V-J Day remembered Sunday in special report

Sixty years ago Sunday, a world war that leveled cities and left a death toll impossible to count, ended in surrender.

V-J Day, victory over Japan, was an exhilarating celebration for some. For others, it was quiet relief.

“I was so darned tired, I didn’t do nothing,” remembers 87-year-old Duffy Setterlund, who now lives at the Spokane Veterans Home.

For a Japanese prisoner of war like Cecil Cunningham of Deep Creek, Wash., it meant freedom. “Saw my first American woman since I was taken prisoner. She sure looked good to me,” he wrote to his family from a hospital ship.

Cunningham died in Spokane in 2002, but his letters home are among the voices in The Spokesman-Review’s V-J Day Commemorative Edition coming Sunday. We’ve gathered memories and images from those who witnessed a world at war – liberating Buchenwald, the Battle of the Bulge, Iwo Jima, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.

For some, like Wayne Fowler, now 85 and living near Grand Coulee Dam, it’s not the battles he fought as a Marine that come to mind. “I remember the people more than anything else.”

Meet him and scores of others on Sunday.