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Late in the war, two B-17 bombers collided over Belgium at 13,500 ft., and one of them was sheared in two. From the main section, one crewman succeeded in bailing out, but the rest crashed to their deaths. In the tail, Joe Frank Jones Jr., a 19-year-old gunner, tried to get out the escape hatch, found it jammed. He tried the window, but it was too small. He was trapped inside the plunging fragment. When Belgian peasants found him lying in a field, still alive, they took him to a hospital. There he lay unconscious for eight days while doctors treated him for his remarkably minor injuries: a lacerated tongue, a ruptured blood vessel in his stomach and a bruised thigh. When he came to, he was asked what he had done when he had realized that he was trapped inside the tail. The gunner answered that he had unbuckled his parachute, sat down in his seat, lit a cigarette and waited.
The bulletin originated in San Francisco, where the Allied diplomats had just approved the United Nations Charter: SF APRIL 28 (AP) GERMANY HAS SURRENDERED TO THE ALLIED GOVERNMENTS UNCONDITIONALLY, AND AN ANNOUNCEMENT IS EXPECTED MOMENTARILY, IT WAS STATED BY A HIGH AMERICAN OFFICIAL TODAY.
Radio reporters immediately began broadcasting the news. On the floor of the U.N. conference, a Chilean delegate waved an extra edition of the San Francisco Call-Bulletin with the screaming headline NAZIS QUIT. The delegates burst into applause. Cheering crowds gathered in the streets of New York City and Chicago. An hour and a half later, President Truman called in reporters and announced that the story was untrue.
What had happened in San Francisco was that British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had told his colleagues about a new German peace feeler. His words had leaked to the British press, and U.S. Senator Tom Connally of Texas had confirmed them to the Associated Press.
The German peace feeler was a desperate maneuver by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, the police and the concentration camps, who had escaped from Berlin to the north German port of Lübeck. There he told a diplomat from neutral Sweden that Germany was willing to surrender to the Americans and British. At worst, Himmler thought, this would enable Germany to throw all its troops against the Soviets; at best, the Western Allies would join the German defense. Himmler seems even to have cherished the illusion that the Allies would support him, the lord of the Holocaust, as the new German leader.
Truman's reaction to Himmler's offer was acerbic. "Has he anything to surrender?" the new President asked Churchill on the transatlantic telephone. The two quickly agreed to tell the Swedish diplomat (and to reassure " the ever suspicious Stalin) that Germany must surrender unconditionally to all the Allies. No more was heard from Himmler. Inside the Berlin bunker, Hitler denounced him as a traitor. He dismissed Himmler from his government positions and expelled him from the Nazi Party.