May 8, VE Day, 1945

It was a Tuesday.  And as the day was ending, the Unconditional Surrender was announced.

From Wiki:

“Adolf Hitler, the Nazi leader, had committed suicide on 30 April during the Battle of Berlin, and Germany's surrender was authorised by his successor, Reichspräsident Karl Dönitz. The administration headed by Dönitz was known as the Flensburg Government. The act of military surrender was first signed at 02:41 on 7 May in SHAEF HQ at Reims,^[2] and a slightly modified document, considered the definitive German Instrument of Surrender, was signed on 8 May 1945 in Karlshorst, Berlin at 22:43 local time (that’s 5:45 PM Washington Time).

The German High Command will at once issue orders to all German military, naval and air authorities and to all forces under German control to cease active operations at 23.01 hours Central European time on 8 May 1945.”

I had gone to school that day, PS-82 in Manhattan, knowing nothing of this momentous event. We were at home, beginning to eat our dinner at our Manhattan apartment. The announcement came on the radio shortly thereafter. We all smiled, I remember.

That War had changed many lives, including ending the lives of more than 80 million people worldwide.  And I remember, several months later, smiling when I saw my Uncle Bill walking toward our apartment on Second Avenue, having just returned from his Seabee duties in the South Pacific.  The War had engulfed us all.

Daisy, my mum, had no college training, but she had acquired some skills with numbers. Specifically, she went to work during the War as a Bookkeeper at a company called Gibbs and Cox, a Naval Architecture firm that designed marine vehicles, specifically boats meant for wartime duty.  In addition to Daisy, my sister Ruth dropped out of high school at Julia Richman in Manhattan.  She was 16 and a junior in high school, but the War beckoned and she went to work alongside my mother, but as a typist.

The War had changed so many lives. Daisy worked and earned a decent living, but the War caused the introduction of many changes, not the least being food rationing. We could still buy food, unlike many Europeans, but it was rationed, so that food could be diverted to our troops. Folks were issued Food Stamps that would be needed in order to buy many items of food, as well as other commodities (automobile tires were rationed, and autos themselves became a casualty, with production lines being diverted to producing military vehicles, including tanks, jeeps, etc).

One casualty of the rationing system was our dog. We owned a little white dog we named Cleo. Daisy had bought food for our dinner one day, and, before she got around to preparing our dinner, Cleo had somehow gotten into the meat she had purchased—Rationed Meat!. When it was discovered that Cleo had eaten into the rationed beef, Cleo became history. He was sent to a doggy hostelry and never again darkened our door.

And then there were the Blackouts. When a signal came down, all lights in Manhattan had to be turned off. Think of that. Manhattan went dark. And should we ignore that order, we had an air raid warden banging on our apartment door. They thought maybe New York would be a target for German bombers (although how Germans could have gotten bombers within reach of Manhattan seemed dubious at best. But Blackouts we had aplenty.

I was ten when that war ended, a young lad with many memories of scary days. To be fair, unlike, say, London, we had no bombers dropping those wicked bombs on us in Manhattan. Still, we did not know that then, so we remained apprehensive. Most of us also knew someone actively engaged, and a few friends actually lost someone in conflict. So, when the conflict actually ceased, via that Unconditional Surrender, soon after Adolph committed suicide, there was much shouting and singing and dancing.

Somehow, nothing that followed ever compared to that Great event. 911 comes close to producing great shock, and massive anger. In that crazed act, someone did something that even the Germans could not do during that Great War.  So, if our reaction to 911 is viewed as somehow excessive, we think it was not. Attack America at your peril.

And so it goes.