VE Day

When Tokyo heard that Nazi Germany had cried uncle and surrendered to the Allies on May 8, 1945, the Imperial Japanese spin-machine digested the news and simply decided that it was a non-event.

Articles about the daily hardships in post-war Germany can be read by clicking here.

Eyewitness accounts of all the excitement that was V.E. Day in Paris:

On the Champs Elysees they were singing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,’ and it was a long way even the few blocks from Fouquet’s restaurant to the Arc de Triomphe if you tried to walk up the Champs on VE-Day in Paris. From one side of the broad and beautiful avenue to the other, all the way to the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe in the Place de l’Etoile, there was hardly any place to breathe and no place at all to move. That was the way it was in the Place l’Opera and the Place de la Republique and all the other famous spots and in a lot of obscure little side streets that nobody but Parisians know.

Click here to read about the liberation of Paris.
Click here to read the observations of U.S. Army lieutenant Louis L’Amour concerning 1946 Paris.

Assorted reports from various European capitols concerning the capitulation of Hitler’s Germany:

Finally, when Paris believed the news, it was just a big-city celebration –crowds and singing and cheers and lots of cognac and girls. People stopped work and airplanes of all the Allied forces buzzed the Champs Elysees. Pvt. Ernest Kuhn of Chicago listened to the news come over the radio at the 108th General Hospital. He had just been liberated after five months in a Nazi PW camp and he still had some shrapnel in his throat. I listened to Churchill talk, he said, and I kept saying to myself, ‘I’m still alive. The war is over and I’m still alive’ I thought of all the guys in the 28th Division Band with me who were dead now. We used to be a pretty good band.

A report from Portland, Oregon, Houston, Texas, Los Angeles and San Francisco, California as to how those cities celebrated the surrender of Germany in May of 1945.

New Yorkers milled around the Wall Street district and Times Square, and over a loudspeaker Mayor Fiorlello H. LaGuardia told them to behave themselves…

Click here to read about the VJ-Day celebrations around the world.

A report from Boston, Atlanta, Baltimore, Cleveland, Minneapolis, St Louis and Springfield (Mass.) as to how VE-Day was celebrated (or not) in these cities:

To get an over-all view of VE-day in America, YANK asked civilian newspapermen and staff writers in various parts of the country to send an eye-witness reports. From these OPs the reports were much the same. Dallas was quiet, Des Moines was sober, Seattle was calm, Boston was staid.