In the collective American memory, the war against the forces of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini has a smooth progression: North Africa, Anzio Beach, Rome, Normandy, Paris, Bastogne.
Berlin.
Lost in the mythology surrounding the Greatest Generation is that the end of World War II — like the end of every war — was a messy affair.
“I think there is an illusion that wars end neatly, and they don’t,” said Thomas Childers, an author and University of Pennsylvania historian.
Sixty years ago, the war did not end neatly with German Col. Gen. Alfred Gustav Jödl surrendering to U.S. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Western Allies at Reims, France, on May 7, 1945, Childers said.
In fact, there were two signings — the one on May 7 in Reims when German commanders surrendered to British, French and U.S. forces, and a second at 12:01 a.m. on May 9 in Berlin. Soviet leader Josef Stalin refused to recognize the Reims surrender and ordered a separate, slightly different one in the presence of Marshall Grgori Zukov, his top commander.
Victory in Europe Day left central Europe “in absolute chaos,” Childers said.
Millions of German civilians were fleeing the Russians. Vigilantes were settling scores with collaborators. Groups of rabid Nazis were ambushing Allied soldiers. Allied air forces were dropping emergency food supplies to starving civilians in still-occupied Dutch cities, even after Hitler’s April 30 suicide and the signing of the peace accord.
On May 7, the Army Air Corps flew 879 sorties, according to the intelligence roster hanging — unchanged in 60 years — in what was then Eisenhower’s war room and is now the Surrender Museum in a former school in Reims. Of those sorties, 398 were bombers and fighters involved in emergency food drops to the large section of the Netherlands.
As Childers was researching “Wings of Morning,” his best selling book about his uncle, Sgt. Howard Goodner, who died in the last U.S. plane shot down over Germany during World War II, German civilians told Childers about the chaos.
There were the Werewolves, teenaged boys armed by Hitler and charged with the last-ditch defense of the Fatherland. Sometimes when British or American units captured a German town, the citizenry would hang white sheets out of windows as a sign of surrender. Often, German troops would counterattack, briefly retaking the town. Before the Allied soldiers could push them back out, the Germans would hang all the civilians at houses displaying sheets, Childers said.
And the chaos was not just in Germany. After signing the May 9 surrender accord, the Germans reopened fire on Prague so they could escape the Red Army.
“For the Germans, it was a nightmare world — caught between the Allies and the Nazis fanatically trying to hang on,” Childers said.
The final 11 months of the war were just as brutal for soldiers. About 135,000 Americans died between D-Day and V-E Day, Childers said.
In fact, more American military personnel died in January 1945 than in any other month of the war, with the majority of losses in Europe, said British historian Alex Kershaw.
Overconfidence and complacency became a problem for Allied commanders after the success of Operation Overlord — the Normandy invasion that included D-Day — said Kershaw, author of the best-selling book “The Bedford Boys” about the ill-fated Virginia National Guard unit that was in the opening wave of the invasion.
U.S. Army planners miscalculated the number of troops needed to defeat Hitler in Europe, and were reduced to transferring support personnel from the Army Air Corps, “giving them an M-1 [rifle], then sending them for a week at a rifle range,” Childers said. “That was their training.”
Allied forces reached German soil in early November 1944. But the bloody Battle of the Bulge — the worst battle for U.S. forces in terms of losses in the war — pushed them back.
German forces in Western Europe were weakened after the failure of the Bulge, but weren’t broken. Like a defiant amateur trying to deprive a grand master of a checkmate, Hitler basically tried to play to a draw while moving units east to meet the Russian onslaught.
The Allies were shaken by prolonged battles along the edges of Germany:
In the Battle of Hürtgen Forest on the German/Belgian border, the United States had 24,000 casualties from September 1944 to February 1945 in one of the fiercest and bloodiest battles of World War II.In the Colmar Pocket, U.S. and British forces took heavy losses as they tried to push German forces out of the Alsace region of France, to the southwest of Germany, in January and February 1945.The U.S. 1st and 9th Army groups moved quickly once they crossed the Rhine River and advanced on the industrialized Ruhr Valley, where they encountered a large German force. The Allies eventually trapped the Germans in the valley and took 325,000 soldiers captive in April 1945.In certain areas, the Germans never really were defeated, said Sgt. Maj. Joseph Hall, a historian and World War II re-enactor in Baumholder, Germany. For every D-Day or Battle of the Bulge, there are two or three overlooked or forgotten campaigns that continued to the last few days of the war.
In Italy, for example, Rome fell to the 1st Armored Division on June 5, 1944, the day before D-Day, Hall said. But Allied forces in Italy never made it to Germany, still fighting German troops, ridge to ridge, in the Apennine Mountains at war’s end, he said.
“It took as long to go from Rome to the Alps, about 300 miles, as it did to go about 1,500 miles from Normandy to Pils, Czechoslovakia, the farthest penetration east by U.S. and British forces,” Childers said.
“I think we’d still be there fighting if the war hadn’t ended.”
After Allied soldiers took the Siegfried Line fortifications on the border of France and Belgium, some units began racing toward Berlin 20 or 30 miles per day, Hall said. “But then, they’d get into a mess,” running up against well-armed and well-led Germans.
In the south, from Anzio onward, Germans used every military advantage they could muster and “effectively bled U.S and British forces to the maximum,” Kershaw said. British commanders were obsessed with the possibility of the war degenerating into the bloody stalemate of World War I, he said. At the same time, U.S. commanders, unlike their Russian counterparts, were determined to minimize casualties late in the war, overrelying on artillery and air power to clear resistance, Kershaw added.
So it took until January 1945 for the Allies to return to their pre-Battle-of-the-Bulge positions in Belgium and Luxembourg. And it took until early March for them to regain momentum again toward the final hurdle of crossing the Rhine, he said.
When Eisenhower got word March 7, 1945, that the Ludendorff Bridge near Remagen, Germany — the only bridge over the Rhine the Germans failed to destroy — was intact, the supreme allied commander called it, “the best news of the war,” Kershaw said. Allied forces had breached the last psychological barrier before Berlin.
Cracks in the alliance
As World War II was ending, the Cold War was beginning. Divisions between the communist Russians on the east and the democracies on the west began to strain the alliance that had defeated Hitler.
“It was not an alliance made in heaven,” Childers said. “They never trusted each other.”
The fissures formed in the summer of 1944, when, on Stalin’s order, Russian forces pulled up short, refusing to help Poles in the Warsaw uprising in August. On the Eastern Front, Zhukov conveyed Stalin’s orders to his men — “Bread for Bread, Blood for Blood.” That is, the Russians troops were free to avenge the German atrocities during Hitler’s failed Russian offensive, resulting in rape, looting and slaughter on an unimaginable scale.
By the Yalta Summit in February 1945, Europe had been divided up between Russia and the Western allies.
Sixty years later, there is growing revisionism among historians about America’s role in World War II, with criticism that the Americans entered the war too late, and that Russia would have defeated Hitler without the United States.
British historian Kershaw bristles at such notions.
Yes, the Russians sacrificed disproportionately to defeat Hitler, he said.
But the Allies, not the Russians, gave Europeans “the true liberation from oppression and dictatorship … in terms of moral righteousness.”
For him, the issue is not who won the war, Kershaw said, but what the thousands of Americans who gave their lives achieved. The free, democratic Western Europe that emerged after the war “was totally the product of ordinary Americans, achieved by ordinary Americans dying by the hundreds,” he said.
“No one can deny that. No one can question that.”
To view or download the 60th Anniversary of V-E day special section (in PDF format), click here. To go to Stripes’ World War II page, featuring coverage of anniversary events and stories, cartoons and photos from our our archives, click here.
Events leading up to Germany’s surrender
March 7, 1945:A bridge is established across the Rhine after the Allies take Cologne.
April 1, 1945:German troops are trapped while defending an Allied offensive in North Italy.
April 12, 1945:Concentration camps Belsen, Buchenwald liberated; President Franklin Roosevelt dies. Harry Truman assumes the presidency.
April 18, 1945:The surrounded German Army surrenders at Ruhr.
April 21, 1945:The Soviet Army surrounds Berlin.
April 28, 1945:The Allies capture Venice. Italian partisans capture and hang Mussolini.
April 29, 1945:Dachau POW camp is liberated by the U.S. 7th Army.
April 30, 1945:Adolf Hitler commits suicide as Berlin is under seige.
May 7, 1945:German forces submit to unconditional surrender to Allies.
May 8, 1945:Victory in Europe
May 9, 1945:A second set of surrender papers is signed in Berlin.
