Kirk Warner on remembering “Victory in Europe, 80 years ago”
Did you realize World War II in Europe ended 80 years ago today? My bet is that millions of Americans don’t. Although May 8th is traditionally considered Victory in Europe or V-E Day, the actual final surrender of German forces took place at Reims on May 7, 1945.
My friend Kirk Warner, a 33-year Army veteran (including lengthy service as a judge advocate) who is now a litigator with Smith Anderson, gathered some thoughts for us to contemplate on this 80th anniversary of Nazi capitulation.
Kirk wants it to be clear that the essay below is “gleaned and adapted” from Rick Atkinson’s magnificent book, “The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945″ (pp. 615-641). His notes that his summary includes “portions cited verbatim” from the work which is volume three of Atkinson’s Liberation Trilogy that includes An Army at Dawn and The Day of Battle.
Why is May 8th considered V-E Day?
The National Archives explains:
After the signing of the Reims accord, Soviet chief of staff Gen. Alexei Antonov expressed concern to SHAEF that the continued fighting in the east between Germany and the Soviet Union made the Reims surrender look like a separate peace. The Soviet command wanted the Act of Military Surrender, with certain additions and alterations, to be signed at Berlin. To the Soviets, the documents signed at Berlin on May 8, 1945, represented the official, legal surrender of the Third Reich. But the Berlin document had few significant changes from the one signed a day earlier at Reims.
Remembering the sacrifices
As Kirk asks us to do, let’s take a “moment to remember the sacrifices made by our great country and its citizens to achieve this victory” that was so vital to all humankind. Let’s also pray that the current war in Europe — indeed, war everywhere — comes to as just an ending.
Victory in Europe, 80 years ago.
Jodl signing surrender documents – Wikipedia
The unconditional surrender lasted ten minutes. At 2:41 A.M. on Monday, May 7, 1945, on the second floor of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces war room in Reims, France, German Army Field Marshall Jodl (with the authorization of Grand Admiral Donitz who succeeded Adolf Hitler as head of state by his last political testament) signed the five paragraph “Act of Military Surrender.”
The Supreme Allied Commander sent the following message reporting that the war in Europe was now over:
“The mission of the Allied force was fulfilled at 0241, local time, May 7, 1945, Eisenhower.”
The world war was over at least in Europe. For the first time in nearly six years, the sun set on a Europe without front lines, a Europe in peace. Darkness fell, and the lights came on again. In Washington, lights bathed the Capitol dome for the first time since December 1941, although the streets remained quiet as 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.
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 a large array of colonial and imperial territories. Sixty million had died in those six years, including 10 million in Germany and Japan and more than 26 million in Russia, one-third of them soldiers.
New words like “genocide” and old words like holocaust” would assume new usages. The war “was a savage, insensate affair, barely conceivable to the well-conducted imagination.” For the Allies, some solace could be derived from “complete victory over a foe of unexampled iniquity.
“Act of Military Surrender”
National Archives
American soldiers bore the brunt for the Western armies in the climatic year of the war: 587,000 U.S. casualties in western Europe included 135,576 dead, almost half of the U.S. total worldwide. The Americans including many of our own fathers, uncles, and grandfathers, 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 armed forces totaling more than 16 million troops had grown 3,500 percent while building 3,000 overseas bases and depots.
By 1945, the United States had built two-thirds of all ships afloat and was making half of all manufactured goods in the world. This is the work of the Greatest Generation.
Nuremberg Trials
Source: National World War II Museum
In Room 600 of the Nuremberg courthouse, the most celebrated of all war-crimes tribunals would hear testimony from 360 witnesses and review 200,000 affidavits.
As President of the American Bar Association, our law firm founder Willis Smith was an observer at these trials. Of two dozen major Nazi defendants, ten would be hanged in October 1946, from gallows built in a jail gymnasium. From 1945 to 1948, American military tribunals tried 1,672 Germans—military officers, politicians, diplomats, industrialists, physicians, jurists—in 489 trials.
Source: DoD
Army Chief of Staff George Marshall replied to Eisenhower’s simple “mission complete” report:
“You have completed your mission with the greatest victory in the history of warfare…You have made history, great history for the good of all mankind, and you have stood for all we hope for and admire…”
The mission was complete in Europe for the good of all mankind, 80 years ago. Please take a moment to remember the sacrifices made by our great country and its citizens to achieve victory.
