August 11, 2025

— Newsreel, 1945

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Oh happy day

It was just past noon on August 14, 1945, and Virginia Dare Aderholdt, aged 35, was at her desk in Arlington Hall, the Army's codebreaking headquarters just outside Washington.

Aderholdt had lived and studied in Japan and served as a missionary before the war, which made her a valuable asset: an American woman fluent in the Japanese language. She became the in-house expert on a diplomatic code called JAH and was the go-to person in U.S. intelligence to decode and translate intercepted messages.

As a result, when the U.S. intercepted a JAH message just after noon that the Japanese government had sent to its embassy in Switzerland, Aderholdt was the first American to read and understand it—and thus to realize that after years of war, the Japanese were accepting the terms of surrender.

She typed her translation, passed it to her superiors, and within hours, President Truman had the confirmation he needed.

Joy and gladness

That evening, he addressed the nation. And the world erupted.

It was perhaps the biggest joint celebration in all of world history. Across the country, photographers and reporters captured the scene.

In New York's Times Square, a Navy sailor grabbed a young woman in a white uniform and kissed her. The kiss—snapped in a split-second by photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt—became the defining image of the moment: surprise, relief, and sheer human joy all in one blurred embrace.

A newsreel proclaimed: "The world's mightiest city marked the end in one tremendous shout of joy and gladness."

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In Chicago, traffic screeched to a halt as people poured into the streets. In a Kansas town, farmers climbed down from tractors and drove to the courthouse, banging pots and singing along the way.

In Miami, bartenders hugged strangers. On college campuses and factory floors, people cried openly. In Los Angeles, a woman bought every bouquet from a street vendor and started handing out flowers to passersby.

Exhilaration and relief

Not all the news from that day was joyful. In San Francisco, where no official celebration had been organized, crowds grew unruly. The worst violence came from groups of young Navy enlistees—most of whom had never served overseas and now would never have to.

Fueled by alcohol and adrenaline, they looted shops, assaulted civilians, and overturned cars. Eleven people died over two nights. It was a jarring counterpoint to the joy elsewhere, a reminder that war doesn't let go of everyone at the same pace.

Still, for the vast majority, the emotion was simple: exhilaration and relief. It wasn't a perfect peace, but it was something whole generations had never experienced. For those born after 1914, war had been the defining feature of adult life. Now, it was over.

Wartime secrecy

Back in Arlington Hall, there were no celebrations, no parades, no confetti. The codebreakers stayed at their desks.

We know now that women made up 70 percent of the U.S. military's codebreaking team during the war, but the very existence of the effort was classified for years.

At the National Archives today, records are hard to come by. So many people working in the codebreaking effort were given official job titles that had nothing to do with cryptography, researchers there explain—again because of wartime secrecy.

Efforts to bring codebreaking veterans together later were stymied because so many young, unmarried women were part of the effort. Often, they got married and took their husbands' names, making them harder to track down.

Literally momentous

Aderholdt was one of them. She returned to Japan after the war, continuing her work as a missionary, then came back to the U.S., got married, and taught school.

If it weren't for a few speeches she gave much later, her moment as a witness to history, and the small but important part she played, might have been forgotten.

That's why I like her story. There were many heroes of that day: soldiers and sailors who fought their way across oceans and continents, workers who built planes and staffed hospitals, families who sacrificed and endured.

Most of their stories are forgotten, or reduced to footnotes. But Aderholdt's moment was literally momentous.

"The Japanese surrender message was delivered," a colleague later said, "and she was the one who put it into English."

And she helped deliver the happiest day the world had known in a very long time.

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7 other things to know this week ...

Folks: I like the way this is going. Let me know if you agree below!

• Sunday August 10: "Most things in this world don´t work, aspirin do." — Kurt Vonnegut. Granted, Vonnegut had nothing to do with the invention/disovery of aspirin, but it was on this date in 1897 that a German chemist, Felix Hoffmann, figured out how to synthesize its active ingredient in a pure and stable form.
• Monday August 11: “Some men like a dull life – they like the routine of eating breakfast, going to work, coming home, petting the dog, watching TV, kissing the kids, and going to bed. Stay clear of it – it’s often catching.” Hedy Lamarr, actress and inventor, who on this day (August 11, 1942) along with George Antheil, patented their “Secret Communication System,” which was a frequency-hopping technology to defeat radio jamming efforts. Their efforts later influenced the development of wi-fi and bluetooth technologies.
• Tuesday August 12: “Mary had a little lamb.” — Thomas Edison, who on this date in 1877 tested the first sound-recording phonograh by reciting a children's poem into it, and found supposedly to his amazement, that it actually worked.
• Wednesday August 13: "I don't want to see old people doing rap or rock and roll. It makes me cringe."— Grace Slick, whose original band Jefferson Airplane played its first gig 60 years ago today.
• Thursday August 14: "We must face the fact that in this country we have a rich man's security and a poor man's security and that the Government owes equal obligations to both." — President Franklin Roosevelt. On this date in 1935, he signed the Social Security Act, part of his New Deal program.
• Friday August 15: “The time has come when we must bear the unbearable.” — Emperor Hirohito in a radio address to the people of Japan, confirming the surrender on this day in 1945. (The difference in date from the August 14 story above is because of the International Date Line.)
• Saturday August 16: "I trained 4 years to run 9 seconds and people give up when they don't see results in 2 months." —Usain Bolt. On this day in 2009, he set the world record for the 100m: 9.58 seconds, at the 2009 IAAF World Championships in Berlin. In 16 years, nobody has come close to breaking his mark.