VE Day(s)

This has been a week where, after eighty years, it has become clear that our culture is losing a bit of clarity around how and when (and where) WWII ended. Though a measure of ambiguity has always been present. 

The Donald is here referencing a not especially relevant event which took place in the Pacific in February 1945. 

Germany meanwhile would surrender largely as a result of defeat to the Russians in the Battle of Berlin and the suicide of Hitler on April 30. The relevant docs were signed at Rheims on May 7 and formalised in Berlin the following day, which became VE Day for us. 

Though the Russians continue to celebrate on the 9th, owing to some procedural delays both sides kicked up, for Stalin didn’t believe Jodl, the general who’d signed up to unconditional surrender in France, was senior enough to do so — though he’s one of those allowed to stay in the bunker office room to witness the Führer going ape in the Downfall memes — or indeed, that the location was appropriate. 

And Keitel started nit-picking over a single clause, which meant the war would end — and for the Russians and Germans REALLY end — after the ceasefire had formally commenced. 

For London civilians like my mother, the experience of war would wind down both sooner and later. The last V2 rocket struck on March 27, but emergency conditions like the rationing of basic foodstuffs would persist a further nine years. The general election of July 5, 1945 was perhaps the greater watershed moment. 

My uncle’s Division, the ‘desert rats’ (into which his regiment, the 8th Royal Irish Hussars fitted) had accepted Hamburg’s surrender in March and he’d reached the Elbe in his tank at the time of ceasefire, and would later participate in the Berlin victory parade at the end of July. 

My father, then just 18, was also in the army and stationed in Sinai, in charge of a courier company within the Royal Fusiliers. He was not especially demob happy as the news reached him, fully expecting to be redeployed out to Asia. For most British soldiers in active service, the prospect was fairly terrifying. 

In May 1945 hardly anybody had an inkling of those goings on at Los Alamos and so there was no sense of imminent surrender in the Asian theatre as there had been in Europe after the failure of Hitler’s last offensive in the Ardennes during the previous winter. 

The war, it was presumed, might drag on for a while. Elation was tempered.