The man who stopped the war: 97-year-old recalls VE Day coded message
“I finished it,” says Gregory Melikian, 97, “but my heroes are the guys that hit the beaches, so many of whom never came back.”
Seventy-five years ago, in the early hours of 7 May 1945, the supreme allied commander Gen Dwight Eisenhower selected Sgt Melikian, then a 20-yearold radio operator, to send the coded message to army groups and allied capitals announcing Germany’s unconditional surrender.
Of the three operators working in the Reims school that housed the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, Melikian was the youngest, an enlisted Illinois University student shipped to France just the year before, and that made him first choice for the US general.
“We were across the hall from the war room [where the German surrender was signed by the German general Alfred Jodl],” says Melikian. “There was a guy from Texas aged 36, another guy from South Carolina, 27 or 28, and yours truly. Eisenhower’s exact words were: ‘I want Melikian to send this coded message and talk about it for the rest of his life.’ It was 74 words to the world saying that tomorrow, 8 May, at 11.01pm, hostilities will cease and that we will stop shooting at each other.
“I immediately had one of the lieutenants in the decodification room translate it for me. We were all expecting it any day and had been taking bets.”
Three-quarters of a century later, and wearing a medical mask and protective clothing, Melikian was flown on Thursday in an empty plane from his home in Phoenix, Arizona, to Washington with the help of the Greatest Generation Foundation, a charity for veterans.
Melikian is to be Donald Trump’s guest of honour at the White House on Friday. “He wants to make a big deal of the victory – which is his prerogative,” Melikian says. “Whether we like him or not, he is the one and only president, and we have one at a time.”
The US veteran will represent a dwindling generation with direct memories of the second world war, many of whom are now trapped because of the coronavirus pandemic in their houses, apartments, care homes and hospitals on what is likely to be the last great anniversary of their lifetimes.
Among them are Jean Thouvenin,
93, who was 13 when the war started in 1939. He enlisted on 2 November 1944, the day after his 18th birthday against the wishes of his parents, joining the 1st Army (France) as part of a medical battalion of stretcher carriers “picking up the dead and wounded”.
VE Day in 1945 was spent in a Tyrolean village, about 25 miles from Innsbruck. “It was spring and a beautiful day,” says Thouvenin. “I had an accordion and the officers came to get me to play in the local chateau. I played all night. We partied all night. I was completely drunk – we were all completely drunk.
“This year I will spend 8 May at home. It’s hard. This is my day of celebration and memory.”
The same will be true of André Hissink, 100, who escaped to Britain from his native Netherlands in 1940 on HMS Keith as the Germans stormed through the Netherlands and Belgium.
A pilot and navigator on 69 bombing missions for the No 320 (Netherlands) Squadron RAF over occupied Europe, providing close air support for ground forces on D Day, his memories of the fighting – and the moment of peace – are crystal clear.
“They were just dots below us on the beaches – some moving and others not,” Hissink says of D-day, speaking from his home in Perth, Ontario, Canada.
“I was on our base in Brussels when we heard of victory in Europe and we did something we shouldn’t. As officers we had pistols and fired them in the air. The military police were there in second: ‘You can’t do that sirs.’ We promised not to do it again.”
Harry Shindler, 99, a British veteran of the Battle of Anzio and the liberation of Rome, will also be at home with his memories, in Italy where he has lived since 1982.
“There are very few of us left now; I’m told I’m the last of those who landed at Anzio in 1944,” says Shindler, who hopes to properly mark the moment peace was won when lockdowns across Europe are lifted. “Things being what they are now, of course, we really are restricted on movements. It is an important day for us and for everybody, and it’s good that people still remember.”
The 8th of May is known in Germany as the Tag der Befreiung,or Day of Liberation. For the 75th anniversary, Berlin has declared the day a holiday, but those planning to mark it have had to change their plans. Claus Günther, born 1931, spent the day 75 years ago hiding in a monastery in remote Bavaria, having been evacuated from his Hamburg home under the Nazi regime’s child evacuation scheme.
A member of the Hitler Youth, the then 14-year-old was only informed about Germany’s defeat by a commander three days later, and he remembers being secretly relieved.
“There was a weight off my heart because I wouldn’t have to do military service,” Günther says. “But I was so steeped in the Nazi party, I could barely remember how to greet people without saying ‘Heil Hitler’.”
Shindler says: “This war we had, people forget this … wars normally have been wars for empires or pieces for land; this was a war really against what Churchill called the most horrendous regime there had ever been in the world. This was a war against evil.”