War still in progress muted joy of V-E Day

The headlines on May 8, 1945, were as big and bold as the “Japan Attacks Pearl Harbor” headlines three and a half years earlier. Yet these headlines were infinitely happier.

“Germany Surrenders Unconditionally to All Three Allied Nations; Formal Announcement Due Today,” trumpeted The Spokesman-Review 60 years ago today.

“Complete and Final Victory in Europe,” proclaimed the Spokane Daily Chronicle that afternoon.

It was Victory in Europe Day, V-E Day, an occasion of joy, satisfaction and immeasurable relief.

Yet it was not a day of wild abandon. Another story in that day’s Spokesman-Review helps illustrate why: “Mr. and Mrs. William Schockly of Huetter (near Coeur d’Alene) were informed this morning by the war department that their son, PFC Orville Schockly, had been killed on Negros, one of the Philippine Islands.”

Only half of the war was over, and the other half was turning even more deadly. A furious battle for Okinawa and other Pacific islands had been raging against Japanese troops since April 1. Kamikaze attacks were killing U.S. sailors and soldiers by the thousands. The Allies were soberly aware that their work was by no means finished.

Spokane’s muted reaction reflected the mood.

“No confetti, no impromptu parades, no noisy demonstration – it was a city with one thought, ‘How long will it take to bring the same kind of news from the Pacific?’ ” reported The Spokesman-Review. “It was not that they were not impressed; it was that they were tremendously impressed – with the knowledge that there still remains an even greater struggle to be won.”

The Chronicle reported that there was “little or no display of jubilance,” and certainly nothing resembling a joyful riot.

“The emergency hospital had a quiet night, with most patients small children injured at play,” according to the Chronicle.

In the middle of the Atlantic, on the escort ship USS Lance, Lt. j.g. Gene Bronson of Spokane, kept his exuberance in check, too.

“To us it was just another day’s work,” said Bronson. “It was a day of rejoicing, but we knew we had a long way to go to defeat Japan. I knew we would all end up going over there.”

He was right. Within weeks, he was on an attack transport near the Philippines, preparing for the dreaded next step – the invasion of Japan.

The relatively subdued reaction was also due to another reason. Everyone had known for weeks that the end was near for Germany.

Allied forces had been rolling across Nazi Germany all spring. On April 12, a Chronicle headline blared, “Nazi Collapse is Imminent in a Few Days,” and on May 1, The Spokesman-Review trumpeted, “Reds Take Blazing Heart of Berlin.”

“We knew it was coming,” Bronson said. “It was understood.”

In fact, the Associated Press had leaked news of the German surrender one day early, causing the Chronicle to issue a “War Extra” edition on May 7 with a giant “GERMANY SURRENDERS” banner. It also caused the Allied Supreme Headquarters to briefly suspend all AP correspondents in Europe for violating wartime censorship rules. Good news, apparently, was no easier to suppress than bad news.

Yet for millions in the European theater, V-E Day did mark the end of their war.

For Lt. George R. Greer, a fighter pilot from Bonners Ferry, the jubilation was complete. Greer’s P-40 Warhawk had been shot down over Italy in 1943. When the surrender was declared, he was in a German stalag, a prisoner of war camp. His German guards suddenly disappeared.

A week later he was able to jot off a quick V-mail – a system of delivering troops’ mail that involved photographing large amounts of censored mail onto reels of film – to his sister, Genevieve Hoagland, of Spokane.

“We are really a happy bunch of boys now that we are out of Germany,” Greer wrote. “We were assigned to an M.P. squadron when the Germans left and we took over their duties. Had a fairly hard time holding some of the boys in check until the planes came in to take us out. The last of our camp was evacuated the 14th and since then, we have been living the life of Riley.”

For Eva Lassman, a young Polish Jewish woman in a Nazi work camp at Chestochowa, Poland, the war had ended months before, on Jan. 17, 1945.

“There were four camps in that town, and the workers at three of them had already been deported to Germany that day,” said Lassman, now 86 and a Spokane resident. “Ours was the last one, and we were already in the train depot. All of the sudden they marched us back to our camp, and the shooting commenced. The lights and windows in the barracks were broken, and we still didn’t know what was going on. A young man braved the situation and went out. He came back and said, ‘We’re free. The Germans are gone.’ “

Soviet troops had liberated the camp. Yet Lassman was too ill and weak to leave. It took her two weeks to regain enough strength to board a train. By V-E Day, she was back in her hometown of Lodz.

“I knew there were sirens going off,” she said. “But there were no parades. There was nothing to celebrate with. There was very little food and no place to stay. And I was very ill. I was still suffering from the residues of the camp.”

She had no family or friends to celebrate with, either.

“I lost everybody,” she said.

V-E Day marked the beginning of some important changes on the Inland Northwest’s home front, even if those changes were not immediately apparent.

The workers at the big aluminum mills at Mead and Trentwood vowed May 8 to keep producing materiel for use in warplanes and ships.

“We are helping to win another war and we will keep working today, believing there is no better way to celebrate V-E Day,” said the manager of the Trentwood works.

A sound truck was hired to “parade the grounds” at Mead so that employees could “hear all about V-E Day and still work.”

In fact, the head of Spokane’s war employment office said that “Spokane will have added responsibilities as emphasis shifts to the Pacific.”

Earlier that week, the Farragut Naval Base on Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho was assigned a new and ominous task. Farragut would now house, among other things, a “personal effects distribution center.”

That was defined as a clearinghouse “to process and send to the next of kin the personal effects of dead or missing personnel.”

Meanwhile, work was progressing furiously at another wartime plant. The federal facility at Hanford had been crackling with activity since 1943. Yet on V-E Day, hardly anyone, including many of the people who worked there, knew the secret: The plant was developing material for a fearsome new weapon, an atomic bomb.

Still, wartime rigors were beginning to ease on the home front. On May 10, the federal government rescinded a ban on horse and dog racing and ended the midnight curfew on places of entertainment (i.e. bars).

“Curfew will not ring tonight,” announced war mobilization director Fred M. Vinson.

Vinson rang a more sober note by saying that food rationing would continue. So would price and wage controls and the 48-hour work week in war-related industries.

Even in victory, the mood in America continued to swing between hope and dread, as it had since the beginning of the year. As 1945 began, the Allies were closing in on Japan in a series of “island-hopping” moves. These advances had come at an appalling cost. U.S. Marines had landed on Iwo Jima in February 1945 and encountered 21,000 cornered Japanese troops. The Japanese hung on for more than a month, killing or wounding 25,000 U.S. troops – nearly a third of the landing force.

A similar bloody scene was now being played out on Okinawa, where Allied troops landed April 1, 1945. Kamikaze suicide attacks sank 30 Allied ships.

The news had been much better in the European theater. The New Year began with the Soviets camped on the Oder River, within 40 miles of Berlin. By March 1945, American and British troops swept across the Rhine.

By April huge chunks of the German homeland were in Allied hands, and the Nazi defeat was just a matter of time. On April 30, with Berlin under siege from Soviet troops, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker.

The Associated Press reported that Adm. Karl Doenitz, Hitler’s successor, announced on Hamburg Radio that Hitler had died a “hero’s death.” Yet an unidentified voice broke in to Doenitz’s speech and shouted, “This is a lie!”

America was still in mourning for its own leader.

“ROOSEVELT PASSES,” shouted a banner headline in the Chronicle on April 12. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died that day of a cerebral hemorrhage. Vice President Harry Truman was sworn in.

Meanwhile, the good news from Europe was balanced by appalling reports of what the liberating troops had discovered.

In the Inland Northwest, the first inkling hit the news in August 1944, when the Associated Press reported that German POWs had confessed to mass gassings and incinerations at a newly liberated Polish camp called Majdanek.

One SS prisoner said he saw bodies stacked outside the gas house.

“Yes, I knew children were murdered,” said the former SS group leader. “But what could we small people in the SS do? We couldn’t protest.”

As more and bigger death camps were liberated through the spring of 1945, the reports became, as one AP correspondent at Buchenwald wrote, “too great for the human mind to believe.”

In fact, the reports were so incredible that a group of American newspaper editors were commissioned for a fact-finding trip to the camps. On May 5, they issued a statement saying that conditions at the camps were even worse than previously reported. The editors said they found convincing proof of “sadistic tortures too horrible and perverted to be publicly described.”

Lassman, back home in Lodz, knew exactly how bad the conditions had been. She had spent two and a half months in Majdanek before being sent to a munitions factory.

“It was hell on earth,” Lassman said. “There was torture and nothing else. We had to go to roll call and wait for the commandant, and as soon as he came out, if he was angry or drunk, he’d point to the left or to the right. And those on the left you would never see again.”

The AP quoted one former Majdanek SS officer as saying, “I couldn’t understand the systematic killing. I told my wife when I went home on furlough about it and she said, ‘God will punish the German people for the crimes they do.’ “

The Allies would extract their punishment as well. The clamor for war crimes trials had already begun when V-E Day was declared.

As V-E Day came and went, life in the Inland Northwest continued as normal, or as normal as it could be in wartime. The Chronicle reported that “presenteeism” was at 98.2 percent at Spokane’s wartime plants.

“Our workers seem to prefer to celebrate by fixing up a few more things for Hirohito,” said a Mead plant spokesman.

Meanwhile, the Spokane newspapers continued to run a depressing daily feature. It was called the “Inland Empire Casualty Lists.”

Some days, it was longer than ever.