The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

by Rick Atkinson

  This hasty pudding would have to serve. Pared to 234 words in five paragraphs, the document was rushed to the typing pool, which in short order produced eight copies of the “Act of Military Surrender,” each bound in a plain gray cover.

  At two A.M. on Monday, May 7, seventeen reporters and photographers were herded up a stone stairway and through a narrow corridor to the second-floor SHAEF war room. Thirty feet square and used in antebellum days for table tennis and chess by students attending the collège, the warm, fusty room contained fifteen unpadded chairs and a heavy oak table. Huge maps hung like tapestries on the faded blue walls, displaying the disposition of Allied armies and airfields from the Arctic Circle to the Aegean Sea. Charts showed weather conditions, SHAEF casualties, and the number of German prisoners, now in seven figures.

  “Get ready, gentleman, they’re coming.”

  A hissing bank of klieg lights flickered to life. Jodl and Friedeburg walked to the table, erect and glassy-eyed. “The effect of make-believe was, if anything, heightened by the arrival in the room of the German uniforms,” one witness reported. Photographers scuttled about, bent double. The eleven-man Allied delegation followed, including Generals Spaatz and Strong, a Soviet major general, and Beetle Smith. Each took his seat behind a name plate printed on a cardboard strip. Smith looked “ghastly, ill, and exhausted,” wrote Osmar White from a perch in the press gallery. In his office down the hall, Eisenhower feigned Olympian detachment, pacing and smoking.

  Strong laid a copy of the surrender document before Jodl. Only the click of camera shutters and a scratching of pen nibs broke the silence. When Smith and others had finished countersigning each sheet, Jodl stood, leaning forward slightly with his fingertips pressed against the tabletop. “I want to say a word,” he told Smith in English, then added, in German with Strong translating, “The German people and the German armed forces are, for better or worse, delivered into the victors’ hands.… In this hour I can only express the hope that the victor will treat them with generosity.”

  The surrender ceremony had lasted ten minutes. Smith and Strong led Jodl, his cheeks streaked with tears, to Eisenhower’s office. They found the supreme commander seated behind a desk upon which miniature flags of the Allied nations were displayed. Purple circles rimmed his eyes and his jowls sagged. Jodl bowed.

  “Do you understand the terms of the document of surrender you have just signed?” Eisenhower asked.

  “Ja. Ja.”

  “You will officially and personally be held responsible if the terms of the surrender are violated. That is all.”

  Jodl saluted, then executed a smart about-face and withdrew under the supreme commander’s cold gaze for an eventual appointment with the hangman.

  Thus was peace made in Europe. “I suppose this calls for a bottle of champagne,” Eisenhower said, managing a grin. A cork popped to feeble cheers. Photographers appeared, and a newsreel crew. At Smith’s suggestion, various staff officers attempted to compose a suitable cable telling the Charlie-Charlies that the war was over.

  As each draft grew more grandiloquent, the supreme commander thanked his lieutenants and then dictated the message himself: “The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 0241, local time, May 7, 1945. Eisenhower.”

  * * *

  The sharp odors of soap and antiseptic still lingered in the Hotel Fürstenhof near Kassel, where until recently a military hospital had occupied the inn. A week earlier the 12th Army Group headquarters had moved here from Wiesbaden; Omar Bradley occupied a second-floor corner room, sleeping with the window open and a bone-handled .38-caliber pistol by his pillow. At 4:45 A.M. on Monday, a jangling telephone roused him from a deep slumber. “Brad?” Eisenhower’s voice bawled from the receiver. “Brad, it’s all over.” A cease-fire would be imposed immediately, although not until 11:01 P.M. on Wednesday would the surrender officially take hold, allowing time to notify German garrisons in Norway and crews aboard U-boats across the Atlantic.

  Bradley climbed from the bed, his hair deranged in gray wisps. Slipping into his frayed West Point bathrobe, he telephoned his army commanders: Hodges in Weimar, Patton in Regensburg, Simpson in Braunschweig, Gerow in Bonn. “Stop them in place,” Bradley said. “No sense in taking casualties.” He dressed and ambled downstairs to breakfast, a canvas map case under his arm. “Now our troubles really begin,” he told a staff officer. “Everyone will want to start for home immediately.” Opening his map board, he smoothed the tiny flags symbolizing each of the forty-three American divisions under his command, arrayed across a 640-mile front. Clutching a grease pencil, Bradley wrote his final entry on the map—“D+335”—then threw open the black-out curtains to gaze on the sun-splashed world outside.

  “For the first time in eleven months, there is no contact with the enemy,” the First Army intelligence log noted in Weimar. At 8:15 Monday morning, seventy miles west of Prague, an order to “cease all forward movement” reached the 1st Division, which, since landing in Algeria thirty months earlier, had dispensed 21,000 Purple Hearts. “It’s about goddamn time,” one GI remarked. At his command post in a former German barracks in Regensburg, Patton listened to staff officers describe the disposition of the half-million men under his command. Peace still held little appeal for him. To an aide he mused, “Wonder what the rivers in Japan are like? See if you can get some terrain maps of Japan.” Rising to his feet, with Willie the white bull terrier on his heels, he strode from the command post and down the barracks steps, snapping his fingers.

  As word spread of the German surrender, some rambunctious soldiers celebrated with honking horns or what one officer called “mad, dangerous” gunfire; “.30- and .45-calibers coming back down like a hailstorm,” a GI near Salzburg reported. General Gavin advised his diary, “This is it. After two years. One doesn’t know whether to cry or cheer or just simply get drunk.” The 3rd Armored Division—which had hoarded champagne since crossing the Rhine for precisely this moment—drank a toast to Eisenhower, their victorious commander.

  Yet many felt subdued—“curiously flat,” in Moorehead’s phrase. Elation seemed misplaced. So many were gone, so many broken. “I should be completely joyous on this occasion. As it is, it comes more as an anticlimax,” a soldier wrote his family. “I remember the many who marched with me, and who also loved life but lost it and cannot celebrate with us today.” An eerie, profound silence fell across much of the battlefield, and even those astonished to have survived felt too weary, or numb, or haunted for hosannas. “I am in a let-down mood,” Devers confessed. In Thuringia, the correspondent W. C. Heinz watched soldiers wander aimlessly among the lilacs and blossoming apple trees, as if baffled to find themselves in a land so benign and beautiful. “We did not know how to kill time,” Heinz wrote.

  For the first time in nearly six years, the sun set on a Europe without front lines, a Europe at peace. “Lights scintillated—truck lights, jeep lights, tent lights, flashlights, building lights, farmhouse lights,” wrote a major in the 29th Division. “Everything lit up.” Night stole over the Continent, creeping west from the Vistula to the Oder, and then to the Elbe and the Rhine and the Seine. Darkness enfolded a thousand battlefields, at Remagen and St.-Vith, Arnhem and St.-Lô, Caen and Omaha Beach. Darkness fell, and the lights came on again.

  EPILOGUE

  THE Daily Mail in London reported that a dozen elderly men stood for hours on Monday, May 7, “with ropes in their hands and hope in their hearts, waiting to send the bells of St. Paul’s clanging in the paean of triumph.” In vain they stood: no paean clanged, nary a bell pealed. Moscow had objected to proclaiming the war’s end until a proper capitulation of German forces on the Eastern Front was signed in Berlin, validating the surrender improvised by SHAEF. The war in Europe was over, yet not quite finished.

  No matter that word of the Reims ceremony had leaked. A German radio broadcast from Flensburg on Monday announced the end, and an Associated Press reporter who had witnessed the signing disobeyed Eisenhower’s news embargo by se
nding word to New York, where ticker tape soon fluttered. “It will seem that it is only the governments who do not know,” Churchill cabled Stalin at 4:30 P.M. Monday.

  But Stalin remained adamant. For years the Nazis had claimed that the German army in World War I was never defeated, in part because the armistice had been signed on French soil; no such canard would be tolerated this time. Churchill and Truman reluctantly agreed to withhold confirmation of the surrender. V-E Day—victory in Europe—would not become official until Tuesday, May 8. Eisenhower dispatched a SHAEF delegation to meet the Soviets at a former German military engineering school in Karlshorst, ten miles southeast of central Berlin. Here the Germans would surrender, again, after nine hours of noisy haggling and more opéra bouffe. General de Lattre, representing France, bitterly decried the absence of a French flag from among the victorious national colors arrayed in the conference hall. He objected further when a tricolor hurriedly sewn by a Russian tailor—using cloth from a Nazi banner, a bedsheet, and denim overalls—turned out Dutch, with the red, white, and blue stripes stacked horizontally rather than aligned vertically. A bemused Harry Butcher wrote from Karlshorst, “It is much easier to start a war than to stop one.”

  Notwithstanding a BBC announcement at six P.M. on Monday that V-E Day must await the morrow, a boisterous, expectant throng jammed Piccadilly and Trafalgar Square. “V-E Day may be tomorrow,” the Daily Mail declared, “but the war is over tonight.” Bonfires glazed the clouds with an orange tint that reminded some of the 1940 Blitz. Yet as word of the postponement spread, the festive spirit fizzled. “Move along,” a policeman ordered. “It’s all off.”

  In Paris, a celebration that began Monday night would run riot until midday Thursday. Jeeps packed with GIs and comely French women rushed about as crowds shouted, “Salut! Vive les États Unis! American Army, heep heep, whoo-ray!” Snaking throngs danced down the Champs-Élysées as sirens sounded a final all clear and church bells rang across the city. A witness in Avenue Kléber reported mobs of “people going from anywhere to anywhere.” So many filled the Place de la Concorde that American MPs struggled to open a corridor into the U.S. embassy; thousands joined the Yanks in singing, or at least humming, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” For the first time since the war began, lights illuminated the Arc de Triomphe, the Opéra, and other grand landmarks. The Garde Républicaine trotted on horseback from the Madeleine in their plumed dragoon helmets, and at least one laughing girl seemed to share every saddle. French gunners unlimbered a howitzer before the palace in Versailles to fire salutes down the Avenue de Paris.

  The rest of the world soon caught the celebratory spirit. A crowd estimated at five thousand gathered before the U.S. embassy near Red Square in Moscow to huzzah the American ally; Yanks spotted in the street were playfully tossed into the air. Half a million celebrants filled Times Square, and enormous headlines splashed across page one of The New York Times proclaimed, “The War in Europe Is Ended! Surrender Is Unconditional; V-E Will Be Proclaimed Today.” In Washington, lights bathed the Capitol dome for the first time since December 1941, although streets remained quiet, perhaps because the battle for Okinawa had become a cave-by-cave bloodbath. Federal bureaucrats were ordered to report to work as usual on Tuesday, lest peacetime lollygagging take root. “This is a solemn but glorious hour,” Truman told the nation. “We must work to finish the war. Our victory is only half won. The West is free, but the East is still in bondage to the treacherous Japanese.”

  V-E Day dawned in London with what one resident called “intense Wagnerian rain” and thunder so violent that many woke fearing a return of German bombers. By midmorning the storm had rolled off, the sun broke through, and those St. Paul’s bell-ringers leaned into their work. British lasses with cornflowers and poppies in their hair swarmed about, wrote Mollie Panter-Downes in The New Yorker, “like flocks of twittering, gaily plumaged cockney birds.” Tugs on the Thames tooted a Morse “V,” and vendors peddled tin brooches of Montgomery’s bereted head in silhouette. Buglers blew “cease fire” while students in Green Park clapped ash can lids like cymbals. Crates of whiskey and gin, labeled “Not to Be Sold Until Victory Night,” were manhandled into hundreds of pubs, where many an elbow was bent prematurely. The Savoy added La Tasse de Consommé Niçoise de la Victoire to the menu, along with Le Médaillon du Soldat. Crowds outside Buckingham Palace chanted, “We want the king!” and the king they got, along with the queen and two princesses, who appeared waving from a balcony six times during the day. To the strains of “Rule, Britannia!,” former Home Guardsmen set fire to a Hitler effigy.

  Early in the afternoon Churchill left 10 Downing Street by the garden gate. Crowds cheered him to the echo as he rode in an open car from Horse Guards Parade to the House of Commons. There the prime minister read the surrender announcement to a standing ovation before leading a procession of House members on foot to the twelfth-century St. Margaret’s church, on the grounds of Westminster Abbey, for a service of thanksgiving. Thence he was driven by car to Buckingham Palace for tea, through adulatory throngs that bayed, “Winnie! Winnie!” “We all roared ourselves hoarse,” the playwright Noël Coward told his diary after standing outside the palace. “I suppose this is the greatest day in our history.” Churchill sent an aide to fetch a cigar, which he fired with a flourish before the ecstatic crowd. “I must put one on for them,” he confided. “They expect it.”

  Searchlights at dusk picked out St. Paul’s dome and cross, likened by one witness to “a marvelous piece of jewelry invented by a magician.” Big Ben’s round face glowed with lunar brilliance. More bonfires jumped up in Green Park, fueled with tree branches and the odd bench. As the day faded in the west, Churchill appeared on the Ministry of Health balcony to peer down at the seething crowd spilling across Whitehall. “This is your hour,” he told them, flashing his stubby fingers in the trademark V. “We were the first, in this ancient land, to draw the sword against tyranny.” Chandelier flares floated overhead, dripping light, and the throng linked arms in deliverance to sing Elgar’s “Land of Hope and Glory,” weeping together in sorrow and in joy, for all that was lost and all that had been won.

  * * *

  By the time Japan surrendered on September 2, 1945, the Second World War had lasted six years and a day, ensnaring almost sixty nations, plus sundry colonial and imperial territories. Sixty million had died in those six years, including nearly 10 million in Germany and Japan, and more than twice that number in the Soviet Union—roughly 26 million, one-third of them soldiers. To describe this “great and terrible epoch,” as George Marshall called it, new words would be required, like “genocide”; and old words would assume new usages: “Holocaust.” The war “was a savage, insensate affair, barely conceivable to the well-conducted imagination,” wrote Lieutenant Paul Fussell. “The real war was tragic and ironic, beyond the power of any literary or philosophic analysis to suggest.” To one victim, Ernie Pyle, this global conflagration had been simply “an unmitigated misfortune.”

  For the Allies, some solace could be derived from complete victory over a foe of unexampled iniquity. An existential struggle had been settled so decisively that Field Marshal Brooke, among many, would conclude “that there is a God all-powerful looking after the destiny of the world.” In Europe, the Western Allies in 338 days had advanced more than seven hundred miles, liberated oppressed peoples by the tens of millions, seized a hundred thousand square miles of Germany and Austria, captured more than four million prisoners, and killed or badly wounded an estimated one million enemy soldiers. While bleeding far less than the Soviets, the West at war’s end had retained the most productive and economically vital quadrants of the Continent.

  A British military maxim held that “he who has not fought the Germans does not know war.” Now the Americans, Soviets, and others also knew war all too well. The cohesion and internal coherence of the Allied coalition had assured victory: the better alliance had won. Certainly it was possible to look at Allied war-making on any given day
and feel heartsick at the missed opportunities and purblind personalities and wretched wastage, to wonder why the ranks could not be braver or at least cleverer, smarter or at least shrewder, prescient or at least intuitive. Yet despite its foibles, the Allied way of war won through, with systems that were, as the historian Richard Overy would write, “centralized, unified, and coordinated,” quite unlike Axis systems.

  In contrast to the Axis autocracy, Allied leadership included checks and balances to temper arbitrary willfulness and personal misjudgment. The battlefield had offered a proving ground upon which demonstrated competence and equanimity could flourish; as usual, modern war also rewarded ingenuity, collaboration, organizational acumen, and luck, that trait most cherished by Napoléon in his generals. The Anglo-American confederation in particular, for all the high-strung melodrama, could be seen in retrospect to effect a strategic symbiosis: British prudence in 1942 and 1943, eventually yielding to American audacity in 1944 and 1945, had brought victories in the Mediterranean that proved a necessary prelude to the decisive campaign that began at Normandy. The war here had indeed formed a triptych, with the campaigns in North Africa, Italy, and western Europe each providing a panel to fashion the whole. Churchill composed his own aphorism, much quoted: “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.”

  “Our resolution to preserve civilization must become more implacable,” an American observer had written in 1939. “Our courage must mount.” Resolution and courage both proved equal to the cause, as did more material contributions. The Americans had provided more than two-thirds of Eisenhower’s 91 divisions, and half of the Allies’ 28,000 combat aircraft. Thirteen U.S. divisions in Europe suffered at least 100 percent casualties— 5 more exceeded 200 percent—yet American combat power remained largely undimmed to the end. The entire war had cost U.S. taxpayers $296 billion—roughly $4 trillion in 2012 dollars. To help underwrite a military budget that increased 8,000 percent, Roosevelt had expanded the number of those taxpayers from 4 million to 42 million. The armed forces had grown 3,500 percent while building 3,000 overseas bases and depots, and shipping 4.5 tons of matériel abroad for each soldier deployed, plus another ton each month to sustain him. “I felt,” one Frenchman wrote in watching the Yanks make war, “as if the Americans were digging the Panama Canal right through the German army.”