Posted on 09/02/2005 5:32:22 PM PDT by SandRat
WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Sept. 2, 2005) – The Army has launched a special online presentation, focusing on its role in post-war Japan, in time for the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.
On Sept 2, 1945, Gen. Douglas MacArthur accepted the Japanese surrender and signed documents aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, officially ending the war.
The online presentation highlights the last year of the war in the Pacific and the ensuing seven-year occupation of Japan with a series of video vignettes.
The entire presentation lasts about 20 minutes, said Robbie Thompson, a multimedia producer who led the Army Web team in the project. He said about seven hours of archival film – much of it from the U.S. Army Signal Corps -- along with about 1,000 still photos, were searched through at the National Archives to distill the final product.
U.S. Army Center for Military History’s Gary Trogdon and archivist Eric S. Van Slander from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration served as content consultants for the project, Thompson said.
The site focuses on the “call to duty” of U.S. Soldiers in Japan who faced a foreign culture, language barriers and other obstacles as they worked to support the emergence of democracy in Japan, Thompson said.
“It’s just such a fascinating piece of history,” Thompson said.
Edward Drea, a retired historian from the Center of Military History, narrates the videos in the presentation. After military service in Japan and Vietnam, Drea received his master’s degree in international relations from Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan, and his doctorate in Modern Japanese History from the University of Kansas.
Drea has taught at the U.S. Army Command & General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and the U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pa. He was chief of the Research and Analysis Division at the U.S. Army Center of Military History. His published works include “MacArthur's ULTRA: Codebreaking and the War Against Japan, 1942-1945” and “In the Service of the Emperor: Essays on the Imperial Japanese Army.”
The production of this online presentation was a team effort, Thompson said, which included the design and development talents of Samantha Warren, Eric Lohman and Ben Sterling from the Army Web team.
The site can be viewed at www.army.mil/postwarjapan.
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