‘Monumental outpouring of emotion, of joy’
VE-DAY REMEMBERED 75 YEARS AFTER THE END OF SE COND WORLD WAR
N. Ann Smith was on duty at a radar station on England’s barren and windswept east coast when she heard that the war in Europe was over.
It was May 7, 1945, and Smith, a member of Britain’s Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, was watching as her radar swept across the North Sea when the station received a message from the navy that it had intercepted a French communiqué. It said: “Total surrender.”
“We didn’t believe it,” said Smith, who turns 96 next week and lives in Britannia. “Even when the news was confirmed, it seemed to fall flat. We expected guns, ringing bells, brass bands, but for a few hours nothing much happened. We continued half- heartedly to sweep the screens, maybe there was a stray German submarine that hadn’t got the news.
“Then at the end came the reaction — the joy, the liberation. We lit bonfires and danced around them. The CO (commanding officer) was lifted onto shoulders and cheered and many a pint was downed in the local pubs.”
It wouldn’t be until the next day, at 3 p.m. on Tuesday, May 8, 1945, that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill officially proclaimed “Victory in Europe Day.” In Ottawa, as elsewhere, people had already been partying for 24 hours in what the Ottawa Citizen described as “the greatest mass demonstration of relief and joy ever to be witnessed in Canada’s Capital.”
News of Germany’s capitulation had been posted the day before in a news bulletin posted on Sparks Street. As the news spread, Ottawans “in uncounted numbers” marched and sang and danced through “a blizzard of rainbow coloured paper,” the paper reported.
Friday’s 75th anniversary of VE-DAY marks one of the last major anniversary’s of the Second World War. Canadians had been fighting in the European theatre for six long years. More than 1.1 million Canadian men and women had served in uniform — one in three adult men. Some 45,000 had been killed and another 55,000 wounded. Though war would drag on for three more months in the Pacific (where hundreds of Canadians captured during the fall of Hong Kong were still held prisoner by the Japanese), VE- Day meant Canada’s war had essentially ended.
“There was this monumental outpouring of emotion, of joy, of excitement — the war was finally over,” said historian Tim Cook, whose latest book, The Fight for History, examines how Canadians have remembered the Second World War. “It was that pent up anxiety and fear and anger being released.”
Of those 1.1 million veterans, barely 30,000 are still alive today. Nearly all of those will be gone within the next five to seven years, Cook said. With them, our firsthand memories of the Second World War will disappear like the smoke from a blown-out candle.
For soldiers on the front lines, VE- Day celebrations were strangely muted.
“There was a feeling of relief that they had survived, but also great sadness that so many of their friends had been buried,” Cook said.
But on the homefront, VE-DAY was celebrated with wild abandon.
Gerry Cann, now 92 and living at St. Vincent’s Hospital, was a 17-year-old air cadet in Yarmouth, N.S., when the war ended.
“I remember it quite well,”
Cann said. “When VE- Day hit they piled us all into buses and drove us out to the airport, where they fired off anything that would make a noise. They wanted us to be part of the celebration. It was the greatest fireworks I’ve ever seen.”
Robin Rousham, 84, was a child in England when he went with a school friend’s family for the celebration. They lit a bonfire in the middle of the road. It was only later that Rousham realized his friend’s family were Dutch Jews, who had barely escaped the Nazis.
“I find it very significant looking back to think that I was with these people on VE- Day,” Rousham said in a phone interview from his apartment at the Perley Rideau Veterans’ Care Centre. “Not that it really sunk in to me at the time as a nine-year-old.”
Ottawa’s Bernard Dufresne, 95, was in class in Montreal when the students got word.
“When the news came all the kids walked out. We went down to St. Catherine Street and joined the mob. I got home mid- evening — long after supper — but the party went all night long,” Dufresne said.
In Halifax, VE-DAY celebrations turned into a full- fledged riot with stores looted and buildings burned, causing millions of dollars in damage.
On Parliament Hill, the Centre Block blazed with lights for the first time since the start of the war. The Peace Tower carillon “pealed incessantly all day and far into the night.”
Acting prime minister J. L. Ilsley, standing in for Mackenzie King who was at a conference in San Francisco, noted the cost of the victory in his speech on Parliament Hill.
“In this, our hour of rejoicing, let us remember those whose thankfulness at the nation’s success is mingles with a deep sense of personal loss,” Ilsley told the crowd jammed onto Parliament’s lawn. “In thousands of Canadian homes, there are places that must ever remain vacant.”
In the months that followed, the giddy exuberance of VE-DAY was forgotten, Cook said. Canada’s National War Memorial, unveiled in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War, but in memory of the First, was hastily converted with the addition of the years 1939-1945 to its base. Even now, 75 years later, Canada has no national memorial dedicated solely to the Second World War, Cook said.
“The end of the war kickstarted the prosperous second half of the 20th century. Canada, as a country was looking forward. We weren’t dwelling on the past,” he said.
“We came out of it scarred and bloodied — 45,000 dead, 55,000 wounded — but we weren’t like Europe. Europe was in ruins. Britain was bankrupt. Our heart was with Britain, but financially we were more tied to the U.S.
“The history was largely forgotten. We were a country that didn’t talk about the world wars, even though they profoundly shaped us as country.”
Smith, who would not emigrate to Canada until 1953, recalled spending VE-DAY with her future husband, bicycling out into the British countryside.
“I remember we laid down on the grass and looked up at the sky and wondered, ‘ What’s going to happen next? What will we do?” she said.
“It was very, very strange after four years of high pressure- life, and then you realized there was a future and it was going to be very different.”
the joy ... We lit bonfires and danced around them.