VE Day: The War That Was Still Running

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’s among the most photographed days of the century and the pictures are all joy. Those photographs are true and they’re partial. Those pictures deserve to exist, and they still make me uneasy. People remembered a war that ended in stages as one afternoon of cheering crowds, and that memory folded everyone outside the frame into a celebration that hadn’t reached them yet.

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. (See Gerhard Weinberg's global history, A World at Arms) It also makes the story wrong in a particular 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 wasn’t available to them.

Anybody who celebrated had earned it and wasn’t wrong to. What I’m observing is how a single date gets remembered as the ending when it was one ending among several. I’d defend every one of those celebrations. My objection is the shorthand that came afterward, the habit of saying the war ended in May because it makes a tidier sentence. Tidiness is a poor reason to forget the people who were still waiting.

Watch: V-E Day 1945: The War Ends in Europe - Historic Newsreel, ClassicClipsVault

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 weren’t 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’s the harder category. That’s the people for whom no ending arrived because they didn’t survive to it. A meaningful number of prisoners died in 1945, in the last months, after the outcome was no longer in doubt.

That fact bothers me more than any other. To die in a camp after the outcome was already settled strikes me as the cruelest timing there is, and it’s exactly the kind of loss a celebration photograph has no way to hold.

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 usually got recorded because somebody needed a date. The date the person lived is messier. A good memoir keeps both. The official ending because it’s what happened on paper, and the private one because it’s what happened to them.

I’ll argue for keeping both every time. When a memoir gives me only the official date, it reads like a press release about somebody’s life, and the private ending is almost always where the reader starts to care.

What the Photographs Do Not Show

The famous images of that day are crowds. Crowds are easy to photograph and they’re a real 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 wouldn’t 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.

This one frustrates me because it was always fixable. The cameras went where the crowds were, and that was never going to change, so every account written by somebody standing outside the frame is a gift to the rest of us.

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’s 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.

Of everything on this page, that call is the one I care most that you make. A parade can be rescheduled. A memory that dies with the person who held it can’t be, and nobody regrets asking too soon.

VE Day FAQ