Today is the 60th anniversary of a terrible day in San Francisco's history -- a victory riot that left 11 dead, 1,000 injured and the city's reputation besmirched.
"It was the deadliest riot in the city's history," said Kevin Mullen, a retired deputy chief of police who has written extensively about crime in San Francisco.
The riot, which followed the Japanese surrender announcement by a day, was mostly confined to downtown San Francisco and involved thousands of drunken soldiers and sailors, most of them teenagers, who smashed store windows, attacked women, halted all traffic, wrecked Muni streetcars -- 30 of them were disabled, and one Muni worker was killed. The rioters took over Market Street and refused to leave until military and civilian police drove them away long after nightfall following hours of chaos.
When the war was over, there was a huge sense of relief. The Army military police and the Navy shore patrol and the San Francisco police got official orders: "Let the people do anything within reason,'' The Chronicle reported, "and keep property damage down.''
The first day -- V-J Day -- was like a pleasant round of drinks, a nice feeling. The second day was different.
"If you pull all restraints off and add liquor, that's what happens," said Mullen, the former deputy police chief. "Everybody went nuts. These were not veterans, they were young people who hadn't been in the war. They were not warriors," he said.
They hadn't seen the war, and now they didn't have to. There would be no invasion of Japan, no long casualty lists. These young men would not see combat. So they got drunk. They were all drunk, the reporter Delaplane wrote. One in four, he thought, was "falling down drunk."
Mullen blames the police for what happened. They were not prepared, he said. They had no plan. The result was a riot and many dead people.
A month later, San Francisco held a big parade on Market Street, led by General Jonathan Wainwright, the hero of Corrigedor. Half a million people came to see the real war veterans. There was no trouble.
Since most of those servicemen were getting ready to ship out for the invasion of Japan, scheduled for November, with one million casualties predicted, it's hard to blame them for cuttin' loose. I'd never heard of this before, so I thought I'd share.
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