He did not see the end coming — perhaps he did not dare to dream. In the 11 months since he had landed on D-Day, John Life of the Royal Artillery had fought across France, crossed the Rhine and entered Germany. Now his division, near Bremen, was ready for its next battle.
“I was all geared up for it,” Life said. “Then, suddenly, we got to the end of the war. Fortunately, one of our chaps had anticipated something like this. He’d brought a crate of Dutch gin.”
Life and other British soldiers like him were able to toast the end of a long journey from Normandy to victory. The odds were ultimately in their favour but nevertheless, the resistance they faced had been fierce. There had been joyful moments of liberation, but tragedy was with them to the end and the slog to Germany had been hellish.
After the crucible of D-Day, the Battle of Normandy was no less brutal. The decisive closing of the Falaise pocket was described by General Eisenhower, the Allies’ supreme commander, as “one of the greatest ‘killing fields’ ”. British forces then pushed on and tried to secure a crossing over the Rhine in the ill-fated Market Garden. That was another dreadful operation as the Arnhem crossing proved to be “a bridge too far”. One of the airborne troops told a journalist that, compared to Arnhem, “Dunkirk was a quiet weekend”.
After a harsh winter, British forces began their final push. In the south, they helped seize the north of Italy and moved into eastern territories such as Czechoslovakia. In the north, they liberated the Netherlands and Denmark before joining the thrust into Germany. By the end of April, surrenders began in a piecemeal fashion, but die-hard Nazis seemed determined to fight on. When news eventually came of the total surrender, the relief was immense.
“There was a lot to celebrate,” Life said of VE Day, “you’d come through all right” — a classic phrase of understatement for those who had survived this extraordinary ordeal. Life would make it to the age of 100, dying only last year. But sadly, even on that last day of the war, there were some who did not come through all right.
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Bernard William O’Neill of the London Rifle Brigade had taken part in the Normandy campaign (he was photographed in action near Caen) and made his way with his comrades to Germany. It is not clear how he died, but it happened on VE Day. He is buried in a cemetery in Brugge. He was 23.
Bernard William O’Neill, left, with fellow riflemen George Wood and Jack Pearson take part in Operation Epsom in Normandy in June 1944
Elsewhere, Donald James Hunter from Upminster climbed into his Spitfire that morning, even though victory had been secured. Flying for the RAF Volunteer Reserve, his plane crashed in Varrelbusch, Germany. Aged only 22, he left behind his wife, Betty Jean, from Phoenix, Arizona.
Hunter and O’Neill are two of almost 80 names listed by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission as having died in the European theatre on May 8, 1945. They are buried in places ranging from Greece to Serbia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Denmark and Britain.
Some soldiers found other horrors along the way. The young Denis Norden and Eric Sykes, who would later find fame as entertainers, were members of an RAF signals unit and had joined its theatrical troupe “to get out of guard duty”. One thing their show was short of was lighting.
“Someone said there was a place near us which was a kind of camp and they’ve got all sorts of lights for illuminating it at night,” Norden said in 2015. “We didn’t know what to expect at all.”
The camp was Bergen-Belsen.
“We were totally unprepared for the sights that hit us between the eyes,” Sykes wrote later in his memoir. “Appalled, aghast, repelled — it’s difficult to find words to express how we felt as we looked upon the degradation of some of the inmates not yet repatriated. As far as I could see, all these pitiful wrecks had one thing in common: none was standing.”
When they told their comrades what they had seen, the troops held a whip-round to send food to the camp. However, Norden would later become haunted by the worry that the rich rations may have done the emaciated Holocaust victims more harm than good.
Prisoners in Bergen-Belsen eat their first meal after the liberation of the camp
ALAMY
The war may have been coming to an end on the Continent, but the soldiers knew their fight was not yet over. Some had already headed to the Far East and on VE Day itself the news came that James Nicolson, a hero of the Battle of Britain, was missing. In 1940, aged 23, he had been wounded in the air, suffering life-threatening burns and wounds, but fought on and shot down the Messerschmitt that had attacked him. That earned him the Victoria Cross. By May 1945, he was in India. He died in a crash in the Bay of Bengal.
Life would follow Nicolson’s path from Europe to Japan. He recalls coming back from ten days’ leave and finding his company in flux. “Don’t you know you’re being transferred?” Life was told. He too would go to India.
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It is easy to forget that these men did not know that victory over Japan was just months away. While civilians in Britain celebrated the end of the war in Europe, the soldiers thought this was a time only for what Churchill called a “brief period of rejoicing”.
And rejoice they did. In Russell Miller’s book VE Day: The People’s Story, there are recollections of the joy that was had. Pilot Officer Anthony Wedgwood Benn, later a major figure in the Labour Party, was in Palestine when he heard a cry of “the war is finished”. That evening, he saw a community of nations celebrate.
“German, Czechs, Poles, Turks, Yugoslavs — all did their national dances,” Benn said. “Then it was explained that the RAF officers would do an English national dance. Hurriedly deciding to do the boomps-a-daisy, two of us took the floor — it was an instantaneous success and everybody joined in.”
Anthony Wedgwood Benn, known in his political career as Tony, described scenes of celebration in Palestine similar to those in London, below, and across Europe
DANIEL BEREHULAK/GETTY IMAGES
Nearer the action was Captain Ian Carmichael, later to become a famous actor. After landing three days on from D-Day he fought with the 30th Armoured Brigade through to Germany, being once mentioned in dispatches — and he happened to have two days’ leave when the news broke.
His afternoon in Brussels began with the thrill of clean clothes, a hot bath and a posh hotel room. Then out he went into the packed streets accompanied by “half-cut but friendly GIs” and “several bottles of champagne”.
“We got tangled up with two young Belgian married couples who shared a flat and insisted that we went back to it for further celebratory glasses,” he said. “Somewhere about 1am, I finally passed out on the sofa.”