It had begun the previous day. A typewritten script of the 18:00 radio news bulletin survives, with the newsreader's handwritten amendments and crossings-out."But unconfirmed reports from correspondents say that the unconditional surrender of Germany to the Western Allies and Russia was signed in the early hours of this morning. They say the ceremony took place in the schoolhouse at Rheims which General Eisenhower uses for his headquarters.
All morning the BBC brought news from across Europe, often from places that had been liberated only hours earlier. In an evocative dispatch from a country road outside Emsdorp in Austria, the British public heard the voices of German soldiers, exhausted and humiliated, being questioned by US servicemen. BBC correspondent Robert Reid watched tens of thousands of defeated men, many of them"stretched out dead beat" on the bonnets of their vehicles, being sent into a field that was being used as a"temporary cage".
At 15:00, Winston Churchill addressed the nation from 10 Downing Street. He recalled the dark early days of the war. He saw a South African flag carried to the front of the crowd, and soldiers and airmen from Canada, New Zealand and the United States join festivities. There were visible reminders of the years of conflict that had just ended: the broken columns where a German bomb had struck Buckingham Palace during the Blitz.
Did the public understand, on that day, how profoundly Britain and the wider world had been changed by the war; that there would be no going back to the old normal of the 1930s? For war had created a new public mood that would change the relationship between the state and society for a generation. Churchill's reference to the"overwhelming power and resources of the United States of America" pointed the way to the new world that would open up from now on - leadership of the Western world had crossed the Atlantic. The United States did not, as it had done in 1918, retreat to its tradition of isolation.
In his 15:00 broadcast Churchill had concluded by reminding the country that Imperial Japan was still undefeated and that Allied forces were still fighting in the East. That warning was echoed in one of the most poignant and arresting moments of the entire day's broadcasting.Mrs MacDonald - who lost a son in the war - reacts to VE Day on 8 May 1945
The BBC now crossed to those islands and introduced a voice identified on air only as"a woman of the Channel Islands".
As we slide deeper into tyranny in the UK.
It took 6 years to defeat a dictator......we have 5.....
We all owe our lives to the men and women xxxx
Two world wars one World Cup
After surrendering, Hermann Goering celebrated with US pilots. Until a message came from Allied HQ: “Strip his uniform of all decorations”. The smile was wiped off Goering’s face. He was to be put on trial as a war criminal
...and here we are again in a crisis and yet we're still lions being led by donkeys!
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