On the evening of 27 October 1945, 80 years ago, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum stood transformed into a vast stage of remembrance and spectacle. The event, A Tribute to Victory, was more than a postwar celebration; it was the nation’s collective exhalation after four years of global conflict. In every city and town in every state, the population came out onto the streets to celebrate a victory that cost much treasure of its youth, no more so than in Los Angeles where the day would reach its climax at the city’s Coliseum. Yet beneath the jubilation ran a more complicated current. A Gallup poll of 26 August 1945 had proclaimed that 85 per cent of Americans endorsed the use of atomic bombs on Japanese cities, while only ten per cent disapproved. Five per cent expressed no opinion. With the celebrations of VJ Day still a recent memory, most of the nation accepted the government and military line that the atomic bombs were merely a final escalation of the firestorms already unleashed on Dresden and Tokyo. As the Chicago Sun declared in a headline that echoed the country’s prevailing mood: ‘There is no scale of values which makes a TNT explosion right and a uranium explosion wrong.’

Over 100,000 spectators filled the grandstands, while millions more across the United States tuned in to the live CBS Radio broadcast. A postwar version of Live Aid. The day’s events promised catharsis – a final act of gratitude toward those who had fought and died in Europe and the Pacific. The organisers had drawn upon Hollywood to tell the story of America’s war, its horrors reimagined as grand pageantry. With sets built by film designers, and utilising an army of actors and stagehands, it was hosted by the country’s fictional hardman, Edward G. Robinson. Alongside the huge crowds, the event was also attended by the cream of Hollywood’s acting community, as they witnessed a day that mixed remembrance with relief.

Massive stage sets recreated tanks, aircraft, and naval fleets, while pyrotechnics simulated the chaos of Pearl Harbor, the storming of Normandy, and the brutal island campaigns of the Pacific. Veterans – some still wearing their uniforms – accompanied their wives and girlfriends to watch with pride and tears as their battles were reenacted in fire and smoke. For a few hours, the nation could believe that the pain of war had been transfigured into spectacle, that history could be rewritten in light and music.

Yet even amid the celebration, the mood in America that October was uneasy. Barely two months had passed since Emperor Hirohito’s surrender on 15 August, the day remembered as VJ Day. Across the nation, jubilation had poured into the streets, but beneath the joy lay a growing awareness that the world had entered a new and uncertain epoch. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had accomplished what invasions, blockades, and firebombings could not: they had forced Imperial Japan’s hand. But the act that ended the war also opened the door to a darker future. Newspapers hailed the triumph of American science, but editorials and sermons warned of divine judgment and human arrogance. ‘The bomb has made the world one neighbourhood’, a New York Times columnist wrote, ‘but not one brotherhood.’

In that context, A Tribute to Victory became more than a celebration – it was a national ritual of closure performed by a people struggling to comprehend what they had unleashed. The war was over, but the peace that followed felt uneasy, almost spectral. America had not only defeated fascism; it had cracked open the atom, and with it, the boundaries of the possible.

As the Californian dusk descended over the Coliseum, the performance unfolded like a living chronicle of the war’s defining moments. Scenes of Pearl Harbor provoked a solemn hush, followed by rousing depictions of the dramatic naval victory at Midway and the valiant US Marine Corps defending Guadalcanal. The D-Day landings were dramatised with precision, actors storming mock beaches as searchlights swept across the field, evoking tracer fire.

Each sequence drew waves of applause, yet many veterans sat still, their faces lit intermittently by bursts of flame. For them, the spectacle carried a weight no Hollywood set could soften. The trauma of war was still near – their comrades buried in Europe, the Pacific, or in the depths of the sea. When the re-enactments began of the American amphibious landings that had captured at great cost the Pacific atoll of Iwo Jima and the Japanese island of Okinawa, the explosions grew louder, the smoke thicker, the music more dissonant. For a moment, the pageantry teetered between celebration and nightmare, a reminder that the path to victory had been paved with nearly half a million American dead.

Then, as the final act began, Robinson’s voice filled the stadium: ‘Tonight, we remember not only our victory but the cost of that victory – the sacrifice that freedom demands.’ At his cue, 80 searchlights flickered to life, forming luminous columns that pierced the Los Angeles night. The crowd gasped as the beams converged into a brilliant dome of light that echoed the grandiose Nazi rallies once staged at Nuremberg – a deliberate visual reminder that tyranny had been vanquished. From the darkness beyond the stadium came a deep, resonant hum. At first, the spectators thought it was a dirigible; then more beams found their mark, revealing the silhouette of a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the aircraft that had decimated Japan with firebombs, and that had also carried the atomic bombs to Japan.

Three of the bombers roared overhead, their recognisable silver fuselages catching the searchlight beams and dazzling the crowd. Many felt pride, others, unease. The B-29 had become an emblem of victory – and of annihilation. Moments after the planes disappeared, and the lead bomber dropped a theatrical bomb slowly descending behind the stage by parachute, a tremendous explosion erupted behind the stage. A giant mushroom cloud rose into the night sky, billowing in eerie silence before the crowd erupted in gasps. The image was unmistakable. The pyrotechnic engineers had recreated an atomic blast – the weapon that had ended the war. It was intended as a triumphant finale, but for many, it felt like an omen.

Navy Day was being celebrated as a showcase of America’s scientific and military power. President Harry S. Truman, who had delivered a workable peace in Europe and now victory over Japan, delivered a speech declaring the dawn of a ‘new era of strength’, while naval exhibits displayed atomic research vessels and models of nuclear-powered ships. Yet as officialdom proclaimed the birth of the atomic age, other voices were expressing alarm. Scientists from Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, some of whom had once celebrated their success working for the Manhattan Project, now within a few weeks of Tribute to Victory openly discussed that the weapon they had built could destroy civilisation if left unchecked. The newly formed Federation of Atomic Scientists urged international control of nuclear technology, fearing an arms race that might one day consume the planet.

In Los Angeles, the symbolism of the mushroom cloud over the Coliseum could not have been more potent. As the crowd dispersed, reporters noted a sense of sobering reflection. Some had indeed whooped and clapped in awe (perhaps veterans glad to have survived the fighting and be back home); others walked silently, disturbed by what they had witnessed. Many were in tears. The Los Angeles Times would later describe the event as ‘a pageant both glorious and grave – a reminder that man’s triumph may also be his trial’.

That paradox defined the American mood in the closing months of 1945. The nation had emerged as the world’s dominant power, its cities intact, its economy thriving. Yet victory carried a burden: the knowledge that the same ingenuity that had saved civilisation could now end it. The United States had achieved what no other country in history had – the ability to destroy itself and the world in a single act. Clergy across denominations warned of a moral reckoning. Cartoonists drew images of a small, frightened Earth beneath a looming atomic cloud labelled ‘Progress’.

The cultural reverberations were immediate. Hollywood, always quick to capture the public mood, began to explore the bomb’s legacy in films like The Beginning or the End and Rocketship X-M. Magazines paired bright illustrations of atomic-powered cities with sombre essays on radiation and fallout. The nation’s imagination oscillated between utopia and apocalypse. The celebration in Los Angeles thus became both an ending and a beginning – a bookend to one war and a preface to a new, invisible one.

Many Americans that autumn clung to faith in science as the guarantor of peace. Truman himself proclaimed that atomic energy, if properly harnessed, could serve humanity rather than destroy it. The director of Los Alamos, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the commander of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves, became national figures. Public exhibitions displayed models of reactors that might one day power homes and cities. Yet beneath the optimism lay a deep unease. Letters to newspaper editors expressed private dread. ‘How do we tell our children’, one reader asked, ‘that the same sun which warms their faces may one day burn them to ash?’ Sociologists would later call this the atomic interlude – a brief period of awe and fear before the Cold War hardened that anxiety into policy.

In the weeks that followed, Los Angeles returned to its rhythms, but the memory of that night lingered. Veterans’ groups held reunions under banners that read ‘Victory Through Peace’. Churches held masses for the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Historians would later view the event as an allegory for America’s transformation. It had begun as a patriotic pageant and ended as an atomic revelation. The mushroom cloud, intended as a symbol of triumph, had become a mirror reflecting the nation’s conscience.

By late 1945, the term ‘Atomic Age’ had entered the American lexicon. Magazines and newsreels embraced it as shorthand for both promise and peril. In December, the newly formed United Nations established an Atomic Energy Commission, an acknowledgment of the moral and political unease that the bomb had created. Debate shifted rapidly from celebration to responsibility. Could any nation, even one that saw itself as righteous, be trusted with such power? Could peace survive the weapon meant to secure it?

At the Los Angeles Coliseum that October night, the American public had glimpsed the shape of this new reality in the language it best understood – spectacle. The fireworks, the bombers, and the artificial cloud combined to produce a vision that was both magnificent and terrifying. It was as if America, in celebrating its victory, had staged an accidental prophecy.

Eighty years later, A Tribute to Victory remains a curious historical footnote – a celebration whose grand finale captured, perhaps unintentionally, the spirit of a nation poised between triumph and terror. What began as homage to courage ended as a premonition of anxiety. The mushroom cloud rising over Los Angeles on that autumn evening was not real, but its shadow endured. It marked the moment Americans realised that victory had changed them – that the age of innocence, and of purely righteous war, had ended.

In the years that followed, as schoolchildren practised duck-and-cover drills and cities constructed fallout shelters, that night at the Coliseum stood as a haunting emblem of how swiftly jubilation could turn to fear. For those who were there, watching the sky ignite one last time, the message was unmistakable: humanity had won the war – but in doing so, it had entered an uneasy covenant with destruction.