In April 1945, the Second World War was nearing its conclusion. In Europe, Allied armies were driving ever further into Nazi Germany from east and west; victory was, quite literally, within their grasp. For Adolf Hitler, once the triumphant master of an empire that stretched from the Pyrenees to the Volga, the writing was on the wall. Now a Berlin recluse in his underground bunker, surrounded by only his most loyal supporters, the Führer’s every word still meant life or death for the German people, as well as for the millions of foreign slave laborers and concentration camp inmates in Nazi captivity. Before the guns were finally silenced, hundreds of thousands of innocent souls would perish in the flames and rubble of the dying Third Reich.
On the opposite side of the world, Hitler’s Axis partner, Imperial Japan, had been left reeling by the Americans fighting in the Pacific theater. Sustained by the world’s greatest economy, the reach and sheer power of the USA was by now simply staggering. Huge amphibious armies, protected by massive naval forces, were leapfrogging across the Pacific, ever closer to Japan, while giant B-29 bombers rained fire and high explosives onto its cities. In the waters around Japan, American submarines had almost run out of ships to sink. In the meantime, the Japanese population, some 90 million strong, faced economic collapse and starvation.
In the Far East, British troops had recaptured Burma from the Japanese, who had been in occupation since 1942. Back in London, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was receiving equally encouraging news from the fighting on all fronts. Even so, after five years of steering the nation through the stormy waters of war, Churchill was weary and anxious about the future. The old warrior was concerned that the British Empire, exhausted and financially drained by such lengthy fighting, would be sidelined as the endgame came into view by its more powerful American and Russian allies. Winston Churchill had undeniably given his all for king and country, and an Allied victory promised to be his finest hour. But he was wise to be cautious, and quite incredibly, his own future as the nation’s prime minister was far from assured.
As April 1, 1945, dawned, three weeks had passed since the first American troops had seized the Ludendorff Bridge over the River Rhine at Remagen before the Germans could demolish it. The rest of the 46 road and rail bridges that had spanned the Rhine had all been blown up; ironically, the Ludendorff Bridge collapsed under the shock of constant near misses by German artillery fire and air attacks, just 10 days after the 1st US Army had used it to secure a bridgehead on the east bank. The Rhine was the only major natural obstacle between the armies led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied Supreme Commander in Europe, and the rest of Germany. Once the Rhine had been crossed, the rest of the German nation would be accessible, and Eisenhower’s troops might well have reached Berlin before the Red Army, which had been held at the River Oder, 90 miles beyond the city, since the end of January.
When Eisenhower had assumed total command of ground operations in September 1944, his land campaign in northwest Europe had its critics, one of the most vociferous being Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery. Better known as “Monty,” the Englishman—notorious for being great to serve under but appallingly difficult to command—led the 21st Army Group as the Allies started to make progress in Germany through March and into April 1945. Charged with putting Operation Plunder into action, Montgomery’s 21st Army Group saw Canadian, British, and American troops cross the Rhine near Wesel. Montgomery’s men captured all their objectives, sustaining only minor losses within hours. However, Operation Varsity, in which two Allied airborne divisions were dropped beyond the east bank of the Rhine, did not fare so well, suffering heavy casualties.
Watching the drama unfold in the skies from the relative safety of the west bank was none other than Winston Churchill himself. Always keen to visit the front whenever he could, Churchill had traveled to General Eisenhower’s tactical headquarters overlooking the river. As ever, Churchill was determined to throw himself into the center of the action, and much to Eisenhower’s dismay, the British Prime Minister, now in his 70s, leapt into an American landing craft and crossed the Rhine. But Churchill had more to contemplate than Eisenhower’s concern for his personal safety, particularly with the looming division of Europe into two rival ideological and military blocs. Churchill believed that the now-ailing American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, seriously underestimated the danger posed by Joseph Stalin and the Soviets. The British Prime Minister wanted Eisenhower and the Western Allies to advance all the way to Berlin before the Soviets could get there. However, Eisenhower regarded the destruction of German military power as his primary mission; Berlin, in itself, was not his main priority. For the time being, with German artillery spotters and snipers still active on the east bank, Eisenhower’s immediate task was to persuade Churchill to return to the comparative safety of the west bank before he got hurt.
While the delicate negotiations were taking place to retrieve Churchill, 150 miles further upstream, the 3rd US Army’s 5th Infantry Division had, strategically and without any of Montgomery’s pomp and circumstance, crossed the Rhine at Oppenheim. There was little love lost between the 3rd US Army’s commander, the flamboyant American general George “Blood and Guts” Patton, and Montgomery. With old scores to settle, Patton would have been delighted to cross the Rhine before Monty’s 21st Army Group. In fact, Patton managed to lead five divisions across the Rhine at Oppenheim, where there was little opposition, ensuring that the road to Berlin and victory in Europe was now wide open.
But German resistance to the Allied advance was weakening daily, with a home guard made up of old men and young boys who were as afraid of the future as the beleaguered civilian population. And worse was to come for them, because from the safety of his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery building in Berlin, Hitler demanded that the battle should be conducted without consideration for the German population. Ordering the destruction of all industrial plants, electricity works, waterworks, gasworks, and all food and clothing stores to create a desert for the advancing Allies, Germany’s Führer declared: “If the war is lost, the German nation…”
April 1, 1945, was, in point of fact, Easter Sunday, a traditional day of celebration for the Christian Church. For the Allies, there was increasing cause for celebration. As Montgomery’s 21st Army Group advanced, they were flanked by the American 9th Army, forming the northern pincer of a giant encircling maneuver around the Ruhr—Germany’s industrial heartland—while the 1st US Army formed the southern pincer. Units from the two American armies met near Lippstadt; 72 hours later, the encirclement of the Ruhr Pocket was complete. Within this slowly shrinking perimeter were the remnants of 21 divisions, totaling 430,000 German soldiers of Army Group B, together with millions of tired, hungry, and frightened German civilians and foreign slave laborers, all trapped and at the mercy of the Allies.
There were also considerable advances being made in the Pacific, with Americans preparing for Operation Iceberg. The target was Okinawa, only 340 miles from southern Japan and the largest of the Ryukyu chain of islands. If an amphibious landing was successful, Okinawa would provide the Americans with a springboard for the final invasion of mainland Japan. Less than a week earlier, Iwo Jima—the first island in the Japanese archipelago to be invaded by the Americans—had finally been declared secure after six weeks of bitter fighting. Immortalized by photographs and film showing U.S. Marines and a U.S. Navy medic raising the Stars and Stripes on top of Mount Suribachi five days after the first landings on February 19, 1945, the Iwo Jima fighting had cost the lives of 6,825 American and 21,703 Japanese soldiers. Although an Allied victory, the Battle of Iwo Jima was a chilling prelude to Operation Iceberg.
For the invasion of Okinawa, the Americans assembled a force of 102,000 soldiers, 88,000 marines, and 18,000 navy personnel under Lieutenant-General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., commander of the 10th U.S. Army. Supporting Buckner’s troops was a massive fleet of 1,600 ships, including 40 aircraft carriers, 18 battleships, 32 cruisers, and 200 destroyers. The warships lying offshore and carrier-borne aircraft were at battle stations, ready to blast Okinawa into submission. At 6 a.m., the bombardment of the beaches at Hagushi began, and after three hours, the intense naval barrage ceased as troops of the 3rd Amphibious Corps and 24th Army Corps stormed ashore. Much to the Americans’ surprise, the assault waves encountered no opposition at all. Follow-up troops rapidly headed inland, and by noon, they had taken their immediate objectives: the airfields at Kadena and Yomitan. By nightfall, the 10th Army had more than 60,000 men ashore, and the beachhead was now nine miles wide.
But the Japanese were nowhere in sight. In fact, Okinawa’s Japanese garrison had positioned itself well inland to avoid American naval gunfire, many troops concealed in the caves of the island’s rocky landscape. The Japanese 32nd Army defending the island was 120,000 strong. 70,000 of them were regular army troops—good, battle-experienced men. But the remaining 50,000 were a mix of naval troops and locally conscripted islanders who were poorly trained and inadequately equipped. Even so, the Japanese had plenty of artillery and the terrain favored a defensive position. At 60 miles long and averaging eight miles wide, much of Okinawa was made up of hills covered with pine forests and thick undergrowth. Renowned for constructing strong and well-concealed defensive positions, the Japanese were ready and waiting for the enemy as the battle for Okinawa commenced.
By April 3, the Americans had reached the eastern shore, effectively splitting the Japanese forces on Okinawa in two. General Buckner quickly initiated Phase II of his plan, the objective of which was to take the northern half of the island. The 6th Marine Division advanced towards the Motobu Peninsula on the western side of the island, where they encountered Japanese troops defending a natural fortress of wooded ridges and ravines. By April 18, the marines had cleared the Motobu Peninsula; most of the northern half of Okinawa was now in American hands.
In the meantime, the Allied invasion fleet off Okinawa had come under a ferocious assault from the air. The Japanese High Command had assembled more than 2,000 aircraft on airfields in southern Japan and Formosa (today known as Taiwan) to disrupt the invasion. Despite bombing raids on their bases by American B-29s and carrier-borne aircraft in the weeks before Operation Iceberg, many were still ready for action. Leading the Japanese air onslaught were aircraft packed with bombs and aviation fuel, flown by young pilots on one-way suicide missions. They were the “kamikaze,” which in Japanese means “divine wind.” In the 13th century, typhoons scattered and sank two Chinese fleets on their way to invade Japan, which the Japanese called the Divine Wind. Now, the Japanese High Command hoped that another divine wind would scatter the American fleet off Okinawa. On April 6, 1945, the Japanese “Operation Chrysanthemum” began with massed kamikaze attacks on the Allied invasion fleet. Although fired up with fanatical devotion to their emperor, most of the kamikaze pilots were novices, and Allied fighters managed to shoot dozens of them down well before they had a chance to do any damage. But there were plenty of kamikazes who did succeed in breaking through, and for two days, anti-aircraft gunners on board Allied warships fought desperately to knock them out of the sky. An incredible 13 American destroyers were badly damaged or sunk, and it was a threat the Allies needed to take very seriously indeed. In the next three months, hundreds more kamikaze pilots hurled their aircraft and themselves at Allied warships and practically all of them, just as they intended, lost their lives. By the time the fighting on Okinawa came to an end, the kamikazes had sunk 36 Allied vessels and badly damaged another 368. Most of the 4,907 American sailors killed and the 4,874 wounded during the invasion of Okinawa perished during kamikaze attacks. For the US Navy, these were grim statistics.
While on Okinawa, the land battle was just beginning. The highest concentration of Japanese forces was to the south of the island. On 4 April, General Buckner ordered the 24th Army Corps to advance in a southerly direction from the American beachhead. As the 7th and 96th Infantry Divisions pushed on towards Shuri, Okinawa’s ancient capital, they met fierce resistance from Japanese troops defending a position the Americans had christened Cactus Ridge. There was a bitter hand-to-hand struggle for Cactus Ridge, but by 9 April, the Japanese had been toppled from their vantage point, though at a high price with 1,500 American casualties. The way to Shuri was still barred by Japanese defenders along the Kakazu Ridge, and the fierce fighting continued until superior American firepower forced the island’s defenders to call off further attacks. Even so, Buckner’s advance had stalled, and the fight for Okinawa was anything but over.
Meanwhile, back in Europe, the British, Canadian, and American armies were driving ever deeper into Germany after successfully crossing the Rhine in late March 1945. In contrast to the bloodletting in the Pacific, their casualties were light. The majority of German troops they encountered were keener to give up rather than fight. During their advance, however, the Western Allies were uncovering the ghastly evidence of the Nazis’ crimes against humanity. On 4 April 1945, troops belonging to Patton’s 3rd US Army overran the Ohrdruf labour camp near the town of Gotha. In the camp, they discovered piles of corpses, some covered with lime and others partially incinerated. These unfortunate souls had been prisoners that the fleeing SS guards considered too ill to walk; they had been shot before the camp was evacuated.
News of the horrors of Ohrdruf quickly spread, and on 12 April, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, visited the camp with General Patton and General Omar Bradley, Commander of the 12th US Army Group, to see for themselves what they had been fighting for. Worse was still to come. Advance units of the 3rd US Army entered another, much larger camp outside the city of Weimar: Buchenwald. Despite the horror of the situation, they were at least able to liberate 21,000 sick and starving inmates. The British and Americans knew about Nazi concentration camps, but little had prepared them for the reality. After inspecting Ohrdruf, Eisenhower informed General George C. Marshall, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington DC, that what he had seen beggared description, as he let the world know the truth about what Hitler and the Nazis had done.
On 12 April, the famous CBS radio correspondent Edward R. Murrow visited Buchenwald, and he too reported his findings over the airwaves to all who would listen. Buchenwald was not an extermination camp, but for the 238,000 prisoners from all over Europe and the Soviet Union who passed through its gates from July 1938 to April 1945, it was a place of terror and death. 56,000 inmates are believed to have perished there. Eisenhower did all he could to publicize the dreadful conditions inside Ohrdruf and Buchenwald, and being of German ancestry himself, he was determined to confront the German people with their collective responsibility for these appalling crimes. The Americans forced inhabitants from the district surrounding the camp to come and witness the atrocities committed in their name, to walk past the piles of emaciated bodies awaiting cremation at the camp furnace. On Buchenwald’s parade ground, the German civilians were also shown an appalling and truly bizarre collection of trophies collected by the SS. These included human organs in jars of formaldehyde, shrunken heads, lampshades, and book bindings made with skin from prisoners specially selected for their colourful tattoos. The horrors of the concentration camps continued to be revealed, but the liberation had come too late for so many inmates, and in the weeks that followed, thousands died as a result of their terrible suffering at the hands of their captors.
However, while this human tragedy played itself out as the world looked on, the death of just one man was about to change the course of history. On 12 April, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt—known to millions simply as FDR, the man responsible for bringing the Americans into the war—died. Paralyzed with polio since his late 30s, and under immense pressure as America’s president since 1933, through the Great Depression and then the war, Roosevelt’s health had been deteriorating for some time. At the Yalta Conference in the Crimea in February, Roosevelt had met Stalin and Churchill to discuss the post-war division of Germany, but his appearance had shocked everyone present; he was evidently a very sick man. On returning to the United States, the President addressed the US Congress. Although too ill to stand, he spoke while seated: “We haven’t won the wars yet.” The main theme of his speech was his vision for the United Nations Organization. He said, ”The Crimean Conference ought to spell the end of a system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balance of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries and have always failed. We propose to substitute for all these a universal organisation in which all peace-loving nations will finally have a chance to join.”
It was a remarkable legacy for Roosevelt to leave the world, and although very unwell, he still continued to lead the Americans in the fight against Adolf Hitler and his “axis of evil.” At the end of March, Roosevelt travelled to Warm Springs, Georgia, to prepare for the International Conference in San Francisco, at which the United Nations Organization would be created. During the course of April 12th, he complained of a terrible headache. Shortly after, Roosevelt suffered a massive brain haemorrhage and died within hours. He was 63 years old and had missed seeing his dedication to the Allied cause rewarded with the fall of Berlin and victory in Europe by only a matter of weeks.
In the United States and amongst the Allies, news of Roosevelt’s death was met with disbelief and grief. FDR had been in the White House for longer than any other American president; for 12 years, he had led the United States to economic prosperity and to the very threshold of victory over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. All over the USA, flags were lowered for 30 days of official mourning. Hundreds of thousands of grateful Americans made the pilgrimage to gather along the railway line between Warm Springs, Georgia, and Washington, D.C. to watch a funeral train bring Roosevelt’s body back to the nation’s capital. Even more people gathered in Washington to line the streets as FDR’s coffin was taken to lie in state in the Capitol building, and his state funeral was one of the most emotional occasions in Washington’s entire history.
But there was still a war to be won, and America turned hopefully to the new president, 60-year-old ex-US Senator Harry S. Truman, a relatively unknown figure on the international stage. Truman had taken on the mantle of US Commander-in-Chief just as the Second World War was about to enter its final and most dramatic stage. In Germany, the British 2nd Army was making rapid progress towards the Danish frontier and the Baltic, while the 12th U.S. Army Group was busy completing operations around the Ruhr Pocket. By April 21st, the fighting was over, and 325,000 German soldiers filed patiently into American captivity. Overwhelmed by the huge number of men surrendering who required food and shelter, the Americans created makeshift prisons along the Rhine. Sadly, during the next days and weeks, due to the sheer enormity of the task, many hundreds of these men died as a result of their already poor state of health before their captors had a chance to care for them properly.
What’s more, tensions were now beginning to appear within the Allied camp. Winston Churchill and the British were in favour of pushing ahead to take Berlin before the Russians could get there, but Eisenhower and the Americans favoured a policy of crushing all further German armed resistance first. Rumours were abounding of a powerful Nazi defensive position that had been established in the German and Austrian Alps, manned by fanatical SS troops. Eisenhower diverted a great deal of American military effort southwards to neutralize this threat. On 11 April, leading units of the US 9th Army that had reached the River Elbe—the last major natural obstacle before Berlin—were ordered to halt. The Russians, however, were still forging ever onwards, displaying ruthless efficiency, with the Red Army thrusting aside the large number of German forces sent by Hitler to defend Hungary. By 13 April, the Soviets had captured Vienna.
In Berlin, where Hitler’s chief of Nazi propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, was still celebrating news of Roosevelt’s death with his Führer, hopes were beginning to grow that the alliance between the British, the Americans, and the Soviets would now crumble. However, despite differences of opinion about what should happen after the war, all three of these major players were ready to end Hitler’s reign of terror once and for all. On 16 April, Stalin’s long-awaited offensive on the Oder-Neisse line east of Berlin began in earnest. The Russian Red Army had three main objectives: the first was to capture Berlin; the second was to seize any material and any remaining scientific personnel connected with the Nazi atom bomb program; and last but not least, to snatch as much German territory as possible in the process.
The assault began with a shattering artillery bombardment as 2.5 million Russians moved into position for the final offensive against Hitler and his Berlin hierarchy. 1.5 million of these soldiers were under the orders of the Red Army’s most experienced battlefield commanders, Marshal Zhukov and Marshal Konev, who were given the task of storming Hitler’s centre of operations. They outnumbered German ground forces by nearly 3-1, artillery by 4-1, and tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles by nearly 6-1. Josef Stalin was well aware that there was fierce competition between the two marshals to get to Berlin first, and he had actually given Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front on the Oder line a head start, much to the annoyance of Konev, whose 1st Ukrainian Front on the River Neisse was some distance further away from the Nazi capital. But Zhukov did not have things all his own way, as directly in front of his troops were the Seelow Heights, the most heavily defended sector of the German front line that lay ten miles beyond the River Oder. After four days of extremely fierce and bloody fighting, the Seelow Heights were finally cleared, while by the 19th of April, Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front had managed to break free of the Neisse line, finding themselves advancing quickly through open country. As the 20th of April dawned, Adolf Hitler’s 56th birthday, there was little for the Führer to celebrate. Zhukov and his men had made a rapid advance from the Seelow Heights and were already shelling the centre of Berlin with long-range artillery. As the day progressed, the Soviet forces enveloped the Nazi capital to the north and south, and over the next 48 hours, began to steadily tighten their grip on the city. The Russians were now taking charge. During the night of April 21st, the Royal Air Force Mosquito bombers made a final raid on Berlin. At precisely 8:30 a.m. the very next day, the Soviet commanders gave the order: “Open fire at the capital of fascist Germany.” By the 23rd of April, Berlin had, in effect, been isolated by the Russians. For Adolf Hitler, now trapped in his Führerbunker, there was no possible escape. Realising that Berlin was doomed, he declared his intention to remain there and take his own life.
Nevertheless, the fighting for Berlin was far from over. Soviet casualties continued to mount, despite the inevitability of the battle’s outcome. There were some 45,000 troops defending the city, and despite being badly equipped and disorganised, they still had a sting in their tail. A separate detachment of 2,000 Waffen-SS soldiers had been put in charge of defending the Führerbunker and the rest of the government district, but there was little even they could do against the Russian onslaught. As well as being outnumbered, the German defenders faced a massive artillery attack. The Russians were well-equipped with Katyusha rockets, which were self-propelled from mobile launchers. These rockets, named after a popular Russian wartime song about a girl called Katyusha, could be devastating.
The Soviet troops were quickly blasting their way into the centre of Berlin. Their main target was the old German parliament building, the Reichstag. Across the entire city, there was fierce house-to-house and hand-to-hand fighting, which ebbed and flowed with each Red Army attack and German counter-offensive. However, in the heat and fury of combat, nobody was taking any prisoners on either side.
The action was not confined to Berlin. Eighty miles to the south-west of the city, at the ancient city of Torgau on the River Elbe, the eastern and western Allies had an historic meeting. The first contact was made between troops of the 9th U.S. Army 69th Division and the 58th Guards Division of Konev’s First Ukrainian Front on 25 April, an event that has gone down in history as Elbe Day. This was a perfect photo opportunity for a small army of American and Soviet journalists and cameramen who were brought together the next day to record the official meeting between the American and Russian soldiers as they shared a moment of celebration and exchanged gifts.
However, despite the outward appearance of unity, tensions between the Allies were growing. Immediately after the photos had been taken, the Americans returned to their side of the Elbe and stayed there. This was against the wishes of General Bill Simpson, the 9th U.S. Army commander, who wanted to continue the push towards Berlin. Eisenhower had already rejected this, electing to leave the way clear for the Russians. This was because when Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had agreed on the plans for restructuring post-war Europe at the Yalta Conference, it was decided that Berlin would be located deep within the Soviet zone. There was little to be gained, and keeping US casualties to a minimum was a major consideration, especially after the Americans’ terrible losses at the Battle of the Bulge. Also, the risk of incurring casualties as a result of Soviet friendly fire in the chaos of the battle-torn streets of Berlin was simply not worth taking, so the Red Army continued its remorseless progress.
By 29 April, the Russians were within a mile of the Führerbunker. As the news reached Hitler, he was also told that the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was dead. After attempting to escape to Switzerland with his mistress, Clara Petacci, Mussolini had been captured; the pair were executed, and their mutilated bodies were put on display before vengeful crowds. For Hitler, there was no escape. Rather than face the same fate as Mussolini, the Führer took control of his destiny. He put his affairs in order, signed his last will and testament, and married his mistress, Eva Braun. Hitler’s dream of a thousand-year Reich was over. On the 30th of April, with the Russians getting ever closer, the newlyweds committed suicide. Afterwards, their bodies were taken out of the Führerbunker and burnt by SS bodyguards in the garden of the Reich Chancellery.
As 10,000 desperate German troops continued defending Berlin’s battered government district to the last, the Reichstag, the most traditional symbol of German power, finally fell to the Soviets on 1 May. While the Russian soldiers flew the red flag from its battered roof, Hitler’s heir apparent, Joseph Goebbels, took drastic and tragic action, killing each of his six children before he and his wife committed suicide. Hitler had ordered Goebbels to flee if Berlin was captured, but for the first time, the Führer’s most loyal supporter disobeyed the man he had devoted his life to serving.
Things were moving at a dramatic pace, and on 2 May, the commander of the Berlin garrison, General Helmuth Weidling, capitulated to the Russians; within hours, all the guns in the city had fallen silent. The Soviets took nearly half a million German prisoners, but there are no accurate figures for the many thousands of soldiers and civilians who perished. Eisenhower’s determination to keep US troops out of the battle for Berlin proved to be well-founded, as the Red Army counted the cost: at least 81,000 Soviet soldiers were killed during the fighting in and around Berlin, while sustaining another 280,000 casualties. With the fighting over, the Russians had the daunting task of organising food supplies for the surviving civilian population and making the city habitable again. Paradoxically, while this was happening, many ordinary Soviet soldiers, motivated by revenge and often fired up by alcohol, rampaged through Berlin, committing atrocities as appalling as those associated with the Nazi regime.
While the promise of peace was imminent in Europe, the war still raged on in the Pacific. News that the Japanese were at last being brought to a standstill reached the West. As the Germans capitulated to the Russians on May 2nd, British and Indian troops completed their advance through central Burma and captured the capital, Rangoon, with just a matter of hours to spare before the monsoon rains began. As the world would see in the months ahead, the Japanese refusal to contemplate surrender slowed Allied progress considerably. However, despite the fighting continuing in Burma for another three months, the campaign was effectively over with the fall of Rangoon.
The Japanese mainland was also being attacked with little opposition. In the Philippines, American troops, led by General Douglas MacArthur, had managed to contain more than 200,000 Japanese soldiers on the islands of Mindanao and Luzon. Resistance was fierce as the Japanese fought bitterly to hang on to their mountain strongholds, but on the 26th of June, MacArthur was finally able to declare that the Philippines campaign was over. Ironically, it was also late June—the 22nd, to be precise—that the Okinawa Campaign was declared officially over. It had lasted a gruelling 87 days; more than 100,000 Japanese soldiers had perished in the fighting, with at least another 7,000, mostly local conscripts, taken prisoner. A further 100,000 Okinawan civilians are also thought to have died. Although victorious, the Americans paid a terrible price, suffering more than 50,000 casualties with at least 12,000 fatalities. The Japanese had served notice that concluding the fighting in the Pacific, despite events in Europe, was going to take all the Allies’ resolve. It was a chilling prospect for the American military planners considering an amphibious assault on Japan as they began to calculate the likely losses. On the basis of the 30% casualties experienced by the US 10th Army on Okinawa, a conservative estimate suggested that a staggering 300,000 Americans would be killed or injured. Finding a way forward would demand a new approach to warfare.
Returning to the European theatre of war, the early days of May 1945 certainly provided the Allies with much to celebrate. With fighting in Italy and Berlin coming to an end on May 2nd, events gathered momentum. Just 48 hours later came the unconditional surrender of all German forces in northwest Europe, given to British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery in a tent on Lüneburg Heath. Everything was now in place for the war in Europe to be brought to a conclusion. Early on the 7th of May, the Germans’ representatives, General Jodl and Field Marshal Keitel, signed the Instrument of Final Unconditional Surrender at Eisenhower’s headquarters at Reims in France. It was agreed that at 23:01 hours Central European Time on the 8th of May, all forces under German control would stop fighting.
Good news travels fast; by the 8th, rumours of the imminent end to the fighting in Europe prompted celebrations in Great Britain, on the streets of London and throughout the nation. Fuelled by the tide of public excitement, at 3 p.m., Prime Minister Winston Churchill broadcast to the British people: “Hostilities will end officially at one minute after midnight tonight, but in the interests of saving lives, the ceasefire began yesterday to be sounded all along the front.” It was an incredible day, and the euphoria out on the streets was contagious. Winston Churchill went to Buckingham Palace to take his place alongside the royal family, who had come out onto the balcony to acknowledge the cheers of the sea of people gathered below. Almost five years to the day after Churchill had taken on the challenging role of Prime Minister in 1940, this moment, on the very first VE Day, has been described by many as Winston’s finest hour.
However, it wasn’t only the people of Britain celebrating the news of Hitler’s demise and the fall of the Nazis. Across the Atlantic, the Americans, despite continuing to fight a war of attrition with the Japanese, took time out to enjoy the occasion. For Harry S. Truman, May 8th was dedicated to the memory of his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had done so much to rid the world of tyranny. Still in mourning for their recently passed president, America’s flags remained at half-mast, but it was nonetheless a time for looking forward with hope to a new era. Ironically, it also happened to be President Truman’s 61st birthday. While to this day Britain and America celebrate VE Day on the 8th of May, the Russians honour the 9th, the date that had originally been set aside by the Allies. For the Soviet people, VE Day remains both a celebration of great joy and intense sorrow. At least 20 million Russian citizens had perished since 22 June 1941, the day the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, laying waste to entire cities, towns, and villages. And the terrible losses have never been forgotten. Across Europe, nations were liberated, from the British Channel Islands to the Greek islands in the Aegean Sea. Dunkirk, St. Nazaire, and La Rochelle all gained their freedom, as did Norway and Denmark. Even the strip of territory stretching from the western Netherlands to Czechoslovakia, still under Nazi control, was handed back as German troops capitulated to local Allied forces, fleeing west wherever possible to avoid capture by the vengeful Soviets.
The final act in the destruction of Nazi Germany took place on the 23rd of May, when British troops arrested Admiral Dönitz at his Flensburg headquarters near the Danish border. From this point onwards, the major Allied powers—Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and France—ruled supreme over Hitler’s now-disbanded German Empire.
But the question of “what next?” needed a definite answer. Always eloquent, in his V-E Day broadcast, Churchill had expressed what the rest of the world was thinking: “We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing, but let us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead. Japan, in all her treachery and greed, remains unsubdued.”
Yet it was Harry S. Truman who had the technology within his grasp to force the Japanese to surrender. After just weeks in office, the responsibility for launching a nuclear attack on Japan rested very firmly on the new president’s shoulders.