained Aberdeen Cemetery .
Just north of Aberdeen's city centre lies Aberdeen (Trinity) Cemetery and Broadhill Extension, which contain the graves and memorials of over 270 Commonwealth servicemen and women of the two World Wars and is maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
The port city of Aberdeen played an important role in both world wars. The city was the home of the Gordon Highlanders infantry regiment, while servicemen of the Royal Navy Reserve based out of Aberdeen's port swept the waters of the North Sea for enemy mines. Trinity Cemetery, which dates from the turn of the 19th-20th century, contains the graves and memorials to over 170 First World War and over 100 Second World War service personnel, including two servicewomen.
Known locally as Trinity Cemetery, Aberdeen (Trinity) Cemetery and Broadhill Extension are on either side of Park Road, north of the city centre. Park Road is close to the esplanade and runs past Aberdeen city football ground. The entrances to the cemeteries are on opposite sides of Park Road, south of the football ground.
Trinity cemetery was opened in 1887. It is on a large site located to the north of the city centre, near the beach adjacent to Aberdeen football stadium.
It comprises two sections. The westerly section is the larger of the two with the later 20th century easterly extension (originally a gravel pit) located on the other side of Park Road. Both sections slope upward from this road. The official main entrance is at the west end, where the cemetery lodge can be seen, with access via Errol Street.
The westerly section contains approximately 5600 stones naming a little over 14000 individuals.
The eastery extension is smaller, containing approximately 3300 stones with a little over 7300 named individuals.
The earliest date found recorded in the extension was 1891 though the vast majority of the stones date from the 1940's to the present time.
Trinity is a large 'open' cemetery consisting mainly of grass and gravel walkways. There are few bushes and even fewer trees. It is well maintained but the lack of the aforementioned trees or larger shrubs gives it a somewhat stark appearance.
The advantage of this layout however is that you can see the whole cemetery from practically anywhere within the grounds. A wonderful view can be had from the top of the cemetery, with the whole grounds before you. Beyond this lies a view of the beach and the North Sea.
In 1940 a German aircraft tried to destroy the gasometer in the adjoining gas works (the site is now occupied by an apartment complex). They failed in that quest but evidence of the 'strafing' can still be seen on some of the memorials located to the south-east of the site.
To see how this blasted chunks out of these granite memorials gives you some idea of the power behind these armaments. It must have been terrifying to be caught in such a raid.
There are just a few memorials showing artistic distinction, nearly all of which are in the original cemetery grounds. The easterly extension site is dominated by a large memorial to those who gifted their bodies to medical science. This is located at the top of the easterly section, extreme left.
Sharing the shadow.
This is a statue of JH "Jack" Cock who fought in WWI. He was from Nelson in New Zealand, and survived the Gallipoli landing only to be injured (and invalided home) a few days later. Then he returned to Egypt and went to the Western Front where he was injured again. This time he was not allowed to return to the army, so he joined the airforce, where he was killed in flight. For a long time his name was not commemorated in the main Nelson memorial areas, and in the past few years this has been rectified and he now stands overlooking the returned servicemen and servicewomen graves.
Blythe wanted to visit him this April for ANZAC Day (Australia and New Zealand Army Corps). Blythe's Mum (me!) often walks around the cemetery in Summer and says "hi" to Jack. This particular day, Blythe wanted to give Jack a hug and to thank him for his service and all he did. Blythe's Mum found it hard to photograph Blythe and Jack due to the shadows from the sunlight. In the end, it seemed fitting that Blythe would share the shadows with Jack.
John d'Arcy builder and man of faith commenced work on this cathedral in 1957 and brought it to completion in 1962. He died 4 February 2007.
May all who visit this church be mindful of Charles S Johansson who supervised the construction of the cathedral 1958 – 1962.
"The seaman and carpenter who finally built a cathedral had placed his labours to one side." He died at Brisbane 9 May 1980.
The Spire surmounting this tower has been presented in memory of all whose grave is the sea.
December 1961. Captain & Mrs S H K Spurgeon.
St Mary's Star of the Sea War Memorial Cathedral is the main church of the Diocese of Darwin.
St Mary's Star of the Sea Cathedral in Darwin serves as a significant war memorial dedicated to servicemen and servicewomen, civilians, and others who died in wartime, particularly remembering those lost during the bombing of Darwin in World War Two, with features like the Wounded Angel Statue honouring sacrifice, making it a central place for remembrance and services like Anzac Day Mass.
It commemorates Australian, American, British and Dutch servicemen, as well as civilian residents who lost their lives.
Stained glass windows, on each side of the church represent the Merchant Navy, Royal Australian Navy, Australian Commonweath Military Forces, Royal Australian Air Force, American Department of the Navy, American Department of the Air Force, American War Office and the British Royal Air Force.
This cathedral was the garrison church during World War Two and it remains the garrison church.
The church was severely damaged in the 1942 air raids and its reconstruction into the current cathedral serves as a permanent tribute to that era.
The site of the present church building was the World War Two American Forces Heaquarters in Darwin which was bombed by the Japanese in 1942.
John d'Arcy builder and man of faith commenced work on this cathedral in 1957 and brought it to completion in 1962. He died 4 February 2007.
May all who visit this church be mindful of Charles S Johansson who supervised the construction of the cathedral 1958 – 1962.
"The seaman and carpenter who finally built a cathedral had placed his labours to one side." He died at Brisbane 9 May 1980.
The Spire surmounting this tower has been presented in memory of all whose grave is the sea.
December 1961. Captain & Mrs S H K Spurgeon.
St Mary's Star of the Sea War Memorial Cathedral is the main church of the Diocese of Darwin.
St Mary's Star of the Sea Cathedral in Darwin serves as a significant war memorial dedicated to servicemen and servicewomen, civilians, and others who died in wartime, particularly remembering those lost during the bombing of Darwin in World War Two, with features like the Wounded Angel Statue honouring sacrifice, making it a central place for remembrance and services like Anzac Day Mass.
It commemorates Australian, American, British and Dutch servicemen, as well as civilian residents who lost their lives.
Stained glass windows, on each side of the church represent the Merchant Navy, Royal Australian Navy, Australian Commonweath Military Forces, Royal Australian Air Force, American Department of the Navy, American Department of the Air Force, American War Office and the British Royal Air Force.
This cathedral was the garrison church during World War Two and it remains the garrison church.
The church was severely damaged in the 1942 air raids and its reconstruction into the current cathedral serves as a permanent tribute to that era.
The site of the present church building was the World War Two American Forces Heaquarters in Darwin which was bombed by the Japanese in 1942.
Originality, it is said, usually means coming from somewhere else. "Somewhere else" can be many places: another time, another culture, the other gender, despair, madness-- anywhere, except familiar here and everyday now. John Lennon has told of his first magical meeting with Yoko Ono, when he wandered into her one-woman show at the Indica Gallery in London on November 9, 1966, a pivotal date in the ferment remembered as the Nineteen Sixties, and was intrigued, as well as mystified, by what he saw. Invited by Ono to pay five shillings to hammer a nail into a piece of plain wood shown as artwork, Lennon made a counter-offer: "Well, I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in." "That's when we really met," Lennon later recalled. "That's when we locked eyes and she got it and I got it, and, as they say in all the interviews we do, the rest is history."
All lovers know the moment when complicity leaps like an electric spark, but in their case, founded on what? Outwardly, the two had nothing in common. Lennon had come from the "genteel poverty" of a dysfunctional working-class family, via art school and sweaty teen-age dance hangouts in Liverpool, England, and Hamburg, Germany, to world fame and an honorable fortune as a rock-and-roll musician, composer, and role model for the first generation of Western youth to remember nothing of World War Two. Ono, seven years his senior, remembered all too well the apocalyptic end of Japan's Pacific War, the hunger and despair that had followed the defeat and enemy occupation which she had seen at first hand. But her own roots were in wealth and privilege: her mother Isoko came from the Yasuda banking family, and her father, Eisuke Ono, himself a banker by profession, descended from a long line of samurai warrior-scholars. Yoko had known little personal experience of deprivation, and had been educated among Japan's business and intellectual elite. Just the same, like had recognized like, at that mythic London meeting.
Why? The explanation lies half-buried under the decades of Japan's new prosperity. By 1966 Lennon, was emerging as one of the gurus of the disillusioned, questing mood called "The Sixties" in the West. Yoko Ono had been there, spiritually, long before. Something very like the mood of the Sixties first took shape in Tokyo in the late 1940's; Japan's confused, hungry years were the "somewhere else" Yoko Ono came from. Even then, and there, it was the amalgam, rather than any of its elements, that was really new. Radical pacifism and politicized feminism had both erupted in spiritually defeated Europe after the First World War, where they had found artistic voices in the instant arts of gesture and performance, made somewhat more durable by photographs, and in the perversely intellectual anti-intellectualism of Dada.
Bereft of social and political protest, however, Dada became just another style, and it was as an avant-garde style that Dada in the 1920's reached Japan, which had suffered next to nothing, and gained much, by the First World War. By the late 1940's, however, after the Second World War, Japan was in a state of despair even deeper and longer-lasting than Europe had known after the first war and by the mid-fifties Japanese art had found a similar expression, this time not as an imported style but with its own emotional authenticity. Japanese ingredients, notably the cerebral anti-intellectualism of Zen Buddhism, flavored a mixture which was original, distinctive, and more than the sum of its parts. Yoko Ono was the prophetess who, with the help of John Lennon, brought the amalgam to a West at long last ready to reconsider its own values. By different paths, Lennon and Western youth had arrived at a need, Ono at its fulfillment. More justifiably than most lovers, John and Yoko knew, in an instant of enlightenment at the Indica Gallery, that they were of one mind.
Ono's Upbringing
Ono's route to the rendezvous was the more devious of the two. She was born in Tokyo on February 18, 1932, the year Japan set up a puppet state in Manchuria, a long step towards the catastrophe of 1945. Two weeks earlier, her father had been transferred to San Francisco with the Yokohama Specie Bank, the financial arm of Japan's expanding empire. His wife and daughter soon followed, and Yoko from infancy heard both English and Japanese, the foundation of her subsequent bilingualism. In the spring of 1937 as Japan began full-scale war in China Yoko, her mother and younger brother Keisuke, born in December 1936, returned to Tokyo, where Yoko was enrolled in the kindergarten of the Peers' School, a Tokyo institution then open only to relatives of the Imperial family or of members of the House of Peers (her maternal grandfather, the banker Zenjiro Yasuda, had been ennobled in 1915). In 1940 Yoko's mother, fearing that all Japanese might be interned if Japan and the United States went to war and that she might not see him for many years, bravely rejoined her husband, by this time stationed in New York, taking her two children. The family sailed from San Francisco for the last time in the spring of 1941. At the time of Pearl Harbor Yoko's father was working in the Hanoi branch of his bank while Yoko was enrolled in a Christian primary school in Tokyo, run by one of the Mitsui family for Japanese children returned from abroad.
Takasumi Mitsui's school gave Yoko a safe and liberal refuge for most of the war. She continued studying in English and was listed as a primary school student well after her twelfth birthday, when most boys and girls her age became liable for war work, often risky. She was still living in Tokyo and being privately tutored in The Bible, Buddhism and the piano when a quarter of the city was burnt out in the great fire raid of March 9, 1945-- an inferno she survived in the Ono family bunker in the affluent
Azabu residential district, far from the incinerated downtown. Only then did her mother move her three children to a small farming village near the still fashionable Karuizawa mountain resort. The choice of refuge proved fortunate, as Yoko and her brother and sister, in the desperate days of the defeat and the collapse of the Japanese economy, were able to help their mother barter family treasures for food. One notable deal yielded sixty kilograms of life-sustaining rice for a German-made sewing machine. At the end of the war the family returned to Tokyo, where Yoko rejoined the re-opened Peers' School in April, 1946.
Founded in Tokyo in 1877, the Peers' School, like its rough equivalents Eton in England and Groton in the United States, has been more noted for social than for academic status. Its campus near the Imperial Palace survived the fire raids more or less intact, and its first post-war intake was like the pre-war ones. When the peerage was abolished in 1947 the school became theoretically open to anyone, including foreign exchange students (a classmate of the present Crown Prince Naruhito was the son of a plumber from Melbourne, Australia) but, like Tokyo itself, the Peers' School has since recovered much of its high-society glitter.
The view from the school windows, however, has changed beyond recognition. When Yoko and her classmates looked outside the school's high walls in the spring of 1946 they saw a city all but returned, as General Curtis E. LeMay Jr., U. S. Army Air Corps, had promised, to the Stone Age. Whole districts were sterile wastelands of twisted iron and blackened stones. People lived in holes clawed in the ground, roofed with stray sheets of metal. On every corner of what had once been shopping streets, famished men and women tried to sell trinkets, clothes, anything for food. Every train from the countryside brought farmers loaded with rice and vegetables for the black market. In makeshift bars in dank cellars, workers formed lines to gulp industrial alcohol. To sharpen the misery, smartly-turned-out, well-fed American soldiers tootled around the ruins in jeeps, driving on the side of the road they were accustomed to, the right-- the rare Japanese vehicle simply got out of the way. In a terminal degradation of Japanese martial values, American servicewomen smiled for souvenir snaps in rickshaws pulled by Japanese men still wearing the tattered remnants of military uniforms, eyes turned down in exhaustion, hunger and shame. Few would have recognized in this desolate scene the seedbed of a great and original flowering of art and cinema-- unless they had seen Berlin in 1919, or Moscow before Stalin.
Japan under occupation was a paradox; democracy imposed by a conqueror under the iron rule of General Douglas MacArthur, "the Macarto," more autocratic than any shogun had been for centuries. The occupation supposedly freed the Japanese press, but two weeks after it began, occupation censorship was imposed, and mention of what had happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for instance, was blue-pencilled. The predictable result was to turn the atomic bombs into monstrous symbols of evil, beyond all rational discourse, in which shape they haunt Japanese and the rest of us to this day. Some accused Japanese war criminals were arrested and leisurely trials began; but Emperor Hirohito, who (as all but a handful of the Japanese elite believed) had directed Japan's war in person was free to visit the conqueror-- and the resulting photograph, of a stiffly correct Emperor and a showily casual general, was as ambiguous as the occasion. The trials were intended to show the Japanese their war crimes-- but the Soviet judge was from the nation that still held a half-million Japanese as war prisoners, many never to see homes and families again.
Most Tokyo residents, like those of any war-devastated city, were engrossed in the search for food and shelter. Even from an island of privilege like the Peers' School, the world outside no longer made sense. That America's war had been wholly just ("the justest war in history," U.S. propaganda claimed) and therefore Japan's totally unjust was by no means so clear to these puzzled young people as it was to the victors. Yes, there had been crimes and cruelties, on both sides, and who could strike the balance? And how could these crimes have been averted? The best answer seemed to be that war itself was to blame. Pacifism has been, for Japanese, the most enduring legacy of those years: "make love not war," the slogan of the Western sixties, well expresses the mood of Tokyo in 1946, as of starving Berlin in 1918. Right up to the present, PEACE (a brand of cigarette) and LOVE (with an arrow-pierced heart) are English words almost every Japanese knows.
Postwar Pacifism
More than a half-century on, any Japanese politician who suggests that Japan might one day go to war again is sure of an angry reaction. We have proof, from the Peers' School itself, that pacifism impacted with particular force on Yoko Ono's generation. Prince Akihito, now Emperor of Japan, returned there, as she did, in April 1946 from the same mountain refuge, the Karuizawa area, and saw the same fire-ravaged cityscape from its windows. The Crown Prince was tutored in English and world history by an American, Elizabeth Gray Vining, selected by Emperor Hirohito with full knowledge that her Quaker faith enjoins strict pacifism. Thirty-four years later, when Akihito acceded to the throne he swore to uphold the constitution, the first Japanese emperor ever to do so-- and to Japanese this can only mean Article Nine, renouncing war. One of the new Emperor Akihito's first official duties was to plant a tree in Nagasaki, whose mayor, Hitoshi Motoshima had not long before been shot and seriously injured by a right-wing fanatic after urging Japanese to reflect on their role in World War II, for which, said the mayor, Emperor Hirohito "shared responsibility." Meeting the mayor-- it could not have been by chance-- Hirohito's eldest son wished him a speedy recovery. Within the restraints of his office, Yoko's schoolmate could not have made his abiding pacifist views plainer.
Feminist agitation was more prominent in Japan's early post-war years than it has ever been since. Women were given the vote by the largely American-written 1946 constitution, and pressure from the new female members of parliament finally led in 1958 to the abolition of the licensed brothels, into which poor girls had been sold into debt slavery. The law making adultery a crime for wives but not for husbands was repealed in 1947. A few professions, notably teaching, introduced equal pay. However, the feminism that reverberated in the Japan of the post-war years was less ideological than situational, the feminism of hard times. War, especially in Japan, has been a hyper-masculine pursuit, with the homoeroticism found in all military societies.
The utter defeat of 1945 temporarily, perhaps permanently, discredited the warrior ethos. Strong, resourceful women like Yoko Ono's mother, who had kept homes and families afloat through eight years of war saw Japan's surrender as simply another man-made crisis to be somehow survived. Thousands of Japanese women, "pan pan girls," prostituted themselves to American soldiers, often for food for their families. Others hired out as the victors' maids, cooks and nannies. In close to a millennium, only one part of the English-speaking world has known such total defeat. Novelist Margaret Mitchell, in Scarlett O'Hara, imagined a strong woman's response to the shipwreck of Southern male pretensions very like the reaction of many Japanese women in 1945. In Woman is the Nigger of the World by Yoko Ono and John Lennon, we can hear, behind the offensive racial slur, the anger of a privileged girl at what her humbler sisters had once had to do, just for survival.
One of the first arts to revive in Japan was cinema, by which a mass audience could be reached for the price of a seat in a drafty hall. The great director Akira Kurosawa had a script in shape for his enigmatic Rashomon as early as 1947, although he took until 1950 to find finance and finish it. Its theme, the impossibility of arriving at reliable truth about any event by way of the self-serving distortions of witnesses and participants, was a plain parable of Japan's situation. The first voice to speak from within defeated Japan and be heard outside, Rashomon began the process, still incomplete, of explaining the pariah nation to a suspicious world. Kurosawa had added an important aside to the bleak vision of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, who wrote the two stories on which it is partly based and suicided, at thirty-five, in 1927. Kurosawa's addition has the woodcutter, one of the witnesses whose version of the rape of a samurai's wife and the murder of her husband by a bandit cannot be trusted, adopt a baby abandoned by the ruined city gate which gives the film its name. Life, says the film, goes on, the human spirit rebounds, there is always hope. A quarter-century later, John Lennon was to climb a ladder at the Indica Gallery and through a magnifying glass read the one word Yoko One had written on the gallery's ceiling, YES. "At least" Lennon later recalled, "her message was positive."
Kurosawa apart (Rashomon won the gold cup at the 1950 Venice film festival and became an international hit) all that the outside world heard from Japan in the immediate post-war years came through the propaganda megaphone operated by the U.S. occupation. MacArthur's headquarters censored not only what the Japanese media reported in Japan, but what the corps of foreign correspondents stationed in Tokyo could send to their readers. The publication of John Hersey's searing Hiroshima (1946), the century's most influential piece of journalism, was only possible because Hersey wrote it in the offices of the New Yorker, far from the occupation's censors.
The year 1945 in fact marked the sharpest discontinuity between generations in all Japanese history, but few outside Japan could distinguish this reality from the claims of MacArthur's personal publicity machine-- and, as with all such breaks with the past, much continued unchanged, and a reverse current soon set in, guided by the same occupation authority. What many Japanese still remember as the years of post-war democracy all too soon ended. The role in the world assigned to Japan was changing. In 1949 the Soviets broke the U.S. nuclear monopoly, the Chinese Communist Party won its civil war, and the Korean War broke out in June, 1950. Already the occupation had begun its "reverse course." No longer an enemy to be punished and reformed, Japan became a potential ally to be courted for the threatened new world war with communism. Korean war spending, the opening of the huge U.S. market to Japanese products, the revival of Japan's wartime production system with its close ties between banks, bureaucrats and favored industrialists-- the celebrated "Japan Inc."-- got Japan back on the dual road to economic recovery and social counter-revolution.
Good times, however, are not necessarily propitious for the arts. By 1951, when Yoko Ono graduated from the Peers' School, the creative ferment of the postwar years was subsiding, as everyday Japan settled down to take advantage of the "reverse course" and its material payoffs. Feminism stalled, Japan's new pacifism was entangled in the alliance with the nuclear-armed U.S. Early in 1952 Yoko was accepted by the philosophy faculty of her school's associated Peers' University as its first female student of that most cerebral of disciplines, but after two semesters she dropped out. Approaching her twentieth birthday, her most impressionable years behind her, Ono rejoined her family in Scarsdale, New York, where her father was once again a banker. She enrolled in nearby Sarah Lawrence College, then strong in the visual arts (painter Bradley Walker Tomlin had taught abstract expressionism there). This led her to American avant-garde circles, where she experimented with painting, music, film and the various performance arts. By 1962 she was back in Tokyo, exhibiting with some success as a member of the Japanese artistic avant-garde, some of whom called themselves Neo-Dadaists, part of the Dada stylistic revival taking place world-wide.
The original Dada (from French baby-talk "dada," a rocking-horse, a word intended to be meaningless) had arisen first in sidelined, neutral Zurich during the First World War. By 1918 it had spread to Berlin, then to Paris and later to New York. Taking a hint from Marcel Duchamp, who had exhibited a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool as an artwork in 1913, the Dadaists hoped, by exhibiting themeless objects, to condemn the futility of war and to shock the bourgeoisie out of the materialism and complacency the artists believed had exacerbated its horrors. Dada attracted some attention in the European cities plunged into something like the despair of Tokyo in 1945, but by 1924 that war was receding, the bourgeoisie were again complacent, and the Dada movement, bereft of social concern, had retreated into style.
As Japan's America-oriented prosperity grew into the early 1960's, the Japanese neo-Dada movement became similarly fragmented and dispirited. Resistance to the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty (ANPO), mostly from students, attracted some of its practitioners; as did opposition to the 1964 Olympics, seen by most Japanese as a milestone in Japan's revival; anti-materialism inspired such notable art as Genpei Akasegawa's Great Japan Zero-Yen Note, mocking the preoccupation of most of his compatriots. But the creative despair of the late 1940's was long gone. Via two failed marriages and a parting from her only daughter, Kyoko, claimed by her American ex-husband Anthony Cox, Yoko again left Japan eventually to find her way to a small London gallery specializing in the avant-garde, then beginning to find the wider audience it always does in times of social upheaval. It took the aristocratic Ono some time to discover what the untutored, instinctual Lennon really had to offer her-- the wide world, as an audience for her art.
Lennon's Trajectory
How had John Lennon reached his side of the mysteriously fated rendezvous at the Indica Gallery in 1966? Born in 1940, his adolescence, the 'fifties, was a time of self-satisfaction in the English-speaking world, of growing affluence, of endless war movies presenting the victors as supermen (but not yet as superwomen-- just as war had deflated the male values of Japanese, it inflated those of the Western winners, whose women were ejected from the jobs they had held while the men were away fighting, and theoretically went back to being full-time housewives and mothers).
Prosperity not known since the 1920's did little for adult women, but a great deal economically for adolescents, now called "teenagers," who commanded real wages and competitively bigger parental allowances in economies finally freed of unemployment. Teenage purchasing power made a new market for records, and the performers correspondingly rich-- none richer than the Fab Four from England, the Beatles.
The Beatles owed their huge success to a creative tension between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who wrote most of their songs-- Paul the syrupy and tuneful, John the tart realist. Advised by their astute manager, Brian Epstein, to present a wholesome image unthreatening to British parents, the Beatles were made Members of the Order of the British Empire (a medal usually given to civil servants like postmasters) in 1965, and they duly acquired wholesome girl friends and/or wives to suit. With a blonde English wife, Cynthia, and an infant son, Julian, Lennon later described feeling "trapped" in "a happily married state of boredom." Money had never been his main motivation-- rather, as wordsmith and intellectual of the partnership, he sought self-expression, meaning expressing the feelings of his contemporaries, the normal rebellion of any generation against the one before it, delayed for Lennon and those who thought like him by the huge (and not unjustified) self-satisfaction of their elders who had won the war, the peace and in their own minds, the game of life itself.
Aimless, shapeless discontent among young people who felt themselves overshadowed and marginalized by the war generation had already inspired James Dean's Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Alan Ginsberg's Howl (1956), John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956), and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957). These one-offs by unknown outsiders, meaningless to mainstream adults, could be ignored-- whereas the Beatles were the Western establishment's own lovable young rascals, with teenage followers in just about every English-speaking home. All that remained to complete the radicalization of youth in the later 'sixties was a new war, a spectacular crisis calling for immediate public action.
I happened to be in Vietnam, covering the first big search-and-destroy operations by American regular troops, in the very same month that Yoko met John. War was again a front-page, news-dominating story. After an on-again, off-again courtship, Lennon left his wife and their posh stockbroker-belt country mansion and set up house with Yoko in a London flat. In 1968 they released Unfinished Music #1: Two Virgins, a collage of electronic sound recorded on their first night together, with a self-shot nude photograph of the couple on the cover. They married in March 1969, promising to stage many "happenings." The wedding was the first, followed by "Bed Peace" in an Amsterdam hotel, then the huge billboard in Times Square, New York: "WAR IS OVER-- if you want it." The two Lennons had become the emblematic leaders of a universal cultural revolution. Long matured, the preoccupations of Yoko Ono's vivid Tokyo adolescence had meshed with John Lennon's energies, and given his showy, empty life a sense of purpose, and her art a world audience. Like the o's in Yoko Ono, another train of political and artistic wheels had at last come full circle.
MURRAY SAYLE, an Australian writer long resident in Japan, contributed this account of the intellectual origins of Yoko Ono, in slightly different form, to the catalogue of the multimedia retrospective "YES YOKO ONO," which opened at the Japan Society Gallery, New York, on October 16, 2000. The exhibition, curated by Alexandra Munroe, director of the gallery, in consultation with Jon Hendricks, curator of the Yoko Ono archive, is scheduled to tour the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston; the List Center for Visual Arts, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; and may travel to Asia.
First World War memorial, unveiled in 1921, designed by J S Gibson and W S A Gordon, with sculpture by C S Jagger; the builder was Samuel Salter. The memorial was partially reconfigured in the 1970s.
MATERIALS: Portland stone ashlar, with bronze plaques and sculpture.DESCRIPTION: the memorial takes the form of an exedra, with a semi-circular screen enclosing a sunken area. To the inside of the screen are fixed, slightly curved bronze plaques bearing the names of around 4500 of the dead, with those who served in the army to the north, and those who served in the navy to the south; a panel was reserved for the Royal Air Force, and the names of servicewomen are placed in a central position. In the architrave above the plaques is the inscription, ‘THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE’. There are two round-arched openings, each with a wrought-iron gate. The arch to the north leads to a passage under the railway and into Victoria Park; that to the south leads to an area to the north-west of Guildhall Square. At either end, the screen terminates in a segmental rusticated niche with flanking rusticated piers; within each niche is a bronze-painted urn above a stone seat. Above, set within the broken entablature, is a carved trophy – clustered weapons bristle above a shield flanked by oak and laurel branches, surrounded by scrolled acanthus, the whole topped by a crown. At the centre of the memorial three stone steps surround the cenotaph pier, which has relief carving of wartime scenes on land and at sea to each side, including marching soldiers, and a naval gun crew in action; there is a Greek-key cornice above. The pier is surmounted by a gadrooned sarcophagus urn. A plaque on the cenotaph reads, ‘THIS MEMORIAL WAS ERECTED BY THE PEOPLE OF PORTSMOUTH IN PROUD AND LOVING MEMORY OF THOSE WHO IN THE GLORIOUS MORNING OF THEIR DAYS FOR ENGLAND’S SAKE LOST ALL BUT ENGLAND’S PRAISE. MAY LIGHT PERPETUAL SHINE UPON THEM.’ The front of the memorial is partially enclosed by a stone balustrade, completing the circle; the balustrade originally extended to the east, curving inwards. Part of the balustrade has been reused to create a screen between the memorial and the north-west part of Guildhall Square. The entrance to the memorial, to the east, is marked by stone pedestals, each holding a seated sculptural figure: to the south is a sailor with a Lewis gun and to the north is a soldier with a Vickers gun. These sculptures were originally set parallel to each other, facing forwards and flanking the entrance when it was further east; in their new position they are slightly angled, opening out the entrance. A plaque on the north plinth notes that the memorial was erected by public subscription; a plaque on the south plinth commemorates its unveiling. A stone tablet on the north plinth was placed in 2003: ‘TO HONOUR ALL THOSE WHO DIED / SERVING THEIR COUNTRY IN / TIMES OF PEACE OR CONFLICT / ‘WE WILL REMEMBER’’.
I visited Methlick this afternoon Wed 18th July 2018 - Methlick (Gaelic: Maothulach) is a village in the Formartine area of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, situated on the River Ythan 11.2 kilometres (7.0 mi) north-west of Ellon Aberdeenshire Scotland, a short drive from my home.
1943. Mack. OSU 349. Green. 1943. 707cc. Petrol.
Event: Bolsover 40s Fest. October 2022
The Mack NO 7+1⁄2-ton 6x6 truck was a heavy 6x6 cargo truck designed in the 1940s by the American manufacturer Mack Trucks. It was used by the U.S. Army as an artillery tractor for heavy artillery during and after World War II.
Album: 1940s Weekends. 2012-2022
[4K] Bolsover 1940s Fest. Oct 2022
YouTube: youtu.be/CDLEI30RcRA
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No Group Banners, thanks.
1943. Mack. OSU 349. Green. 1943. 707cc. Petrol.
Event: Bolsover 40s Fest. October 2022
Album: 1940s Weekends. 2012-2022
[4K] Bolsover 1940s Fest. Oct 2022
YouTube: youtu.be/CDLEI30RcRA
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No Group Banners, thanks.
1986. Land Rover. C117 PUX. Green. 2500cc. Diesel.
Event: Bolsover 40s Fest. October 2022
Album: 1940s Weekends. 2012-2022
[4K] Bolsover 1940s Fest. Oct 2022
YouTube: youtu.be/CDLEI30RcRA
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No Group Banners, thanks.
Fence railings at Higginson Park.
Over 5,000 poppies have been made by about 20 people in the Marlow Poppy Display Group over the course of a few years and are proudly brought out each year for Remembrance – alongside 300 new poppies made for people to find around the town and keep.
These poppies are displayed on the railings of Marlow's All Saints Church and Higginson Park fences, honouring local servicemen and servicewomen.
1975. Land Rover. KWU 605N. Green. 3860cc. Diesel.
Event: Bolsover 40s Fest. October 2022
Album: 1940s Weekends. 2012-2022
[4K] Bolsover 1940s Fest. Oct 2022
YouTube: youtu.be/CDLEI30RcRA
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No Group Banners, thanks.
Russian servicewomen march during the Victory Day parade in Moscow, Russia on May 09, 2018. (Photo by Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters)
Servicewomen of the Army Air Corps are pictured on parade at Middle Wallop airfield in Hampshire.
The Army Air Corps (AAC) operates alongside the other Combat Arms of the Infantry and Royal Armoured Corps. Combat Arms are those forces that use fire and manoeuvre to engage with the enemy with direct fire systems. The forces providing fire support and operational assistance to the Combat Arms are called Combat Support Forces.
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Russian servicewomen march during the Victory Day parade at Red Square in Moscow, Russia on May 09, 2018. (Photo by Maxim Shipenkov/Reuters)
Re-post from last year.
Members of my family who served in either WW1 or WW2.
Anzac Day, 25 April, is one of Australia’s most important national occasions. It marks the anniversary of the first major military action fought by Australian and New Zealand forces during the First World War.
This day has become more and more important to Australians as the years go by and attendances to the commemorative services held around the nation increases yearly. School children have become very involved and each year they march with their parents and grandparents, often wearing the medals that belonged to family members.
My granddaughters marched in an Anzac parade this morning, in their school uniform.
1982. Land Rover. URR 781X. Green. 6000cc. Diesel.
Event: Bolsover 40s Fest. October 2022
Album: 1940s Weekends. 2012-2022
[4K] Bolsover 1940s Fest. Oct 2022
YouTube: youtu.be/CDLEI30RcRA
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No Group Banners, thanks.
Russian servicewomen march during the Victory Day parade in Moscow, Russia on May 09, 2018. (Photo by Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters)
One of the coolest things to do in DC is to catch the sunrise from where Lincoln sits overlooking the reflecting pool and Washington Monument. On the backdrop of a quickly changing colorful sky, and before the tourists take over, there's a tiny sliver of time when locals jog up to wink at, blow kisses to, point to, make peace signs at and yell out "you da man" to Lincoln. #dailyritual
It was during this time I came across several service-men and -women taking a group photo. Just wanted to recognize those that serve, that have served and remember those that have fallen. Thank you!
Happy Memorial Day!
The white marble headstones stretch in solemn symmetry across the rolling hills of Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C., creating a powerful visual rhythm that embodies the weight of national memory. This deeply moving scene captures the eternal stillness of America’s most hallowed ground—a final resting place for over 400,000 military service members, veterans, and their families.
Located directly across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery spans over 600 acres of meticulously maintained land. Its history dates back to the Civil War, when it was established on the estate of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, repurposed by the U.S. government as a symbol of reconciliation and remembrance. Today, it remains a solemn landscape where grief, honor, and patriotism intersect.
In the images above, long shadows from bare winter trees fall gently across the manicured grass, adding texture and emotional resonance. Each headstone bears the name, rank, and dates of a life dedicated to service—many marked by quiet heroism, some by profound sacrifice. The view evokes both individual stories and the collective scale of history.
Notably visible in one image is a fresh gravesite—a poignant reminder that Arlington is not just a memorial to the past but an ongoing tribute to those who continue to serve and protect the ideals of democracy. Spring is just beginning to awaken around the cemetery, with buds forming on trees, suggesting renewal and resilience amidst reverent silence.
Arlington is the final resting place of some of the most prominent figures in American history, including President John F. Kennedy and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. But it is also a democratizing space—every stone stands the same height, aligned in perfect military order, reinforcing the idea that in death, rank dissolves and every service matters equally.
The quiet dignity of this place leaves an indelible impression. Visitors often speak in hushed tones, pausing not only to pay respects but to reflect on the enormity of what these stones represent: courage, duty, and the unbreakable bond between the military and the nation it defends.
Found this cool, patriotic mural on an old building in Downtown Louisville, Kentucky. Thank you to all the servicemen and servicewomen who fight for my freedom each and every day!!
Three bracketed photos were taken with a handheld Nikon D5200 and combined with Photomatix to create this HDR image. Additional adjustments were made in Photoshop CS6.
"For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." ~Jeremiah 29:11