VE Day Dawns: May 8, 1945

May 8, 2013

VE Day Dawns: May 8, 1945

By: Martin GilbertDate:May8 , 2013

At one minute past midnight on Tuesday, May 8, VE-Day, so long awaited, began. In London, at his wartime headquarters in Storey’s Gate, facing St. James’s Park, the Prime Minister asked one of his secretaries, Elizabeth Layton, to come into his room for the nightly dictation. A mass of documents awaited his scrutiny: diplomatic telegrams, intelligence summaries, reports from the now-silent war zones, and reports from the British forces fighting in Burma. As his secretary entered the room he looked up from his desk with the words: ‘Hello, Miss Layton. Well, the war’s over, you’ve played your part.’ She had been with him for more than three years, including his wartime journeys to Ottawa, Moscow and, five months earlier, to Athens amid civil war.

In a letter to her parents written when the dictation was over that night, Miss Layton described how, as she entered the room, ‘an enormous thunderstorm broke – claps, bangs and crashes. He kept saying, “What was that? Oh, thunder”, because it sounded like rockets, not because he thought it might be! Then he’d say “Might as well have another war. What was that? Oh, thunder.”"

VE-Day had begun with an explosion of nature. There had been a similarly violent thunderstorm on the night of September 2, 1939, when Neville Chamberlain was still hesitating to declare war on Germany, and a group of his Cabinet Ministers, angered by what they saw as a demoralizing and possibly even sinister delay, hastened to Downing Street to insist that Britain carry out its treaty obligations to Poland at once.

Among the telegrams requiring Churchill’s attention in the early hours of May 8 were several which gave more information about the recent arrest by the Soviet authorities, near Warsaw, of General Okulicki and the fifteen other Poles who were meant to be travelling to Moscow under safe conduct. The same Poland whose fate had led Britain and France to declare war on Germany in 1939, was still not be be allowed to decide its own political future. From the British perspective, the villain in both cases was the Soviet Union, which in 1939 had signed a pact with Germany effectively sealing Poland’s fate, and in 1945 was seeking to impose on Poland a Moscow-backed communist regime.

It was not until 3.45 a.m. that Churchill finished his work and went to bed. By then the newspapers were on the streets. In The Times there was a stark reminder of the cost of the war. The daily list of ‘fallen officers’ still had its place on the Court page. ‘We have received news of the death of the following officers …’ the column began. The frontpage headline of Stars and Stripes carried an implicit reminder that the war was still being fought against Japan. The headline read:

IT’S OVER, OVER HERE http://www.commandposts.com/2013/05/ve-day-dawns-may-8-1945/