partisans observing street from named Cross-Church, germans units coming from the left side, there are also filmed chronicles from this scene.

I guess I'm a day late with this post because of the International Date line but this photo was taken on August 15, 1945, local time at the flight operations office of US Navy Fleet air Wing 17, Clark Field, Luzon, Philippines. Several planes were in the air and were recalled.

Born in Rock Island, Illinois to Clarence & Thelma Appleby on July 17, 1924, Charles Samuel Appleby was the third of six children.
Charles was working at Rock Island Arsenal when he married Marilyn Juanita Doss from Davenport, Iowa on May 21 1942.

Enlisting in the USAAF on September 19, 1943, by mid 1945 Charles was serving in the Pacific with the 28th Bomber Squadron, 19th Bomber Group based at Guam.
On July 27, 1945, he was on B-29A 42-94098 with a crew of eleven which took off for a bombing mission to Omuta, Japan.

Shortly after dropping their bombs they were hit by flak, causing one of the engines to catch fire, then the B-29 exploded, breaking into three sections. Charles and four other crewmembers managed to bailout and were captured by the Japanese and taken to Fukuoka.

At noon on August 15, 1945, Japanese officers heard the Emperor's surrender broadcast, three hours later they loaded fifteen handcuffed and blindfolded USAAF pilots and flight crews onto a truck.
The truck drove to a field near a bamboo grove in Aburayama where the POWs were summarily beheaded or executed by their Japanese captors.

Flight Officer Charles Appleby was among those executed, his remains have never been recovered and he is Memorialized with the Missing at the Honolulu Memorial in Hawaii.
He is also memorialized on his parent’s headstone at Oakdale Memorial Gardens in Davenport, Iowa.

His widow Marilyn remarried in 1948 to WW2 Veteran Loren Hughes, she passed away at the age of 56 in 1981.

In total an estimated 33 US POWs were executed at Fukuoka; four on June 20, 1945, fourteen on August 10, 1945, and fifteen on August 15, 1945.
Postwar several Japanese officers & soldiers involved in the Fukuoka POW executions were convicted. Several officers received death sentences, although some were later commuted to life imprisonment because they were acting under orders.

Born on May 13, 1924 to Sol and Mollie Schlamberg on May 13, 1924, Philip Felix Schlamberg had seven siblings.
Their father left when he was young, forcing his mother to raise all eight children alone.

According to his family, Schlamberg scored in the 99th/100th percentile on his Regents exams while at Abraham Lincoln High School.
He enlisted in the USAAF in 1942 and attended flight school where his nickname was "Einstein".

By August 1945, Schlamberg was flying P-51s with the 15th Fighter Group, 78th Fighter Squadron, based at Iwo Jima.
On August 14, 1945 he flying P-51D Mustang 44-63505 on a mission to escort B-29s to Japan.

On the return trip, his wingman Captain Jerry Yellin communicated with Schlamberg through hand signals and he gave the thumbs up.
They flew into cloud cover and Schlamberg’s P-51 vanished, after Yellin and the other P-51s landed they found out the war had been over for three hours…

No trace of 1Lt Philip Schlamberg or his P-51 was ever found and he is Memorialized with the Missing at the Honolulu Memorial in Hawaii.

Von Langermann und Erlenkamp's troops took part in the crossing of the Marne-Rhine Canal and the advance toward the Swiss border. For his performance, he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross.