The Day War Broke Out

by Jacky Hyams

  On that day, some 156,000 American, British and Canadian forces had landed on a 50-mile stretch along the coast in France’s Normandy region. It was one of the largest amphibious military assaults in history. By late August 1944, all of northern France had been liberated from the Nazis. D-Day, or ‘Operation Overlord’ as it was known, would go down in history as the beginning of the end.

  On the afternoon of 30 April 1945, as Russian troops closed in on Berlin, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in a Berlin bunker. The man the newspapers called ‘the world’s chief criminal’ was gone. His death was announced by the BBC in a news flash on the evening of 1 May and in the newspapers the following day.

  ‘His mad dream of a 1,000-year Reich was over at a cost of an estimated thirty million dead, including six million Jews murdered in death and labour camps,’ [reported the Mirror]. The defeated German nation, which had long lost faith in their deranged Führer, was told he was killed fighting and fell for Germany.’ As leading Nazis made an undignified scramble to save their own skins, Hitler’s successor, Grand-Admiral Doenitz, ordered the military struggle to continue, but surrender was imminent.

  Effectively, the British Army’s war in Europe was over at that point. But for several more days, the war on other fronts dragged painfully slowly to its official ending (and the war against the Japanese in the Far East would drag on until August). For everyone, the tension was nigh unbearable, as Joan Strange in Worthing recorded in her diary.

  29 APRIL

  Rumours of surrenders are still rife. Mussolini has been tried and rumoured shot today. Hitler is supposed to be dying from cerebral haemorrhage. Berlin is nothing but a mass of rubble but terrible fighting continues there. Today’s paper says the only purpose of resistance has been to gratify the nihilism of the Nazi chiefs, anxious that, if they must perish, their country shall perish with them.

  1 MAY

  It is reported that Count Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross, has seen Himmler again about the surrender plans but nothing definite has been disclosed. The papers are full of Mussolini’s death. He was strung up, head downwards, with his mistress on meat hooks in a petrol station – it all sounds medieval. [Italy, under Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, had allied itself with Hitler in 1936 and entered the Second World War on Germany’s side in June 1940. After Mussolini was ousted in July 1943, Italy signed an unconditional surrender with the Allies in September 1943; Mussolini was executed by Italian partisans on 28 April 1945. The German forces in Italy, however, continued to fight on, forcing the Allies to undertake a succession of hard battles to liberate the country.]

  2 MAY

  The news is most extraordinary: the Nazi radio late last night announced the death of Hitler, saying, ‘He died a hero’s death at his post in Berlin.’ What can we make of this? Admiral Doenitz takes his place, Himmler seems to have vanished, likewise Goering, Goebbels and von Ribbentrop. [The four principal Nazi leaders were all dead within two years: Hitler, Himmler, Goering and Goebbels committed suicide and von Ribbentrop, sentenced to death at Nuremburg in 1946, was hanged in October 1946.]

  Mr Churchill has announced that all resistance in Italy has ended – a magnificent achievement. At 10.30, our wireless was interrupted to tell us that Berlin has fallen to the Russians today. What will happen next? British troops have taken Lubeck and cut off the Nazis in Denmark. Civil Defence has come to an end officially today. [The title ARP, used to describe the civilian Air Raid Precaution services which played such a crucial role throughout the bombing of Britain, was changed to Civil Defence Service in 1941.]

  4 MAY

  There is a tremendous feeling of repressed excitement as today may be V-Day! Soldiers and helpers all listened in at 9pm at the YMCA canteen to hear the news that all organised resistance by the Nazis in north-west Europe, Denmark, Holland, Heligoland and the Frisian Islands ceases tomorrow at 8am. At 10.30pm, the BBC broke into the programmes to give a recording of the surrender by the Germans to Field Marshal Montgomery at 6.20pm. According to today’s paper, the Nazis are trying a ‘Dunkirk’ and some ships and U-boats are endeavouring to get to Norway but are being harried by the RAF. Queen Wilhelmina is in Holland and there are great scenes of rejoicing already in Holland and Denmark tonight.

  5 MAY

  Not quite VE Day yet! London is in a terrific state of excitement and expects the announcement at any minute. Fighting continues still in the South, but Russians and Americans are rushing ahead into Czechoslovakia. Sweden seems to think that the Nazis will capitulate in Norway very soon. The seventy-nine passenger stations in the tube systems of London Transport, which have been used as airraid shelters ever since the first London raids in 1940, will be closed as shelters after tomorrow.

  At 2.41am in the early hours of 7 May, at a schoolhouse in Reims, France that served as Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, General Alfred Jodl signed the unconditional surrender of all German land, sea and air forces, wherever they might be. General Walter Bedell Smith, Chief of Staff to the Allied Supreme Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, signed on behalf of the Allies, and the document was witnessed by generals from France and the Soviet Union. The surrender was to come into effect at 59 minutes to midnight (11:01pm) on 8 May.

  ‘Field Marshal Montgomery and his men have beaten the Hun to his knees along the whole of their front and have written “finis” to the German Reich,’ trumpeted the Daily Mirror, a declaration which, perhaps understandably, rather overlooked the part played by US and Soviet Russian forces.

  In London, where end-of-war excitement was reaching fever pitch, a public announcement of war’s end should have been made at 6pm on 7 May. Churchill had alerted the War Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff (respectively, the political and military bodies with overall responsibility for the war effort) to be ready to go with him to Buckingham Palace. There, he planned to make the official announcement. But the Soviet leader Stalin had other ideas: he insisted that the official surrender of German forces on the Eastern Front must take place in Russian-occupied Berlin with his foremost commander, Marshal Zhukov, as the senior Allied signatory to this and the surrender agreed in Reims. VE Day, Stalin insisted, could not be announced until this happened on 8 May. He wanted the announcement of the end of the war to take place on 9 May, at 7am Moscow time.

  Throughout 7 May, frantic communications took place between London, Moscow and Washington. At one stage Churchill rang the Supreme Allied Commander in Western Europe, General Eisenhower, eight times.

  Nothing had been agreed about the official announcement when the newly appointed German Foreign Minister threw a giant spanner into the works. Broadcasting from Flensburg in the small area of northern German controlled by the provisional government of Admiral Doenitz, Count Schwerin von Krosigk said that German forces had surrendered and the war was officially over. The broadcast was flashed across the globe and reported, without comment, on BBC News at 3pm on 7 May. Ironically, as the victors argued about the timing of the announcement, it was the defeated who were officially telling the world that the war in Europe had ended.

  Then the Paris Bureau Chief of the Associated Press news agency, Edward Kennedy, who, along with sixteen other journalists, had witnessed the historic signing of the surrender at Reims, but had been told to refrain from reporting the news so that Stalin could hold a ceremony in Berlin, decided to defy the news embargo. Via the AP bureau in London, he too reported the surrender, the first Allied journalist to break the story. On the streets of New York, the victory celebrations started as soon as the news broke.

  Behind the scenes, however, the day’s frantic negotiations between the Allies had reached a stalemate: the Americans were willing to comply with Stalin’s request, Churchill was not.

  Already that evening, the streets of Central London were thronged with thousands of people impatiently waiting for the official news, ready to celebrate, many dismayed and grumbling at the delay to the announcement, with good reason.

  The Ministry of Food
had ruled that no extra food would be released to restaurants and the 5-shilling limit on the price of a meal would not be waived. Leading brewers were promising nothing: supplies were low, they said. An extension of pub hours was unlikely. It seemed like a mean-spirited prelude to the celebration millions had dreamed of.

  Finally, a compromise was reached that evening of 7 May: the people would be told immediately that Tuesday, 8 May would be Victory in Europe day, while on the following day, 9 May, Britain’s ‘Great Russian Ally’ would be celebrating its own VE Day: both days would be public holidays.

  That morning of 8 May, the early editions of the UK papers headlined the news everyone had been waiting for: ‘IT’S ALL OVER!’ stated the Daily Mail. ‘VE-DAY! IT’S OVER IN THE WEST,’ said the Mirror, in a rare reference to the continuing war in the Far East. A report from one of its journalists in London’s Piccadilly Circus at just after midnight enthused:

  We are all going nuts! We are dancing the conga and the jig and ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’. We are singing and whistling and blowing paper trumpets. The idea is to make a noise. Gangs of girls and soldiers of all the Allied nations are waving rattles and shouting and climbing lamp-posts, swarming over cars that have become bogged down in this struggling, swirling mass of celebrating Londoners.

  A paper-hatted throng is trying to pull me out of this telephone box now. I hold the door tight, but the din is drowning my voice.

  Mollie Panter-Downes was an English novelist and journalist who wrote a series of vividly perceptive articles about London life in wartime for The New Yorker magazine. Here is her description of London celebrating the end of war in Europe:

  When the day finally came it was like no other day that anyone can remember. It had a flavour of its own, an extemporaneousness which gave it something of the quality of a vast, happy village fête as people wandered about, sat, sang and slept against a slimmer background of trees, grass, flowers and water. Apparently the desire to assist in London’s celebration combusted spontaneously in the bosom of every member of every family, from the smallest babies, with their hair done up in red, white and blue ribbons, to beaming elderly couples who, utterly without self-consciousness, strolled up and down the streets, arm in arm in red, white and blue paper hats. Even the dogs wore immense tricoloured bows. The bells had begun to peal and, after the night’s storm, London was having that perfect, hot, English summer’s day which, one sometimes feels, is to be found only in the imaginations of the lyric poets.

  The girls in their thin, bright dresses heightened the impression that the city had been taken over by an enormous family picnic. The number of extraordinarily pretty young girls, who presumably are hidden on working days inside the factories and government offices, was astonishing. Strolling with their uniformed boys, arms candidly about each other, they provided a constant, gay, simple marginal decoration to the big solemn moments of the day.

  The crowds milled back and forth between the Palace, Westminster, Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus and when they got tired, they simply sat down wherever they happened to be – on the grass, on doorsteps or on the kerb – and watched the other people or spread handkerchiefs over their faces and took a nap. Everybody appeared determined to see the King and Queen and Mr Churchill at least once, and few could have been disappointed.

  By lunchtime, in the Circus, the buses had to slow to a crawl in order to get through the tightly packed, laughing people. A lad in the black beret of the Tank Corps was the first to climb the little pyramidal Angkor Wat of scaffolding and sandbags which was erected early in the war to protect the pedestal of the Eros statue after the figure had been removed to safekeeping. The boy shinned up to the top and took a tiptoe Eros pose, aiming an imaginary bow, while the crowd roared.

  He was followed by a paratrooper in a maroon beret, who, after getting up to the top, reached down and hauled up a young blonde woman in a very tight pair of green slacks. When she got to the top, the Tank Corps soldier promptly grabbed her in his arms and, encouraged by ecstatic cheers from the whole Circus, seemed about to enact the classic role of Eros right on the top of the monument. Nothing came of it, because a moment later, a couple of GIs joined them and before long, the pyramid was covered with boys and girls.

  They sat jammed together in an affectionate mass, swinging their legs over the sides, wearing each other’s uniform caps and calling down wisecracks to the crowd.

  ‘My God,’ someone said, ‘think of a flying bomb coming down on this!’ When a firecracker went off, a hawker with a tray of tin brooches of Monty’s [Field Marshal Montgomery’s] head happily yelled that comforting, sometimes fallacious phrase of the Blitz nights, ‘All right, mates, it’s one of ours!’

  All day long, the deadly past was for most people only just under the surface of the beautiful, safe present, so much so that the Government decided against sounding the sirens in a triumphant ‘all clear’ for fear that the noise would revive too many painful memories.

  For the same reason, there were no salutes of guns – only the pealing of the bells and the whistles of tugs on the Thames sounding the doot, doot, doot, doooot of the ‘V’ [for victory; 3 short, 1 long in Morse code] and the roar of the planes, which swooped back and forth over the city, dropping red and green signals toward the blur of smiling, upturned faces.

  It was without any doubt, Churchill’s day. Thousands of King George’s subjects wedged themselves in front of the Palace throughout the day, chanting ceaselessly, ‘We want the King’ and cheering themselves hoarse when he and the Queen and their daughters appeared, but when the crowd saw Churchill, there was a deep, full-throated, almost reverent roar. He was at the head of a procession of Members of Parliament, walking back to the House of Commons from the traditional St Margaret’s Thanksgiving Service [St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, on Parliament Square, was until 1972 the Anglican parish church of the House of Commons]. Instantly, he was surrounded by people – people running, standing on tiptoe, holding up babies so that they could be told later they had seen him and shouting affectionately the absurd little nurserymaid name ‘Winnie, Winnie!’ One or two happily sozzled, very old and incredibly dirty Cockneys who had been engaged in a slow, shuffling dance, like a couple of Shakespearean clowns, bellowed, ‘That’s ’im, that’s ’is little old lovely bald ’ead!’ American sailors and laughing girls formed a conga line down the middle of Piccadilly and Cockneys linked arms in the Lambeth Walk.

  It was a day and night of no fixed plan and no organised merriment. Each group danced its own dance, sang its own song, and went on its own way as the spirit moved it. The most tolerant, self-effacing people in London on VE Day were the police, who simply stood by, smiling benignly, while soldiers swung by one arm from lamp standards and laughing groups tore down hoardings to build the evening’s bonfires. The young servicemen and women who swung arm in arm down the middle of every street, singing and swarming over the few cars rash enough to come out, were simply happy with an immense holiday happiness. They were the liberated people who, like their counterparts in every celebrating capital that night, were young enough to outlive the past and to look forward to an unspoilt future.

  Their gaiety was very moving.

  There were, of course, street parties all over the country on VE Day, though many more took place over the succeeding weeks. Rationing made it difficult but, nonetheless, women managed somehow to get together the sandwiches, cakes, trifles, biscuits and lemonade to give the children a good time for their Victory tea party.

  Frank Mee was working as an apprentice at a large engineering firm in Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham, on VE Day. He was sixteen years old.

  We all knew it was coming. A couple of the men I worked with had been in the Army after D-Day, wounded, sent home and then invalided out, so we got some idea of what it was like for those still fighting. Then the news came that we’d be getting a day off work for the official VE Day, 8 May.

  Mother, as did many people, dived into her War Stock, the secret supply
put away for what was to come but never did. The tins of fruit, Carnation milk, a large tin of Del Monte peaches, goodies that had come in wooden boxes every six months or so from family in New Zealand. Dad opened the garage doors and set out tables and chairs from the loft above the stables; people congregated, bringing food, cake and goodies, and we had an ad-hoc street party.

  Later, all us young ones congregated on Norton Green and watched the older ones as hidden bottles of drink came from nowhere and were consumed. Long-hidden bottles of sherry appeared and Green Goddess cocktail, a horrible concoction my mother loved and had hidden for years. There was a happy air about it all as if we were all suddenly able to fly, more food was eaten and us youngsters set off walking into town to go dancing. The dance hall had opened its doors. It was free, although trying to dance was impossible – it was so riotous with flags draped around the hall and lights full on. So, we set off back home, dancing, singing and kissing everyone we met – well, I drew the line at hairy-faced sailors – but a few grans got kissed. Back onto the Green and we found a huge bonfire at the top of Beaconsfield Street with crowds around it.

  The party went on until well into the night. Someone had put a couple of sacks of potatoes into the ashes of the fire. Others brought butter and cheese for the potatoes and there seemed to be gallons of drink. A lot of the older folk, for whom this was the second Victory Day in just less than thirty years, let their hair down. Sometime around one in the morning, with the bonfire down to embers and a girl in my arms who was not exactly saying: ‘Don’t do that!’, I thought my life was made until a stentorian voice yelling, ‘Come on, Mary! Time for bed!’ interrupted my dreams. Oh well, it was probably for the best. And so the day ended. We all knew of the girl down the road who was sent away to have her baby – she swore blind she’d only been kissing. We boys still only guessed at the mechanics of all that kind of thing.