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<text> <title> (1940s) Victory In Europe </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1940s Highlights </history> <link 08175> <link 08110> <link 00095><link 00102><article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Victory in Europe </hdr> <body> [Allied troops landed on the Riviera beaches of southern France in August, opening an important front that prevented the Germans from drawing reserves from the south to help contain the drive across northern France. Suddenly, deliriously, Paris was free, liberated by its own resistance forces and by U.S. and Free French troops.] (September 4, 1944) The news that made the whole free world catch its breath last week as the news that Paris was free. It was one of the great days of all time. For Paris is the city of all free mankind, and its liberation last week was one of the great events of all time. This even was reported by the first U.S. newsman to enter Paris, TIME's Chief War Correspondent Charles Christian Wertenbaker. Excerpts from his eyewitness report: I have seen the faces of young people in love and the faces of old people at peace with their God. I have never seen in any face such as joy as radiated from the faces of the people of Paris this morning. This is no day for restraint, and I could not write with restraint if I wanted to. At 6 o'clock in the morning the tanks began to move, and we followed as far as Antony, where a squad of Spanish Republicans, now of the French 2nd Armored Division, stopped us. There was still enemy resistance ahead. Presently the tanks cleaned it up, and General Leclerc, who stood in the road with one hand in his pocket and the other gripping a cane, decided to go into Paris. It was 9 o'clock. We maneuvered our jeep just behind the General's armored car and drove fast toward the Porte d'Orleans. The people, who up to now had made small groups beside the road, suddenly became a dense crowd packed from the buildings to the middle of the street, where they separated to make a narrow line for the General's car to pass through. No longer did they simply throw flowers and kisses. They waved arms and flags and flowers; they climbed aboard the cars and jeeps embracing the French and us alike; they uttered a great mass cry of delight that swelled and died down and swelled to a greater height. They cried: "Vive De Gaulle!" and "Vive Leclerc!" But one word repeated over and over rose above all the other words. It was: "Merci! Merci! Merci!" A little girl had given us a Tricolor, which we put on the windshield of the jeep, but, seeing our uniforms and hearing our accents, the people said: "You are the Americans?" "You have come at last!" "For four years we have waited." The people said there had been little food in Paris, and in the last weeks almost none. "Are you bringing food to us?" they asked. We said the French had 300 trucks that would soon come to Paris with food. "Merci! Merci! Merci!" The streets were full of people--Resistance groups armed with any old rifles, white-clad doctors and nurses carrying stretchers, and citizens old and young who, in spite of the danger, could not stay at home on this day. We who had been with the armies knew that the decision to enter Paris had been made suddenly, when the fighting in the city made it necessary. We also knew that celebrations of the fall of Paris were premature. Now, at 6 o'clock Friday evening, Paris is free--it surrendered officially at 5--but the batter of machine guns from the Chamber of Deputies still echoes in the streets. General Charles de Gaulle's hour of triumph, ticked off by snipers' fire at him, was one for history. Eyewitnesses recorded it: Down the Champs Elysees into the Place de la Concorde went the procession, at the pace of De Gaulle's brisk wall. There he and the dignitaries got into cars and the procession proceeded down Rue de Rivoli at 40 m.p.h. to the Hotel de Ville. In front of the Hotel de Ville the shooting started. A machine gun let go from the top story of a high building across from the Hotel de Ville. Then other machine guns and rifles fired from above. Everything stopped. People dived under cars, trucks, jeeps, while every man who had a gun or a pistol--and hundreds had--started firing. The shooting started just as the procession reached the Notre Dame cathedral. The time was 4:20. As the first shots rang out, Leclerc and Koenig tried to hustle De Gaulle through the door. De Gaulle shook off their hands and never faltered. While the battle began outside, he walked slowly down the aisle. Before he had gone many paces a machine pistol fired down from above. De Gaulle continued his slow walk up the aisle toward Cardinal Suhard and Monsignor Beaussart, who never faltered either. A Te Deum was playing from the organ where the machine pistolers were hidden. The ceremony was brief. De Gaulle walked back down the aisle as slowly and as calmly as he had gone up it. Thus ended his first great public appearance in Paris. If there had been any doubt about his acceptance by the French people, this hour finished it. [The Germans responded to the Allied gains by lashing out with a new and terrible weapon, the V-I, or "flying bomb."] (July 17, 1944) From the start London knew the robot bomb for what it was--a new weapon of terrible power. It was never something to be shrugged off with British humor and contempt for the bloody Nazis. It was a weapon which struck again & again & again, 18 hours at a stretch. Even its sound-effects were potent: a throaty roar, then a sudden silence when the jet motor stopped and the bomb dived; then the blast. It kept thousands of Londoners in deep shelters. It drove other thousands to the country. It kept thousands, at work aboveground, in a state of sustained apprehension which the Great Blitz never matched. As inaccurate as it was impersonal, it was a weapon precisely designed for sprawling London, precisely calculated to raise havoc with civilian life. In the first four weeks, the robots killed 2,752, injured 8,000. Still, the robot's power to disrupt was greater than its power to kill; the rate of casualties during the worst periods of the 1940-41 blitz was twice as high. (September 18, 1944) In 80 days the robombs had damaged 870,000 English houses, killed 5,817 people, seriously wounded 17,036 others. The Germans launched 8,000 one-ton robombs--an average of 100 a day, beginning June 16--of which 2,300 reached British targets. One long-guarded secret: 92% of all casualties occurred in London. [The Allies lanced through France with unbelievable swiftness, paced by General Patton's racing armored columns and bolstered by a supply system that was a miracle of logistics.] (September 4, 1944) Lieut. General George S. Patton Jr. rapped the map with his leather riding crop, which sheathes a glistening poniard. He pointed with it to the next objective, a town 50 miles away. Said he to a Third Army corps commander: "Get there--any way you want to." As he had before, he was demanding the impossible of his supply officers. As before, in this miraculous month, they would get the impossible done. By last week "Georgie" Patton's supply lines reached more than half-way across France. He was getting gasoline by parachute for his forward tanks. Exactly how far along toward Germany's borders his 35-ton daggers were by this week was something for the enemy to worry about. As a rule, they did not find out until the tanks were upon them, blazing away at their rear. (September 11, 1944) But by this week the Allies had smashed deep into the Low Countries and U.S. forces probed at the outer hedgehogs of the Siegfried Line. This week battles would boil on German soil. In 78 hours last week units of General Patton's Third Army swept over the Marne near Paris, zipped through to Verdun and a minor battle. Within another 48 hours they were in Alsace, at Metz; then they were in reported stabbing into the Reich's rich industrial Saar Basin. In four days they had covered an area that, in World War I, had been fought over for four years. (September 25, 1944) In the first 100 days after D-day, over 1,000,000 long tons of supplies (700,000 items) and 100,000 vehicles poured into France. What was more, these supplies closely followed the slashing, wheeling, speeding columns of Allied tanks and infantry via plane, truck, pipeline and railroad. The North American Way. This miracle was in the American tradition, a tradition the Germans have never really understood. It was begotten of a people accustomed to great spaces, to transcontinental railways, to nationwide trucking chains, to endless roads and millions of automobiles, to mail-order houses, department stores and supermarkets; of a nation of builders and movers. It was also a miracle in the British tradition, begotten of a people who for generations have sailed all waters, great and small, and delivered their goods to every shore and harbor of the world. It was a joint miracle, wrought by many hands. [A cleverly conceived plan to take the bridges of the lower Rhine, where it crosses from Germany into The Netherlands, was in initiated.] (October 2, 1944) The battle was fought in the undulating countryside just west of where the Rhine divides (into the Waal and Lek) for its final course to the sea. Here there were three fine towns: Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Arnhem, rich in the histories of ancient wars and in the traditions of peaceful living. And here Allied parachutists dropped behind German units like pieces on a checkboard hopping over their opposition. But in war, unlike checkers, the enemy pieces that have been hopped over are not thereby swept from the board. They have to be removed by force. The safety of the paratroopers depended on the Second Army's speed. And the Second Army's speed depended in part on the paratroopers seizing bridges so that its tanks and big guns could roll ahead without interruption. The whole was a fine calculation of military risks to gain a foothold across the Rhine. In the first surprise the Second Army pushed to Eindhoven. Thereafter, as often happens in war, the stroke did not go according to plan. To take Nijmegen and its modern (less than ten years ago) five-span, mile-and-a-half-long bridge was the task of American paratroopers who were landed south of the town. They found the Germans in command of both the north and south ends of the coveted bridge. The U.S. paratroop commander decided to send his men across the river in small, rubber assault boats, to storm the long bridge from the north. The Americans had only 26 boats. They gathered their craft half a mile downstream while British artillery raked the Germans across the river. But when the first force of Americans pushed off, the river splattered around them with machine-gun and mortar fire. Each of the 26 boats carried a dozen men, but only 13 boats returned for more paratroopers. Some paddled, some bailed with their canteen cups. This time only eight boats returned (one carried back three dead and four wounded). After the third trip there were only five boats. They kept going. Across the bridge suddenly appeared a U.S. flag: the north end had been cleared. As if they had rehearsed it for weeks, the infantry moved in to clean out the Germans on the slope behind the Belvedere. At last the tanks moved out across the bridge. Nijmegen was a 24-hour sweet dream of tactical triumph. Arnhem, ten miles to the north, was a week-long nightmare. The British airborne division had descended north of Arnhem (pop. 80,000), which lies on the north side of its river. The airborne British, storming in to seize the bridge, had run into hot trouble half a mile short of it. Germans in force held houses, parks and paratroops fought house to house, day & by big by big guns, thumped by mortars, clipped by machine guns. They set up field stations for their wounded--and wounded Germans straggled into them. The Germans captured some of the stations, and Allied and German doctors worked together. With the airborne was one reporter: Alan Wood, a British correspondent with a shortwave radio, dubbed the airborne's little island of rubble "this patch of hell." After five days & nights Wood reported "Our men are being asked to do more than ordinary flesh and blood can stand... "If in the years to come any man says to you, `I fought with the Arnhem airborne force,' take off your hat to him and buy him a drink...The few of Arnhem will rank in glory with the few of the Battle of Britain." [As the summer of 1944 went on, the Russians swept past their own frontiers and into the Baltic states and Poland. They pushed to within a few dozen miles of Warsaw, then stopped while another Polish tragedy in the long and tragic history of that nation, took place. On August 1, Polish patriots in Warsaw had risen against the Nazi overlords, and expected the Russians to come to their aid. Inexplicably, the Russians did not. To this day, it is not known whether the Red armies were really worn out and at the end of long and uncertain supply lines, as they claimed, or whether they stood cynically by until it was too late to save the non-Communist leadership of the rebellion, along with thousands of other Poles who died in the rubble of their city. It just so happened that the Soviets had a pro-Communist Polish regime waiting in the wings in Lublin.] (October 16, 1944) German might, Russian policy and the calculated indifference of Britain and the U.S. last week wrote bloody finis to a chapter of Polish history. In 1939, as the Germans stormed into blazing Warsaw after a 20-day siege, the Warsaw radio went off the air playing Polish funeral hymns. Last week Warsaw died again. After a 63-day siege, a ferocious fight from building to building and block to block, the Partisan forces of General Bor (Lieut. General Tadeusz Komorowski) surrendered to the Germans. This time there was no aerial music. There had been little aerial help either. during the first few weeks of the uprising, the Russian Army twelve miles away did nothing to aid the Partisans, who were under the command of the Polish Government in Exile. Instead it disarmed Partisans. When Madame Helena Sikorska (widow of Poland's late great Premier and commander in chief) and 15 leading Poles protested, Prime Minister Winston Churchill fumed. Then Russia, stung in part probably by foreign criticism, in part probably mindful of the effect on those parts of Poland controlled by the Lublin government, began to send aid to Warsaw. But when General Bor was made commander in chief of all the Polish Government's forces, the Lublin government denounced him as a "criminal," threatened to arrest and try him if he fell into their hands. Promptly, when General Bor surrendered to the Germans, the Lublin Poles cried: "Tailor!" [In the Pacific, the U.S. went after Tinian, Guam, Peleliu. The fighting was hard, the Japanese resistance desperate, the casualties proportionately high on both sides. But everyone was waiting for MacArthur to make good on his two-and-a-half-year-old promise to return and liberate the Philippines.] (October 30, 1944) The Nashville bore shoreward. The first land sighted by General MacArthur was the islet of Suluan, the first seen by Magellan when he discovered the Philippines in 1521. His first major goal was Leyte, in the heart of the islands, where devoted Visayan guerrillas had been heard calling by secret radio for help a year ago. The Deceptive Blow. This was what Douglas MacArthur had long advocated, with an intensity which seemed wholly justified because he believed he had been ordered out of Corregidor only in order to lead a counterinvasion soon. Five hours after the first wave of Army infantrymen dashed across the shell-pocked beaches, General MacArthur and his party filed down a ladder from the Nashville's deck into a landing barge. MacArthur sat upright in the stern of the barge. When it grounded in shoal water, he walked down the ramp and waded ashore. He was wet to the midriff, but the sun glinted on the golden "scrambled eggs" on his strictly individualistic cap as he faced a microphone. To Filipinos his first words were the fulfillment of a promise: "This is the Voice of Freedom." That was how the last Corregidor radio programs began. Said Douglas MacArthur: "People of the Philippines, I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippines soil...At my side is your president, Sergio Osmena...The seat of your government is therefore now firmly re-established on Philippine soil...Rally to me...Let every arm be steeled. The guidance of Divine God points the way. Follow in His name to the Holy Grail of righteous victory." [As the troops stormed ashore on Leyte, the U.S. Navy, in the last great engagement of naval forces, narrowly but decisively defeated the Japanese in the three-pronged Battle of Leyte Gulf. Admiral Halsey and the Third Fleet helped punish the central Japanese force that had come through the Sibuyuan Sea, south of Luzon, to interdict the landings. Then, taking a calculated risk, Halsey took his carriers up north to counter the northernmost Japanese threat, leaving the understrength Seventh Fleet to cope with the third, southernmost Japanese attack force attempting to force the narrow Surigao Strait into Leyte Gulf.] (November 6, 1944) The first-quarter moon had set early, and the morning darkness was deep in Surigao Strait. At the southern end, squadrons of PT boats lay in ambush. As the Huso and Yamasiro entered the narrows with their screen, the PTs attacked. The tiny, bucking craft made their reputation for dash and expendability in the Philippines, and they lived up to it. They scored some hits, lost several of their number. Still the Japs came on. Now it was the U.S. destroyers' turn. at 3:30 a.m. they attacked with torpedoes. Then hulking Rear Admiral Jesse Barrett Oldendorf, commanding a powerful, balanced task force, put into effect his policy of "never give a sucker an even break." His ships laid down a semicircular wall of fire, from guns of all calibers, 5-inch to 16-inch. Laying it down were five battlewagons salvaged from the wreckage of Pearl Harbor: the California, Tennessee and Pennsylvania (14-inch), West Virginia and Maryland (16-inch). Ultramodern fire control and crack handling put the first salvos squarely on the targets. The Japs slowed from 20 knots to twelve. They hesitated as their leading ships caught fire; then they turned and ran. In a 40-minute hail of shellfire at ranges of eight to ten miles, and a later hail of bombs as they trailed oil through the Mindanao Sea, the Japs lost the battleships Huso and Yamasiro. MacArthur proclaimed that every ship was sunk; Nimitz hedged, saying all units were "sunk or decisively defeated." "Bull" Halsey's swift stroke against the northernmost force had been brilliantly successful, but he was going to have to let some of the cripples get away. In mid-battle, he got a desperate call for help from Kinkaid's Seventh Fleet. Had Halsey stayed too long at his appointment in the north? Kinkaid's jeep carriers had already caught it hot & heavy from the Japs' central force, which whipped through San Bernardino Strait before dawn--before, the jeeps' aircraft could get off. The CVEs were at no pains to hide their plight: they shrilled for help in uncoded voice radio. And well they might. While the Japs' bomb-battered battleships and destroyers hugged the coast of Samar, heading for the supply ships, Jap cruisers and more destroyers swung wide into the Philippine Sea, heading for the U.S. carriers. Their 6- and 8-inch guns outranged the jeeps' 5-inchers. Their speed was vastly superior. It looked like murder. The CVEs executed the best-known naval maneuver: they turned south, firing over their sterns. They claimed some hits. Luckily the Jap's gunnery was bad. Two destroyers and a destroyer-escort covered the carriers' retreat by a furious attack launched about 8:30. With torpedoes and 5-inch guns they tore into the vastly superior enemy. Two U.S. ships were quickly blown up. The third, hit in one engine room, fired a spread of torpedoes at a heavy Jap ship, then limped around to fire another spread. After an hour she was abandoned. [The Japanese force was finally beaten with the extensive help of carrier aircraft. In Europe, the Germans attacked Britain with V-2 bombs, the first true rocket weapons.] (November 20, 1944) For weeks southern England had been under a bombardment as lurid as something out an early Wells novel. Both London and Berlin kept the business under wraps. Then, last week, Berlin announced that London was under heavy fire from V-2, the second Vergeltungswaffe or "vengeance weapon"--the long-range rocket which Berlin had long threatened and London had long anticipated. Best information at hand indicates that V-2 is a wingless, cylindrical missile, 40 ft. long and 5 ft. in diameter, which soars to the astounding height of 60 to 70 miles. Reports from Sweden were that it has a range of 250 to 300 miles, and that its maximum velocity is around 4,000 miles per hour. Witnesses who saw the V-2 falling at night said it looked like a "falling star" or "the tail of comet." By day, it looked like "a flying telegraph pole." V-2 seems to be far less accurate than V-1. According to one expert, it has a radius of error of 30 to 200 miles. Like V-1, it is more of a morale and propaganda weapon than an effective military instrument, and Winston Churchill flatly characterized it as such. [Throughout the autumn, coordinated advances from Belgium in the north through Metz and Mulhouse were slowly but surely bringing Allied forces to the borders of Germany itself. Though a tenacious defense was to be expected, the steady Allied pressure against an exhausted foe appeared about to take its inevitable toll. In December, however, the Germans revealed themselves to be far from exhausted.] (December 25, 1944) On a 60-mile front, from gloomy, bloodsoaked Hurtgen Forest to the eastern bulge of Luxembourg opposite Trier, the Germans finally smashed back. They struck with more weight and fury than they had mustered at any time since their ill-fated attempt to break the Allied line at Mortain, in Normandy. After a short spell of bad weather which grounded Allied reconnaissance and attack planes, Rundstedt struck. Crack German armored and infantry divisions drove in behind massive artillery barrages. German paratroops landed behind the U.S. lines, tried to snarl communications. Buzz-bombs, rockets and a new, undescribed V-weapon came over the lines. In clearer weather, the resurgent Luftwaffe showed a burst of offensive strength. Heaviest German thrust was delivered in the heart of the Ardennes, east of Malmedy, where they overran the U.S. forward positions entirely, advanced five miles into Belgium. Generals Bradley and Hodges had been surprised and caught off balance. They now seemed to expect more blows before the feverish explosion of enemy strength petered out. Until it did, they would probably yield in one place, try to hold in another, to make the push as costly for Rundstedt as they could. But U.S. casualties would rise as the drive was broken. (January 1, 1945) At first everything was wild confusion. Germans suddenly appeared over the crest of hills and shot up towns. They overran rear-area supply points, pounded upon U.S. artillerymen before they could get to their guns. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt's skillful breakthrough had had the first great element of success: surprise. He had struck the thinnest sector of the American line. He had cleverly begun with light attacks, concealing his intentions, playing upon the Americans' underestimation of his strength. Then savagely, the full force of the German blow was unleashed. Its suddenness, its underrated force, sent the Americans reeling like a boxer who has taken a terrific punch to the solar plexus. The Germans followed through, hoping to corner the Americans, to knock out the U.S. first Army. Through most of last week the Americans battled mainly for time. But by week's end they had braced, were fighting back with an aggressiveness that matched the Germans' savagery. After a week the Americans got two days of clear skies, turned them to telling account. On the second day the Allies flew more sorties than D-day's historic 11,000. Up from the Saar area came large forces of Lieut. General George S. Patton's tankheavy Third Army to strike at the Germans' southernmost penetration at Arlon. Heavy battles raged for the wedges the Americans had been able to hold in the Monschau-Malmedy-Stavelot area and to the west of Saint-Vith. But they were perilous triangular salients. Lieut. General Courtney H. Hodges' First Army had apparently stopped the spearhead closet to Liege, focal point of U.S. supplies. (January 8, 1945) The U.S. command had given one order: hold Bastogne at all costs. The Americans (some 10,000) worked like devils to make some sort of defense. On a perimeter about two miles out of the town they set up a line of foxholes, manned by the 101st's paratroopers. Stationed nearby were groups of tanks and tank destroyers. Slight ( 5 ft. 8 in., 135 lb.), salty Brigadier General Anthony Clement McAuliffe, the 101st's acting commander charged with holding Bastogne, called them his "Team Snafu." On Tuesday, Dec. 19, the Germans rolled up from the east and collided with the American tanks, which had gone out to meet them at neighboring villages. On the first night one of the worst things that could befall an island of besieged happened to Bastogne: the Germans captured its complete surgical unit. Bastogne's wounded would have to get along without amputations, without fracture splints, without skilled care at all. Through Wednesday and Thursday Bastogne battled almost continuously on its perimeter, suffered tortures in the overcrowded town. Shells poured in from all sides. Some 3,000 civilians huddled in cellars with the wounded. Food was running low--the Germans had also captured a quartermaster unit. Ammunition was dwindling--an ordnance unit had been taken too. By Friday Bastogne was a wrecked town, its outskirts littered with dead. There had been at least four fighting Germans to every American--the elements of eight enemy divisions. The dead were probably in the same ratio. Through the lines on Friday came in enemy envoy carrying a white sheet. He delivered an ultimatum: two hours to decide upon surrender. The alternative: "annihilation by artillery." General McAuliffe did not hesitate. He had been touring the aid stations, had heard the wounded beg him, "Don't give up on account of us, General Mac." He sat at a debris-littered desk, printed his reply with formal military courtesy: "To the German Commander--NUTS!--the American Commander." So there would be no misinterpretation, an officer translated for the blindfolded German envoy: "It means the same as `Go to Hell.'" Christmas was the turning point. As darkness fell the next day, a sentry spotted several U.S. Sherman tanks rolling down a ridge from the south. He alerted the outposts; captured Shermans had carried Germans up to the lines before, and sentries had been shot down. Out of the leading Sherman's turret popped a bandaged head. The man with the bandage and the big shiner on his right eye yelled the proper password. He was Lieut. Colonel Creighton ("Abe") Abrams, commanding the 4th Armored Division's rescue spearhead. (January 22, 1944) Battered and bedeviled, the German salient in the Ardennes shrank, squirmed, changed shape. Allied counterblows from three directions forced Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt to make a decision. He could stand and fight a battle that was turning against him, or he could back up with his well-earned gains. He chose retreat--and conducted it with consummate skill and minimum losses. Top U.S. military sources were now agreed that Rundstedt had aimed, primarily, to capture the Allied communications center at Liege, seize or smash the great supply dumps there. But they failed even to capture Liege--and thus failed to force a withdrawal of the Allied positions fronting the Ruhr. Yet Rundstedt had achieved what was, undoubtedly, his secondary aim: to disrupt the Allied offensive for four to six months. In casualties he had probably got an even break. The Allies claimed some 50,000 Germans dead or wounded, 40,000 taken prisoner. Last week Secretary Stimson gave a preliminary count of 40,000 American casualties, including 18,000 missing, but this obviously did not include all the categories of losses. [As the Battle of the Bulge was winding down, U.S. forces in the Pacific moved to finish their recapture of the Philippines. With Leyte in control, MacArthur looked toward Luzon and the archipelago's capital, Manila. A huge armada spearheaded the invasion of Luzon at Lingayen Gulf, and the landing forces met only moderate opposition as they swept south.] (February 12, 1945) Douglas MacArthur came back to Manila, Pearl of the Orient. He came back as he had promised, through 4,000 miles--and 35 months. Far behind now lay the bitter campaign across New Guinea, the dashing leapfrog drive along the 1,500-mile north coast. Still fresh in the memory of his soldiers was the landing in force on Leyte, the swift lancing drive to Mindoro and Marinduque, the dazzling, varied attack that had baffled and finally paralyzed the Jap on Luzon. No one doubted that there would be hard fighting aplenty before the Philippines were entirely redeemed; but Manila was the crown and symbol of the entire Southwest Pacific campaign. The war that had begun in defeat and humiliation had yielded a great victory: clear-cut, renowned--and semifinal. Neither Manila nor her liberators were garbed for a gala. The city was drab and dirty after the Jap occupation. The incoming soldiers were dust-caked and sweatstreaked. But next morning, as the sun mounted, the miracle of freedom restored called forth a rush of popular emotion that was louder than the music of bands, gayer than whipping banners. Suddenly Manila's unkempt streets swarmed with men, women & children, shouting "Veektory!" and "Mabuhay!"--the Tagalog "Hurrah!" From the little the Japs had left them, from the fullness of their hearts, the Filipinos pressed gifts on their deliveries. A small boy darted out to hand a precious egg to one startled American. [The second conference of the Big Three leaders was held at Yalta in February. It appeared to be a great success. But the meeting, along with its follow-up in Potsdam in July, was later seen to have condoned the Soviets' creation of a sphere of influence in the Eastern European countries they had liberated.] (February 19, 1945) By any standards, the Crimean Conference was a great achievement. All doubts about the Big Three's ability to cooperate, in peace as well as war, seemed now to have been swept away. On the basis of the Big Three's communique, no citizen of the U.S., the U.S.S.R., or Great Britain could complain that this country had been sold down the river. Stalin gave his strongest support yet to the Roosevelt policy of unconditional surrender. More important, the occupation and control of defeated Germany is to be an Allied, cooperative job: "The forces of the three powers will each occupy a separate zone...A central control commission consisting of the supreme commanders of the three powers (will have) headquarters in Berlin." Russia gets eastern Poland up to the Curzon line (with some minor adjustments "in Poland's favor"), and Poland will get German territory to the west and north. "...A conference of United Nations should be called at San Francisco...April 25, 1945, to prepare the charter of (a world security) organization." The Big Three said that they had settled the tough problem raised by Russia's previous insistence that any major power should be able to veto any action against itself, withheld the details of agreement until France and China have been consulted. Where necessary, the Big Three powers reserve the right to intervene in the affairs of liberated countries (as Britain did in Greece) until the people of those countries can "create the democratic institutions of their own choice." The Big Three's words presumably applied to Russia's sphere (Bulgaria, Rumania, etc.): "They jointly declare their mutual agreement to concert, during the temporary period of instability in liberated Europe, the policies of their three Governments in assisting the peoples liberated from the domination of Nazi Germany, and the peoples of the former Axis satellite states of Europe, to solve by democratic means their pressing political and economic problems." [Yalta had scarcely ended before some of its postwar provisions were put to the test. Churchill had to use British troops, who had just finished liberating Greece, against homegrown Communist rebels who were sowing terror throughout the country. And in Rumania, visiting Soviet Vice Commissar for Foreign Affairs Andrei Vishinsky quickly arranged the removal of a stubborn anti-Communist premier and the installation of a minority pro-Soviet regime. In the Pacific, the Marines landed on tiny Iwo Jima, then on Okinawa in the Ryukyus, less than 400 miles from Japan's southern-most island of Kyushu. Allied preparations had been thorough, naval and air support well coordinated. But fanatical Japanese defenders exacted a terrible price in U.S. casualties: 6,800 killed on Iwo Jima, 12,500 on Okinawa. In the latter battle, the defenders held out an incredible 82 days, lost almost 100,000 men. At Okinawa, a new Japanese defensive air tactic born of desperation was revealed.] (March 5, 1945) On Iwo Jima last week at least 40,000 Marines fought to the death with 20,000 entrenched Japanese in an area so constricted that the troops engaged averaged twelve men to an acre. Ashore with the marines, TIME Correspondent Robert Sherrod radioed his account of the battle: Two hours after the original landings on D-day, we had a toe hold and it looked like a good one. But all hell broke loose before noon. From the north and from the south the hidden Japs poured artillery and 6-in. mortars into the marines on the beachhead. Nearly all our tanks were clustered near the black-ash beaches like so many black beetles struggling to move on tar paper. The first night on Iwo Jima can only be described as a nightmare in hell. It was partly the weather--Iwo is as cold as Ohio at this season. The front line now has moved out of the tropics into a region of high winds and long periods without sunshine. All through this bitter night the Japs rained heavy mortars and rockets and artillery on the entire area between the beach and the airfield. Twice they hit casualty stations on the beach. Many men who had been only wounded were killed. One group of medical corpsmen was reduced from 28 to 11; the corpsmen were taking it, as usual. Along the beach in the morning lay many dead. About them, whether American or Jap, there was one thing in common. They died with the greatest possible violence. Nowhere in the Pacific war have I seen such badly mangled bodies. Many were cut squarely in half. Legs and arms lay 50 ft. away from anybody. Only the legs were easy to identify--Japanese if wrapped in khaki puttees, American if covered by canvas leggings. (March 12, 1945) There is no longer any doubt that Iwo is the most difficult amphibious operation in U.S. history. The end results of Jap tenacity, natural defenses and weapons might have caused weaker men to falter, but the marines have carried out their assignment with nobility and courage. Everybody has had to take it. Even artillerymen, under the heaviest fire they have seen in the Pacific, have suffered 15% casualties. One division has lost seven doctors. Such "rear area" troops as motor transport battalions have had 10% casualties. But the troops who have had to charge impossible defenses have taken it as never before. I came across one company that had only 62 men left. Another had lost 109. Another had lost an officer and 40 men in a vain but heroic charge. (April 30, 1945) There was no question that the harakiri tactic of Kamikaze (Divine Tempest) airmen had been adopted as a chief effort. There were strong indications that it had become the major hope of a defense of desperation. Now nearly all Jap air attacks are suicidal. Last week the Navy confirmed reports that the Japs were building a special Kamikaze plane, with a cockpit into which the pilot is locked before the take-off. A picture of what it was like on the receiving end of a Kamikaze attack came from TIME Correspondent Robert Sherrod, who cabled: "The first suicide attack I saw was last winter, against a ship from which I had recently been detached. I had the excruciating experiencing of watching a flaming furnace which contained many of my friends. Seven Jap planes got through the fighter screen. Six were shot down, but the seventh crashed my old ship. It poured a column of smoke 300 feet high. Through the black an occasional explosion pitched roaring flames." [Allied forces began crossing the Rhine into Germany in March 1945, and by April 1, the defeat of the Third Reich was assured. Air Forces continued to rain bombs on cities already reduced to rubble heaps. The Russians were at the outskirts of Berlin. Through collapsing German defenses, U.S. and British forces drove swiftly toward the Elbe, the dividing line between zones of occupation agreed on at Yalta. The Russians took Vienna in a bloody battle. As the Allies advanced, they began coming on the death campus, with their pitiful remnants of starved, terrified humanity. The horror felt by those who liberated the camps is conveyed by these excerpts from Time Inc. correspondents' eyewitness accounts.] (April 30, 1945) From the Belsen camp LIFE Correspondent George Rodger reported: During the month of March, 17,000 people died of starvation, and they still die at the rate of 300 to 350 every 24 hours, far beyond the help of the British authorities, who are doing all possible to save as many as still have strength to react to treatment. Under the pine trees the scattered dead were lying, not in twos or threes or dozens, but in thousands. The living tore ragged clothing from the corpses to build fires over which they boiled pine needles and roots for soup. Little children rested their heads against the stinking corpses of their mothers, too nearly dead themselves to cry. A man hobbled up to me and spoke to me in German. I couldn't understand what he said and I shall never know, for he fell dead at my feet in the middle of his sentence. From the camp at Buchenwald TIME Correspondent Percy Knauth reported: In this war we have had more than our share of atrocity stories, but Buchenwald is not a story. It is acres of bare ground on a hillside in Thuringia where woods and fields are green under warm spring sun. It is miles and miles of barbed wire once charged with electricity and guarded by machine-gun towers built of creosoted pine logs. It is barracks after barracks crowded with 21,000 living, breathing human beings who stink like nothing else on earth and many of whom have lost the power of coherent speech. Buchenwald is something of a showplace now, nine days after it was liberated, and there are certain things you have to see. There were two ovens there, each with six openings. It was a clean room with no smell. The ovens were not clean. In some of them there were still charred remains, a grinning, blackened skull, a chest from which the flesh was still not fully burned away, skeletons half melted down. The ovens were cold now but in recent weeks before the Americans came their clean bright flame consumed between 150 and 200 people daily. You cannot adequately describe starved men; they just look awful and unnatural. They walk or creep or lie around and seem about as animate as the barracks and fence posts and the stones on Buchenwald's bare, hard-packed earth, and when they are dead they are corpses and then gone. It is terrible and beyond understanding to see human beings with brain and skillful hands and lives and destinies and thoughts reduced to a state where only blind instinct tries to keep them alive. It is beyond human anger or disgust to see in such a place the remnants of a sign put up by those who ran the place: "Honesty, Diligence, Pride, Ability...these are the milestones of your way through here." (May 7, 1945) Last week the U.S. Seventh Army entered Dachau and liberated 32,000 of its still living inmates. With them went TIME Correspondent Sidney Olson. His report: Beside the highway into Dachau there runs a spur line off the Munich railroad. Here a soldier stopped us and said: "I think you better take a look at these box-cars." The cars were filled with dead men. Most of them were naked. On their bony, emaciated backs and rumps were whip marks. Most of the cars were open-top cars like American coal cars. I walked along these cars and counted 39 of them which were filled with these dead. The main entry road runs past several largish buildings. These had been cleared; and now we began to meet the liberated. The eyes of these men defy my powers of description. They are the eyes of men who have lived in a super-hell of horrors for many years, and are now driven half-crazy by the liberation they have prayed so hopelessly for. Again and again, in all languages, they called on God to witness their joy. [There was still little realization that the vast majority of people in the cramps, living and dead, were Jews. That fact would not be fully known until the Nuremberg war trials revealed the "Final Solution" envisioned by Hitler and his henchmen. Berlin, and the Third Reich, fell.] (May 7, 1945) The world's fourth city, in its dying hours, was a monstrous thing of almost utter destruction. The once-wide Chaussees were mere lanes in a jungle of enormous ruins. Even the lanes heaved and quaked to underground expulsions. The Germans, driven from the streets, had carried their final fighting to the subways, and the Russians blasted and burned them out. The Germans had burrowed into the sewers to get behind the attackers, and Russian sappers went systematically about the foul business of blowing out great sections. Avalanches of stone thundered into the lanes and blocked them off. Towers of fire surged into the pall of smoke and dust that overhung the dying city. Here and there Berliners risked a dash from their cellars to the bomb craters filled with brackish water. Berlin's water system had gone; thirst was worse than a possible bullet. This was the Berlin that every Red Army man had dreamed of entering in triumph. But in his wildest dream none could have imagined these vignettes etched by a madman. Once the Red storm had passed and the German shells had run out of range, waiters from a Bierstube stood in the rubble with foaming steins, smiling tentatively, offering them to the Russians, going through the motions of tasting the brew, as if to say: "See, it is not poisoned." But from the cauldrons of the subways came a hot, sour, brownish odor--a smell of sweating men, of dank nests burned out by flame-throwers. Out of the subway's stench emerged boys in grew-green and hobnailed boots. These were among the last--the Hitlerjugend. Some were drunk and some reeled from weariness, some sobbed and some hiccupped. One more Platz in the last long mile to the Wilhelmstrasse had been won, and one more Red banner flapped over a scene of dead bodies and discarded swastika armbands. Into that Platz, then into others, and finally into the vast wreckage of Unter den Linden came tanks and guns. Katusha rockets screeched over the Brandenburger Tor. Then, against a background of flames, the Red banner of victory was unfurled over the gutted Reichstag building. But, even after the ten-day battle was won, Germans died hard. (May 14, 1945) Like spring, victory in Europe came at last--in its own sweet time. For soldiers in Europe, war's end came variously, and at various times. For some it ended long ago--at Dunkirk, at Salerno, in Normandy, in the Ardennes, at many an unsung roadside. But for each survivor the war ended on the day when the prisoners' cage was opened or the field ahead no longer spat death. For the commanders it ended over different tables at different hours: for Alexander in Caserta on Sunday; for Montgomery on Luneburg Heath on the following Friday; for Devers, at Munich on Saturday. For heads of states, it ended when they got around to announcing it--anticlimatically, after everyone knew it was over. And for ordinary people, the war in Europe ended--not when they heard the voice of the radio, nor when they saw paper blizzards falling between skyscrapers, nor even when they ate their first food in freedom--but slowly and silently, by degrees, somewhere in each man's heart. But this week victory in Europe, like long-deferred spring, was here. </body> </article> </text>