On 8 May 1945 the surrender of Germany took effect and Europe stopped fighting. Crowds filled streets in London and Paris and New York. It is one of the most photographed days of the century and the pictures are all joy.
Those photographs are true and they are partial.
On the same day, in camps across Japan and its occupied territories, tens of thousands of Allied prisoners were still prisoners. My grandfather was one of them. He had been captured at Corregidor in 1942 and he had three and a half more months to go.
A War Does Not End All at Once
We talk about the Second World War as one thing with one ending, and it makes the story easier to tell. It also makes the story wrong in a specific way.
There were two wars running at once with different geographies, different enemies and different end dates. Victory in Europe came in May. Victory over Japan came in September. Between those two dates a great deal happened to a great many people, and the celebration in the first photograph was not available to them.
None of that is a criticism of anybody who celebrated. They had earned it and they were not wrong to. It is an observation about how a single date gets remembered as the ending when it was one ending among several.
The People Who Heard It Late or Not at All
VE Day is a European date, and the further you were from Europe the less it changed.
Prisoners in the Pacific were not released by Germany’s surrender. Troops being redeployed east found their war continuing. Families waiting on men in that theater got a day of somebody else’s good news and another summer of waiting.
And there is the harder category, which is the people for whom no ending arrived because they did not survive to it. A meaningful number of prisoners died in 1945, in the last months, after the outcome was no longer in doubt.
Remembering VE Day properly means holding the photographs and that fact at the same time.
Why the Uneven Ending Matters to a Writer
I write other people’s life stories for a living, and this is a pattern I run into constantly at a much smaller scale.
Every account of a hard period has a date the person gives you as the ending. The day the company was sold. The day the diagnosis came back clear. The day the thing was finally finished. Ask a few more questions and the ending turns out to be a range instead of a moment, and different people inside the same story would name different days.
The clean date is usually the one that got recorded because somebody needed a date. The real one is messier and it is what the person lived.
A good memoir keeps both. The official ending because it is what happened on paper, and the private one because it is what happened to them.
What the Photographs Do Not Show
The famous images of that day are crowds. Crowds are easy to photograph and they are a genuine record of relief on a scale most of us have never seen.
What no camera was pointed at was the household that got no news, the ward full of men who would not be going anywhere for a year, and the far side of the world where nothing had changed.
This is a general problem with how we remember things. The record skews toward whatever was photogenic and toward wherever the cameras already were. Everything else has to be written down by somebody who was there, or it goes.
Which is the argument for first-hand accounts over summaries, and it applies to your own family as much as to 1945.
How do you mark VE Day?
In Britain and much of Europe it is a public occasion with ceremonies and, in anniversary years, a considerable amount of national attention. In the United States it passes with much less notice, partly because the American war continued afterward.
If you want to mark it, read something written by somebody who was there instead of a summary written since. The accounts from May 1945 are startling for how tired they are. Relief instead of triumph, and a lot of people simply going home.
And if you have a relative who remembers any part of that decade, this is a reasonable week to call them and ask one question.