The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (113 page)

EPILOGUE

T
HE
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 sending 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.”

What Churchill called the American “prodigy of organization” had shipped 18 million tons of war stuff to Europe, equivalent to the cargo in 3,600 Liberty ships or 181,000 rail cars: the kit ranged from 800,000 military vehicles to footwear in sizes 2A to 22EEE. U.S. munitions plants had turned out 40 billion rounds of small arms ammunition and 56 million grenades. From D-Day to V-E Day, GIs fired 500 million machine-gun bullets and 23 million artillery rounds. “I’m letting the American taxpayer take this hill,” one prodigal gunner declared, and no one disagreed. By 1945, the United States had built two-thirds of all ships afloat and was making half of all manufactured goods in the world, including nearly half of all armaments. The enemy was crushed by logistical brilliance, firepower, mobility, mechanical aptitude, and an economic juggernaut that produced much, much more of nearly everything than Germany could—bombers, bombs, fighters, transport planes, mortars, machine guns, trucks—yet the war absorbed barely one-third of the American gross domestic product, a smaller proportion than that of any major belligerent. A German prisoner complained, “Warfare like yours is easy.”

There was nothing easy about it, of course. But the United States emerged from World War II with extraordinary advantages that would ensure prosperity for decades: an intact, thriving industrial base; a population relatively unscarred by war; cheap energy; two-thirds of the world’s gold supply; and great optimism. As the major power in western Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific, possessing both atomic weapons and a Navy and Air Force of unequaled might, the United States was ready to exploit what the historian H. P. Willmott described as “the end of the period of European supremacy in the world that had existed for four centuries.” If the war had dispelled American isolationism, it also encouraged American exceptionalism, as well as a penchant for military solutions and a self-regard that led some to label their epoch “the American century.” “Power,” as John Adams had written, “always thinks it has a great soul.”

The war was a potent catalyst for social change across the republic. New technologies—jets, computers, ballistic missiles, penicillin—soon spurred vibrant new industries, which in turn encouraged the migration of black workers from south to north, and of all peoples to the emerging west. The GI Bill put millions of soldiers into college classrooms, spurring unprecedented social mobility. Nineteen million American women had entered the workplace by war’s end; although they quickly reverted to traditional antebellum roles—the percentage working in 1947 was hardly higher than it had been in 1940—that genie would not remain back in the bottle forever. The modest experiment in racially integrating infantry battalions ended when the war did, despite nearly universal agreement that black riflemen had performed ably and in harmony with their white comrades. A presidential order in 1948 would be required to desegregate the military, and much more than that would be needed to reverse three centuries of racial oppression in America.