his nose broken. That night, hundreds of sailors went into the neighborhood and attacked every Mexican American boy they could find. For the next ten straight days, the Navy sailors went into Chavez Ravine, Downtown LA, and even East Los Angeles, dragging, beating, and stripping naked every Zoot suited boy out in public - some as young as twelve and thirteen years old. The Los Angeles press cheered on the racist attacks, even printing guides on how to "de-zoot" a zoot-suiter. The LAPD responded by joining the sailors, arresting hundreds of Zoot suiters, both teenaged boys and girls, and charging them with "disturbing the peace". Progressive activists at the time, such as Carey McWilliams, blamed the riots on William Randolph Hearst's "proto-fascist" promotion of "anti-Mexican hysteria" during the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial. Scholars, however, have focused on the complex social matrix operating within Los Angeles at the time, and interpret the riots as an example of the "social cleavages" within the segregation-era U.S. Postwar activism World War II formally ended on September 2, 1945 after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the final surrender of Japan to the Allied powers. For the millions of returning veterans, the adjustment back to civilian life was difficult. For African and Latino Americans, in particular, there was significant difficulty transitioning from being war heroes and liberators in Europe, back into second-class citizens in the race-segregated United States. African Americans had sought to address some of these discrepancies with their Double V campaign; meanwhile, Mexican Americans began their own fight for civil rights at home. The historian Thomas A. Guglielmo writes, "Patriotic sacrifice and service only further fired Mexicans' and Mexican Americans' determination to gain first-class citizenship." Returning Mexican Americans challenged discrimination and segregation in many ways, including by sitting in "whites only" seating sections in town theaters, demanding service at white restaurants, and attempting to enter segregated public pools. In one notorious instance, Macario Garcia received the Medal of Honor in a ceremony at the White House, and less than a month later, he was refused service at the Oasis Cafe in Richmond, Texas because of his ethnicity. He refused to leave the cafe, the police were called, and Garcia was arrested and charged with "aggravated assault". In Arizona, the governor named August 14, 1945 in honor after another Medal of Honor recipient, Silvestre Herrera. Coverage of the event was marred, however,