After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe (40 page)

It was all very dramatic – a mixture of truth and embellishment – but Stack felt an air of unreality about it all. Göring’s influence within the Reich had waned considerably in the last year of the war. His prisoner now imagined a new role for himself. He carried a letter with him addressed to General Eisenhower, in which he offered his services to help rebuild Germany. Stack said: ‘He seemed to have no idea that he might be regarded as a war criminal.’

In the early afternoon Göring was put on a plane to US Seventh Army headquarters at Augsburg, where he would be formally taken into custody. The Reichsmarschall’s main concern seemed to be what uniform he should wear when he met the Supreme Allied Commander. Stack understood German well but had chosen to always speak to Göring through a sergeant-interpreter. The Reichsmarschall’s last words to him, directed through the interpreter, were: ‘Ask General Stack whether I should wear a pistol or my ceremonial dagger when I appear before General Eisenhower.’ Stack, well aware that Göring would never meet the Allied commander, did not wait for the request to be translated but said abruptly: ‘
Das ist mir ganz wurst
’ – German slang for ‘I don’t give a damn’. The Reichsmarschall looked so startled that he almost awoke from his reverie.

In Britain, VE-Day dawned brilliantly fine. Mollie Panter-Downes, writing for the
New Yorker
magazine, said: ‘When the day finally came, it was like no other that anyone could remember. It had a flavour of its own, an extemporaneousness which gave it something of the quality of a vast, happy village fete … The bells had begun to peal, and after the night’s storm, London was having a perfect, hot, English summer’s day.’

Crowds were gathering in London from lunchtime onwards. By 1.00 p.m. Whitehall was jammed with people. Many more were lining the pavements from Downing Street to the Ministry of Works. Police estimated the crowd to be 50,000 and growing. A bus passing down Whitehall had chalked across it: ‘Hitler missed this bus’.

Harold Nicolson was at the scene:

The whole of Trafalgar square and Whitehall was packed. Somebody had made a display with rosettes, flags, streamers and paper caps – and some of the Guardsmen, in full uniform, were wearing them. And through this cheerful but not exuberant crowd I pushed my way through to the House of Commons. The last few yards were very difficult, as the crowd was packed against the railings … Eventually I made my way through to Palace Yard, and as it was approaching the hour of 3pm I decided to remain there and listen to Winston’s broadcast, which was to be relayed through loudspeakers.

Big Ben struck three and silenced the vast crowd. Over the loudspeakers came the voice of the announcer – ‘the Prime Minister the Right Honourable Winston Churchill’ – and the crowd sent up a mighty cheer. Then Churchill began to speak and for a few brief minutes his was the only voice to be heard in Whitehall:

Yesterday morning at 2.41am at Headquarters the representative of the German High Command and government, General Jodl, signed the act of unconditional surrender of all German land, sea and air forces in Europe to the Allied Expeditionary Force and simultaneously to the Soviet High Command. Today this agreement will be ratified and confirmed in Berlin … Hostilities will end officially at one minute after midnight tonight [Tuesday 8 May], but in the interests of saving lives the ceasefire began yesterday to be sounded all along the front … The German war is therefore at an end.

‘Churchill made a very simple and impressive announcement,’ was one overheard comment. There were loud cheers when he said hostilities would cease from midnight. Churchill also spoke of the imminent liberation of the Channel Islands – and there were more cheers for that. But when he announced ‘The German war is therefore at an end’ there were whoops of joy and all the flags were waved. The broadcast closed with the national anthem and one onlooker said: ‘Young and old sang God Save the King with such fervour that the anthem sounded like a battle hymn.’

A volunteer nurse remembered being at Paddington Green Hospital to hear Churchill’s speech:

As the hands of the ward clock neared the hour, the nursing staff automatically moved apart. For once the ward as silent – the children stopped chattering and not one of them was crying. When the Prime Minister’s voice came on the air I glanced at the women in uniform. Each stood quietly and you could tell by their eyes that their thoughts were far away from the hospital.

The announcement finished. I felt a tug at my hand, which was being held by the small girl in the cot I was standing by. A little face was gazing up at mine. ‘What does it mean?’ she asked anxiously.

‘The war has ended.’ I tried to reassure her with a smile.

‘What does that mean?’

I hesitated for a moment, searching for something she would understand. ‘Well it means you will see lights in the streets and windows lit up.’ She looked dazed and I stumbled on. ‘It means you will never hear a siren again.’

‘Never hear a siren again?’ she repeated in a voice of utter astonishment. And I could see by the look in her eyes that she did not believe one word I had told her.

In the Führer Bunker on 30 April Hitler had gathered his personal staff in the early afternoon and briefly bade them farewell. In a strange echo, shortly after 3.00 p.m. on 8 May, the prime minister’s aides at Downing Street gathered to acclaim him. One recalled:

After his statement, we all rushed downstairs and into the garden to line the path when he came out to go on to the House of Commons, to make his statement there. We clapped and clapped and I think there were tears in his eyes as he beamed and said ‘Thank you all, thank you very much.’ Outside, through the Horse Guards Parade … the whole place was jammed with people waiting to welcome him. They cheered and shouted, ‘Good old Winnie’, and some pressed forward to pat the car and jump on the running board, so that it was almost impossible to move …

At 3.23 p.m. in the House of Commons, Harold Nicolson observed: ‘A slight stir was observed behind the Speaker’s chair and Winston, looking coy and cheerful, came in. The House rose as a man and yelled and waved their order papers. The Prime Minister responded, not with a bow exactly, but with an odd shy jerk of the head and a wide grin. Then he begged to move: “That this House does now attend at the Church of St Margaret, Westminster, to give humble thanks to Almighty God for our deliverance from the threat of German domination”.’

After Churchill’s broadcast there was a lull in the streets outside. War correspondent John Hodson, walking back through Whitehall and Trafalgar Square in bright sunshine, found London ‘gay and densely thronged, but comparatively quiet’:

‘Streets were crowded and looked, from a short distance, impassable. But in the main one could move about. The crowd was lighted-hearted, wearing its red, white and blue rosettes as on a Cup Final Day – and wearing too, a host of comic hats … Girls had climbed on to various clumps of stone and turned themselves into living statues: the lions’ heads in Trafalgar Square were being sat upon …’

The writer John Lehmann, walking across Hyde Park, was struck by the ‘not quite full-hearted nature of the celebrations’. He felt that the crowds were aware that Japan had still to be conquered, at a cost no one could reckon, and were more dazed than excited. ‘It was a sober cheerfulness’, another participant observed, ‘that was very different from Armistice Day in November 1918, when everything went completely crazy.’

At Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park the merchants of doom were excelling themselves. Some were anti-government and anti-Churchill. Others predicted that the seeds of the next war were already sprouting in Poland and the Balkans. But they were a tiny minority. And real excitement did grow as the afternoon went on. Soon after 4.00 p.m. the royal family and Churchill appeared on the balcony at Buckingham Palace to greet everyone. ‘It was without doubt Churchill’s day,’ Mollie Panter-Downes said. ‘When the crowd saw him there was a deep, full-throated, almost reverent roar.’

Then word spread that Churchill would be making a second speech and crowds of people were soon jammed in front of the Ministry of Health building, calling out ‘We want Winnie’. When he appeared, just before 6.00 p.m., complete with a cigar, and gave the ‘V’ sign, another deafening roar went up.

People had waited for hours in the heat, chanting and singing. When Churchill appeared the crowd cheered itself hoarse. When he was eventually able to make himself heard he said: ‘This is your victory. It is the victory of the cause of freedom in every land. In all of living history we have never seen a greater day than this. Everyone, man or woman, has done their best. Everyone has tried. Neither the long years, nor the dangers, nor the fierce attacks of the enemy, have in any way weakened the deep resolve of the British nation. God bless you all.’

Elizabeth Leighton, one of Churchill’s private secretaries, was also on the balcony. She remembered: ‘At the end of his brief speech, Churchill gazed out at the seething mass of people. And then, quite spontaneously, he began to sing
Land of Hope and Glory.
There was a roar of approval – and as one, the crowd joined in with him.’

Mary Blythe, who had travelled up to London for the day, felt an intoxicating sense of happiness that evening. However, there was fragility amid the euphoria. Mollie Panter-Downes observed:

All day long, the deadly past was for most people 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 bells, the whistles of tugs on the Thames 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.

And at 9.00 p.m. King George VI broadcast to the nation. For all who heard it, it was his best speech – delivered with sincerity and conviction:

Today we give thanks to Almighty God for a great deliverance. Speaking from our Empire’s oldest capital city, war-battered, but never for one moment daunted or dismayed, speaking from London, I ask you to join with me in that act of thanksgiving … Let us remember those who will not come back, the men and women in all the services who laid down their lives … Then let us salute in proud gratitude the great host of the living who have brought us to victory … Let us think what has upheld us through nearly six years of suffering and peril … To that, let us on this day of just triumph and proud sorrow turn our thoughts, and then take up our work again, resolved as a people and then to do nothing unworthy of those who died for us and to make such a world as they would have desired, for their children and for ours.

Away from the massed crowds of London, England celebrated in its own way, with towns and villages across the country holding street parties, lighting bonfires, passing round beer and sandwiches. William Paton remembered the festivities in Stoneyburn in West Lothian, Scotland:

I heard Prime Minister Churchill speaking on the wireless at 3.00pm when he gave his long-awaited and eagerly anticipated statement about the surrender of Germany. He announced that the war was over and that Germany had accepted unconditional surrender. It was a day of great rejoicing in every town and village of Britain. Stoneyburn was awash with flags, there was singing, dancing and a parade. Festivities were interrupted at 9.00pm so that we could hear the King speaking. That night bonfires were lit at every street corner and crowds gathered round them and sang into the small hours.

Joan Strange wrote about the mood of celebration in Worthing:

It’s come at last. I woke up at 7.00am to hear the sound of Mother wrestling with the flags (rather moth-eaten and patched). But we weren’t the first in the road … the weather’s been good for the first of the two VE Day holidays. There were church services at mid-day and in the afternoon we all listened to the thrilling broadcasts on the European victory. The highlights were the Prime Minister’s short broadcast at 3.00pm and the King’s at 9.00pm. Hostilities end officially at one minute past midnight tonight when it’s hoped that any fighting against the Soviet Union will also cease. It’s Russia’s VE Day tomorrow.

It was the street parties which more than anything else caught the mood. A participant recalled:

Plate-loads disappeared, but no matter, they were filled again. Paper hats were worn by the ladies and aprons coloured red, white and blue. A gramophone was brought out and we sang along to it. Chairs were placed near a wall, tables cleared and dishes washed – then races for the children. The women and children started dancing and the street was alive with record after record. Soon people were coming from other streets and joining in. When the pub closed at 10.00pm an avalanche descended upon us. At 10.30pm a bonfire was lit opposite my house. Hitler was on top of it – and how the crowd cheered when he came down in flames.

Irene Bain described events on her street in Mitcham:

A group of women in the street formed a committee to organise the party. On the actual day trestle tables were set up in the centre of the road and covered in cloths. Chairs were brought out of the houses and arranged down each side. Use was now made of the precious items of food hoarded for such a purpose. Vases were filled with flowers picked from our gardens and set at intervals down the tables, which were soon laden with plates of food. All of us children went to the party with our brothers and sisters and the babies were carried along too. I wore my best dress and the recently-bought wooden soled sandals I was so proud of … At the end, one of only two car owners, a taxi driver, sat at a little table and handed out to each child in the road a sixpence.