May 8, 1945--V-E day--was a day for which millions of people had fought and worked and prayed and died. Yet, ironically, it was a day on which little of substance actually happened. There were speeches, cheers and parades, but the German surrender had been signed early on May 7, and almost all the fighting had ended well before that. "We play softball every afternoon," a member of the U.S. 667th Field Artillery Battalion, at a German village near the Czech border, wrote in his diary. "I've had a shower, two movies and a U.S.O. show." Wrote one of his buddies: "V-E day. Just another day. Didn't seem to make a hell of a lot of difference."
It did make a hell of a lot of difference, of course, for it meant that the bloodiest war Europe had ever known was finished. "In all our long history, we have never seen a greater day than this," Winston Churchill told the crowds in Parliament Square. "This is a solemn but glorious hour," said President Harry Truman. "We join in offering our thanks to the Providence which has guided and sustained us through the dark days of adversity."
In retrospect, the outcome should have appeared inevitable--perhaps ever since the Allied invasion of North Africa in late 1942, probably since the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in 1943, almost certainly since D-day and the Normandy break out and the liberation of Paris in the summer of 1944. The Allied advantage in troops and weapons meant that it was only a matter of time before the Germans were defeated.
Yet making the inevitable an accomplished fact kept taking thousands of lives. Hitler's last big offensive, the Battle of the Bulge, crashed through U.S. lines in the snow-covered Ardennes Forest just before Christmas of 1944. When the battle was over, the Germans had suffered more than 100,000 casualties, the Allies 81 ,000. From then on, the German retreat never really stopped. U.S. forces seized the Remagen bridge and swarmed across the Rhine in March. Frankfurt fell, then Karlsruhe. The Soviets took Vienna on April 13.
The day before in Washington, at about 5 p.m., Vice President Truman had been summoned to the White House. "Harry," Eleanor Roosevelt said as she greeted him, "the President is dead." Truman found himself unable to speak for a moment. Then he said, "Is there anything I can do for you?" She answered, "Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now."
Truman could hardly disagree. He felt, he said later that week, "like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me." Within hours of his swearing in, he had to confront secrets and controversies that as Vice President he had never heard of. He learned that U.S. scientists were about to test something known as an atom bomb, that the Allies had already decided how Germany was to be divided up among them, that Joseph Stalin and Churchill were bitterly at odds about who would rule Poland. And he had to address the diplomats assembling in San Francisco to create an organization to be called the United Nations. "You are to be the architects of the better world," he told them by radio. "In your hands rests our future."
"My Führer, I congratulate you," said Hitler's dwarfish Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who had just ordered champagne. "Roosevelt is dead! It is written in the stars that the second half of April will be the turning point for us."