PEACE AT LAST! CHEERS ERUPT IN WASHINGTON

For the fourth day in a row, Mary A. Brown, a gray-haired grandmother, had come to sit with her 9-year-old granddaughter, Bernice, on a Lafayette Square bench. It was a vigil, she explained, for peace and the safe return from the Pacific of her son, Lt. Aubrey A. Brown, USNR, formerly the assistant manager of the Mayflower Hotel.

During those four summer days, crowds had been gathering across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. On Sunday evening, there had been a false armistice report on the radio. Now it was Tuesday, Aug. 14, 1945, and this time it was for real.

At 7 p.m., President Harry S. Truman made it official from the Oval Office. And then, in answer to the "We want Harry!" chants of the huge crowd, he and Bess came out on the North Porch and waved.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he told the suddenly silent throng, "this is the great day. This is the day we have been looking for since December 7, 1941. This is the day when fascism and police government ceases in the world. This is the day for the democracies."

THE END OF World War II had been a long time coming. Today, finally, was the time to celebrate.

Down near 10th and P streets NW, a candy shop prepared for what would come by nailing boards over its windows. Federal employees, long on a six-day week, were given two days off. Lansburgh's ad in the next day's Washington Post said only: "We Thank God." Peoples Drug: "Thank God for Peace."

Byron Price, the government's wartime press censor, hung up a sign: "Out of Business."

Ever since the first atomic bomb had exploded Aug. 6 over Hiroshima, peace had suddenly seemed possible. As The Post editorialized, "Perhaps this will frighten the surviving Japanese into accepting the terms of the Potsdam ultimatum." And the next day: "It may even make an invasion of the Japanese home islands a nonessential prelude to final victory."

It took a couple of days to formalize the end, once Tokyo Radio reported that Emperor Hirohito had told his countrymen that it was time to quit fighting. A Japanese message to Washington came via the neutral Swiss government. On Aug. 13, two RCA employees, Earl Allison and Thomas Jones, set out from their Connecticut Avenue office with the official message from Bern to its embassy in Washington, for transmission to the State Department.

But bureaucracy had not taken a total holiday. At 4:15 p.m. Allison and Jones were stopped by a policeman at Connecticut Avenue and N Street for making an illegal U-turn. Allison: "We told him we were delivering the Jap message that had been awaited for more than two days, and even showed him the radiogram, but he said we couldn't feed him those horsefeathers." They said it took 10 minutes to argue their way out; the officer said only two. And so came peace, formally.

Washington got pretty raucous that evening. Half a million people swirled through downtown; traffic was a hopeless jam. When they stopped the film in movie theaters to announce the news, audiences stood to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner."

A Washington Daily News reporter wrote of "a swaying, swirling sea of humanity that howled and shrieked and hugged and kissed and just went daffy with delight." A Post reporter, Scott Hart, got down to basics in his book "Washington at War." That "hugging and kissing," Hart wrote, "grew into unabashed fornication on the steps of the Treasury Department and in Lafayette Park." And: "A crowd in front of the Post (then at E Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, site now of the J.W. Marriott Hotel) cheered as a serviceman and his girl jumped from a car, stripped, exchanged clothing and leaped back into the automobile."

In spite of all the hoopla, it was a benign celebration. Emergency Hospital, now long gone from New York Avenue just west of the White House, treated only 160 people. Churches and synagogues were full of the thankful. Nightclubs, half a dozen of them within walking distance of the White House, were jammed. And they danced much of the night away at the Mayflower and the new Statler, now the Capital Hilton. Celebration was most everywhere; there were block parties all over town.

It lasted till dawn. But some longer-range thoughts now were beginning to percolate. After the bomb fell on Hiroshima, The Post declared that "what we seem really to need at this moment is a new era in the understanding of the nature of man, and whether it is really the kind of nature that makes it desirable for him to play with such toys as atomic energy. Anyway, it is possible at this point to draw only one conclusion, namely, that if the peoples of the world cannot now live in unity and peace, they will presently not live at all."

A few days later came a letter to the editor signed Eunice M. Knapp: "For the first time in my life I am ashamed of being an American. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima is by far the greatest atrocity of the war, outdoing all Japanese-German atrocities combined." The same day's Post reported that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had told Parliament that the bomb had saved the lives of a million Americans and 250,000 British people by making invasion unnecessary.

MOST OF US, however, had more mundane thoughts. At Briggs Clarifier Co., 515 people were laid off in a "victory cutback," and Congress began discussing how to legislate "full employment." Six and a half million soldiers, sailors and airmen were to be demobilized in the next 18 months -- it went even faster than that, in fact. Gasoline rationing ended, and the complex food rationing system soon was dismantled.

Truman created a Fair Employment Practices Commission, and complaints about Capital Transit's refusal to hire black people were among its first cases. Air fares from National to Los Angeles became competitive: $111.35 and "less than 16 hours" vs. four days in a Pullman railroad car at $120.55 or coach for $59.66.

Washington, that "sleepy southern town" of yore, twice had been yanked out of its lethargy, first with the arrival of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 and then when the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. During the war years, its population exploded. In 1930, the District census counted 486,809; in 1940, it was 663,091; and by 1950, it was 802,178, the all-time high. The spillover into the suburbs began as a wartime trickle, severely inhibited by gasoline rationing. In 1940, the suburban count was 342,923, and that included long-established Alexandria and Arlington. By 1950, however, the suburban total was 705,670, fewer than 100,000 below the District's.

From the end of the Civil War until 1900, the District's black population was not quite a third of its total; then the proportion declined to a quarter, or slightly more, until 1940, when the percentage began growing again and became a majority in the 1950s, concurrent with the big white exodus to the suburbs. For all practical purposes, wartime Washington was a segregated city. There were two school systems, separate and unequal. Restaurants for whites did not admit blacks, although blacks managed, or even owned, some white establishments. The only eating place for whites and blacks together was Union Station.

The influx of "government girls," the thousands of secretaries who flocked to Washington during the war, was partly met with the construction of residence halls -- segregated buildings. Just as the military was segregated, so were the groups volunteering to help, the USO and the Red Cross. Even "Negro" blood was segregated from that of white people by the Red Cross. The city's white business establishment, at least its powerful majority, had combined with southern Democrats in Congress to govern white and black and to continue segregation throughout the war.

There were efforts to address the economic and social problems of the black population. But the overriding drive for military victory made all such efforts secondary. Roosevelt had accepted the segregated capital as a fact of life he would, or had to, live with. Truman would begin to change that, once V-J Day had come.

Physically, the scars of war long remained. In Washington, a "temporary" building was defined as a low, hot government office space constructed hurriedly in one war and still there for the next. The "tempos" of World War II appeared all over the Mall, to join the leftovers from World War I. There even were a pair of footbridges across the Reflecting Pool to connect two-story tempos on either side. Not until the Nixon administration did the last of those tempos of both wars disappear.

The government gobbled up whatever it could. Mount Vernon College at Ward Circle was taken over by the Navy and never returned. Out Wisconsin Avenue, Evalyn Walsh McLean, owner of the Hope Diamond and wife of The Post's former owner, surrendered her summer estate, Friendship, to new dormitories for government girls. Today, the development is called McLean Gardens. Some wartime results were bizarre: At what had been the Dupont Circle Apartments, a pre-war tenant found herself, as a government secretary, typing in her onetime bathroom.

Wars, both the hot and the cold varieties, have always quickened the pulse of Washington. At the end comes a moment of release; such was V-J Day in 1945. And then, as so often before, it was on to new adventures and changing times.

CHALMERS M. ROBERTS reported local, national and international news for The Washington Post for 23 years in 1933-34 and 1949-71. On V-J Day, he was a captain in Army Air Forces intelligence stationed at the Pentagon.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.