Every man and every woman

Let’s switch from one unprecedented 20^th Century global conflagration to another by moving on from the infancy of unrestricted submarine warfare by the Second Reich to the ignominious end of the Third.

At 0241 local time on Monday 7 May 1945, General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) signed the unconditional surrender document at Supreme Allied Command HQ in Reims, France, effectively ending the war in Europe. With Adolf Hitler dead by suicide and his top lieutenants either dead or in flight, with Germany in ruins, and with no resources (much less the long-promised “super weapons” that would save the master race), they were running out of options.

Hitler’s heirs had been equivocating for a few days with the Western Allies over the unconditional surrender requirement, largely to delay the inevitable so as allow tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians to flee westward and not be in Soviet-held territory at the moment that everything was officially frozen. They were also laboring under the pipe dream that they could somehow convince the Anglo-Americans to team up with them and drive eastward to take on their natural and mutual enemy, the Soviet Union.

Because the representatives were all old-school military, they expected to treat soldier-to-soldier with the Allies, with all courtesy attendant upon their rank. I don’t know whether they’d thought that clean uniforms would somehow cause SHAEF command to disassociate them from (among other things) the previously unimaginable horrors of places like Dachau, Bergen-Belsen or Mauthausen. But Eisenhower had visited Ordruf, part of the Buchenwald installation, and he refused to set eyes on Jodl and his entourage until after they’d signed the unconditional surrender.

Whereupon he curtly informed Jodl, "You will, officially and personally, be held responsible if the terms of this surrender are violated, including its provisions for German commanders to appear in Berlin at the moment set by the Russian high command to accomplish formal surrender to that government. That is all."

He refused to salute the Germans.

(They were rather like the German representatives to the Versailles Conference of 1919, who—by the time they arrived—had convinced themselves that Germany was no more culpable for the outbreak of war than everyone else, that the other nations at the conference recognized that, and that they would therefore be engaged in a somewhat technical exercise in diplomat-speak for a while, after which everything would return to normal. It never ceases to astonish me how delusional people can be, or how predictable their subsequent disastrous mistakes can therefore be.)

Later that day, German Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Soviet Marshal Georgi Zhukov and American, British and French representatives signed an identical document in Berlin, drawing a very final line under German resistance.

(And in less than two years, both Jodl and Keitel would be hanged as war criminals at Nuremberg. Their membership in the comrades-in-arms club hadn’t saved them from accountability for their actions while in Nazi service.)

By that time, word was seeping out that Germany was kaput, and—despite Stalin wanting to delay the announcement—Churchill proclaimed the surrender to a Britain that was already half-delirious with relief and hope, and the Western world partied like it was 1918.

In almost six years of war in Europe, 40 million people had died, half of them civilians. Millions were homeless, hundreds of thousands stateless. Pretty much everyone was somewhere on the hunger-to-starvation spectrum. Entire cities had been razed, libraries and museums burnt and looted. Nations had been bankrupted.

And they still faced the continuing war in the Pacific against Japan.

But for a few hours on 8 May there was literally dancing in the streets; laughing, kissing, comradery. In London, Buckingham Palace was lit by floodlights for the first time since 1939, and two searchlights shone a huge “V” above Saint Paul’s Cathedral. For a city that had spent almost six years in blackout, this was proof that people would once again be able to sleep through the night.

Just not that one.

Eisenhower’s message to his troops included these words:

"Let us have no part in the profitless quarrels in which other en will inevitably engage as to what country, what service, won the European war. Every man, every woman, of every nation here represented has served to the outcome. This we shall remember—and in doing so we shall be revering each honored grave, and be sending comfort to the loved ones of comrades who could not live to see this day.":

There are so few of those men and women left among us, but we can take some time to remember what they did then and in the following years, to rebuild society broken by years of total war. It’s V-E Day, 70 years on. What an amazing anniversary.