The People You Will Meet Along the Way

Before we set out together, I would like you to know who will travel with us, because a chronicle of endings is never only a list of dates; it is a long line of people who stood in small rooms, held pens they did not want to hold, and waited for news that changed their lives.

Some of them are famous, and you will recognize their names at once, but I have tried to meet them in this book the way you might meet a stranger on a train, by noticing first the place around them: the olive trees, the chalk dust, the scrubbed deck of a battleship in the early morning.

In the olive grove you will meet General Giuseppe Castellano, who waited through a long afternoon in the late summer of 1943 for a telegram that would allow him to sign the first armistice of the war. Near him, in the background of that chapter, stand Marshal Pietro Badoglio, an old soldier asked to lead a tired government out of the war, and the Allied officers on the other side of the folding table, among them General Walter Bedell Smith, who would sign again at the war's end in the west.

In the forests and lake country of the north you will meet Marshal Carl Mannerheim, an aged commander who had to steer his small nation out of the war without breaking it, and who understood that leaving a war can be as dangerous as entering one.

At a mountain hotel in the summer of 1944 you will meet John Maynard Keynes, tired and brilliant, stepping down from a special train with his papers, and Harry Dexter White, his partner and rival across the conference table. These two men argued over money, but what they were really drawing was the shape of a world in which nations might trade instead of fight.

At the palace by the sea in February 1945 you will meet the three leaders whose names everyone knows, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, but you will meet them first through the eyes of Anna, the president's daughter, who watched over her father's strength in those cold days, and through Sarah, the prime minister's daughter, who wrote cheerful letters home about the long drives and the cold.

In the spring of 1945 you will meet Harry Truman, who became president on an April evening without warning and inherited both the war and the peace, and you will return to him at the lakeside palace in July, where he took the chair of the last great conference of the war.

In the schoolhouse of a cathedral town, at two in the morning on the seventh of May, you will meet General Ivan Susloparov, an officer from the eastern ally who had to decide, without clear orders, whether to put his name to a surrender, and General Alfred Jodl, who signed for the defeated side and asked the victors for generosity.

On the deck of a battleship in a quiet bay, on the second of September 1945, you will meet Mamoru Shigemitsu, the foreign minister who climbed the ladder slowly with his cane because of an old injury, and who carried the hardest signature of the war on behalf of an exhausted people.

In the autumn of 1945 you will meet James Byrnes, who signed the paper that brought the Charter of the United Nations into force, and with him the quieter builders of peace who wrote declarations, conventions and treaties in the years that followed.

And then there are the people whom history books seldom name.

You will meet Margaret, an old bell ringer who taught two children in a frosty tower how to listen to a bell; Matthias, a carpenter whom I watched mending a round table; Odile, who kept a market stall where I found a child's old exercise book among the boxes of a house clearance; Anke on a ferry, who pointed out to me a lighthouse that had stood dark for a long time after the fighting; Heinrich, an old railwayman I knew as a child, who remembered the trains that carried people home; and Klara, whose old gramophone taught me how a voice could be kept on a disc and carried through a dangerous night. Some of these people I met myself, in the ordinary places where I like to walk and listen; others I know only through the small things they left behind.

You will also meet many people without names at all: the soldiers who shook hands on a broken bridge, the families who gathered around radios at noon, the prisoners who waited for ships on distant islands, the mothers who listened every day to a radio programme that read out the names of the missing, and the young students who, years later, crossed an old border on a train without even noticing it.

I ask you to meet all of them, on every side, with the same respect. Some of them made terrible decisions during the war, and this book does not hide that; but in the rooms where the war ended, each of them had to choose between going on and stopping, and every choice to stop saved lives that would otherwise have been lost.

When you read about them, I hope you will hear, beneath the scratch of pens and the ringing of telephones, the quieter sound that runs through the whole book: the sound of people, in many languages, hoping that the silence after the guns would last.

Prologue: Listen for the Many Endings

The Second World War did not end on a single day.

The Second World War did not end on one day or in one room, but on many days and in many rooms, one front at a time. If you hold on to that single thought as you read, the long ending of the war will look slower and more human than the one date most of us learned at school.

We usually speak of the end of a war as if it were a door that closed with one sound. The calendars of every nation give us a day to mark, a day with flags or a day with silence. Yet when you look closely at the years from 1943 to 1945, the picture changes. The guns fell silent the way the lights of a long train go out when it reaches the last station at night. They went out carriage after carriage, each in its own moment, while the passengers further back were still awake and still travelling. Some soldiers laid down their arms in a tent among olive trees, and some in a schoolhouse. Some laid them down on the deck of a battleship, and some only decades later, in a forest or a jungle. This book is a chronicle of those endings, told in the order of the calendar. I would like you to walk through them with me as a friend would, slowly and with care.

An old man read the dates on a station memorial.

The idea for this book came to me on a railway platform on a grey afternoon in late autumn. I was waiting for a local train that was already twenty minutes behind its timetable.

At the end of the platform, beside a bench whose green paint had worn through to the wood, stood a small memorial of dark stone. You will find such stones in many stations, carrying the names of railway workers who died in the war. An old man in a long coat stood in front of it, a folded newspaper under his arm. He was reading the dates cut into the stone with one gloved finger, moving slowly from line to line as if he were checking a timetable. I watched him because he did not stop at the last date, as I expected. He went back up the column again and again, as though one line had been left unread. When the train finally came in, its brakes sighing as it slowed along the platform, he turned to me. He said, quite simply, that his father had come home in 1949, four years after the war had ended for everybody else. Then he climbed into the carriage ahead of me, and I never saw him again. His words stayed with me through the whole journey and for a long time after it.

For his family, you see, the war had not ended on the day printed in the history books, nor on the day of the parades. It had ended on an ordinary weekday in 1949, when a thin man stepped down from a train with a cardboard suitcase. He then walked the last mile home on foot, past fields he had not seen for nearly ten years. There are millions of such private endings, on every side of the war. Behind every public signing that you will read about in these pages there stands a crowd of quiet days like that one. Each of them was as real to the people who lived it as any ceremony in a palace.

I have since asked many older people when their war ended, and I have almost never heard the same answer twice. A woman who had worked in a telephone exchange told me it ended on the evening the blackout curtains came down from her kitchen window. A retired teacher said it ended for him on the morning his school reopened, with half the desks still empty. A farmer's widow told me, very quietly, that it ended for her only when the letter came that her brother would not return. You may have heard such answers in your own family, and if you have, you already know what this book is trying to say.

A war ends in rooms where people sit down and sign.

Even the public endings, the ones with pens and tables and photographers, came one after another rather than all at once. I find it helpful to imagine the war as a great machine with many wheels. Its ending was the slow winding down of that machine, wheel by wheel, until only the smallest ones still turned in the dark.

The rooms where the wheels stopped were often surprisingly plain. On the third of September 1943, the first partner of the Axis to leave the war did so in a military tent. A general in a plain civilian suit signed a short document there, under the olive trees, while the summer heat pressed on the canvas. On the seventh of May 1945, the Axis forces in the war in the west surrendered in a red brick schoolhouse that served as a headquarters. The signing took place in the early hours of the morning, among maps pinned to the walls of a former classroom. On the second of September 1945, the war in Asia was formally ended on the deck of a battleship in a bay. The signers used an ordinary table covered with a green cloth, and the ceremony lasted less than half an hour. When you think of those three rooms side by side, the tent, the classroom and the deck, a simple truth appears. Peace did not need a palace to arrive in. It needed only people willing to sit down, to read, and to put their names to a page.

The demand for unconditional surrender shaped every later ending.

To understand why the endings took the shape they did, you have to go back to a winter conference in January 1943. The leaders of two of the western Allies met for ten days in a villa hotel in a warm port city, far from their own capitals, together with their military staffs.

On the twenty-fourth of January 1943, at a press conference on the lawn behind the villa, the president of the western ally spoke a short phrase. He said that the Allies would accept nothing less than the unconditional surrender of their enemies. The phrase was not new to him, but saying it aloud before the reporters made it a public promise. That promise followed every later negotiation like a long shadow following a train across a field. It meant that there would be no bargaining over terms in the old style, no exchange of conditions between equal parties. It also meant that every government on the losing side had to find its own way of accepting something it had been told it could not negotiate. Some found that way quickly, some slowly, and some only after their cities and their soldiers had paid a very heavy price. I do not say this to blame anyone, because the decision was made in a hard time by people carrying heavy burdens. Still, I want you to keep the phrase in mind, since you will hear its echo in nearly every room we enter together.

Lay the first and last signing dates side by side.

Before we go further, I would like to ask you for a small piece of work. You need only a pencil and the margin of a page or the back of an envelope.

Write down the date of the first armistice signed by a partner of the Axis, the third of September 1943. Beside it, write the date of the last great signing of the war, the second of September 1945, on the deck in the bay. Now count the days between them, remembering that 1944 was a leap year with an extra day at the end of February. If you count carefully, you will arrive at seven hundred and thirty days, which is two full years less one day. Then let your eye rest on that number for a moment. For seven hundred and thirty days, somewhere in the world, an ending was being prepared, signed, broadcast, refused or finally accepted. On every one of those days people were still dying, on every side, while the papers that would end their war moved slowly from desk to desk. When I first did this little calculation myself, at my kitchen table on a winter evening, I put the pencil down. Then I sat for a while without doing anything else at all.

The endings came one after another like stations on a line.

Imagine that you could stand on a hill above those years and look down along them. You would see the endings strung out like stations along a railway line, each with its own name board and its own clock.

The first station is the tent of September 1943, and the long summer negotiation that led to it. That negotiation began after the leader of the first Axis partner had been voted out by his own council in the night of the twenty-fourth to the twenty-fifth of July 1943. The next stations come in 1944, when the smaller partners of the Axis stepped away one by one. One turned around on the twenty-third of August, when a young king and his officers changed sides in a single evening. Another agreed to a ceasefire on the fourth of September and signed an armistice on the nineteenth. A third signed its armistice on the twenty-eighth of October. In the same months, while the fighting was still heavy, delegates met in a mountain hotel and in a brick mansion to draw the shape of the peace in advance. In the towns that were freed, one street after another, the church bells were rung again.

Then the stations come closer together, as they do when a train enters a great city. There is the conference at the palace by the sea in February 1945, and the meeting of soldiers from west and east at a river on the twenty-fifth of April. There are the signings of early May, the islands and pockets that were freed in the days after, and the declaration of July. There is the voice on the radio at noon on the fifteenth of August, and finally the deck in the bay on the second of September.

Yet the line does not end there, and I would ask you to remember this. Beyond the last great station the rails go on into the years after the war. They run through the long journeys home of millions of prisoners and refugees, through the trials, and through the treaties of 1947, 1951 and 1955. They pass the joint declaration of 1956 that ended the state of war between the eastern ally and the island empire. At the far end of the line stand the lonely soldiers who came out of the jungle in 1972 and 1974, still faithful to orders that nobody had cancelled.

Each ending had its own hour and its own silence.

What moves me most, when I read the old records, is how exact the people of that time were about the hour. A surrender was not only a date but a minute, written down by a clerk or read from a watch. Very often it came with a second hour as well, the moment when the ceasefire was to begin. That second hour gave the news time to travel to men who were far away from any radio.

In the schoolhouse in May 1945, the signing was recorded at forty-one minutes past two in the morning. The ceasefire was set for one minute after eleven in the evening of the following day. On the deck in the bay, the first signature was placed at a few minutes past nine in the morning, and the last one about twenty minutes later. When you read such times, I hope you will do what I have slowly learned to do. Stop for a moment and imagine the silence in the room as the pen moved across the paper. Imagine the small scratch of the nib, the cough of someone standing at the back, the shuffle of a shoe on a wooden floor. Think, too, of the soldiers on distant fronts who did not yet know that their war had just been signed away. In those silences there was no triumph, only tiredness and a careful hope.

The clocks themselves did not agree, and this is worth keeping in mind as you read. When it was morning on the deck in the bay, it was still the evening of the day before in the capital of the western ally across the ocean. A surrender signed at breakfast on one side of the world was read in the evening newspapers on the other side, under a different date. So even the most exact minute in this book belongs to one place only, and you will often need to turn the hands of your own watch to follow the news as it travelled.

The dead of every side belong in this story.

A chronicle of endings could easily become a chronicle of winners, a story of flags raised and documents handed over. I have tried hard not to let this book become that.

The war took the lives of tens of millions of people, soldiers and civilians, women and children, in every land that it touched. The great majority of them never saw any of the endings that I will describe to you. Some died in the last week of fighting, some on the very last day, and some after the signing, before the news reached them. When you read of a general signing in a schoolhouse, I would ask you to think also of those who were not there. Think of the young soldier on the losing side who had been told he must never give up. Think of the mother on the winning side who would not live to hear the church bells. Think of the prisoner who would wait years for a train home. They are part of every ending, and none of the signings would mean anything without them. I will not describe the battles, the bombings or the camps in detail. Their names and their dates are enough to call them to mind, and I want this to be a book you can read slowly, perhaps even aloud, in a quiet room.

Reading a chronicle slowly is a kind of remembrance.

You may wonder why I have chosen to tell all this in the strict order of the calendar, rather than by theme or by region. The reason is simple, and it comes from that old man on the station platform.

The calendar is the one thing that every person in the war shared, whatever uniform they wore and whatever language they spoke. A day in September 1943 was the same day for the general in the tent and for the sailor far out at sea. It was the same day for the farmer in a village that the front had not yet reached. It was the same day, too, for the child in a cellar waiting for the noise to stop. When you follow the dates one after another, you are walking beside all of them at once. You begin to feel how the end of the war came to each of them in turn. Sometimes it came as good news, sometimes as fear, and sometimes as a strange quiet that nobody quite trusted. In each chapter I will set the events in their order, with the hours and the rooms where I know them. Now and then I will stop, as you would stop at a wayside chapel on a long walk, to remember the people living through those days.

Small things seen today can open a door to the past.

Along the way I will also tell you about a few small things that I have seen myself, in my own travels and in my own town. There will be a round table in a carpenter's workshop, a bell rung on a frosty morning, a ferry crossing a cold sea at night, and a child's exercise book in a box at a market stall.

I do this not because my own life is important to the story. I do it because I have found that the past is often closest to us in ordinary places, where nobody expects to meet it. A railway platform, an old timetable, or a stone with names at the end of a bench can open a door that a thick history book keeps closed. You probably have such places near you as well. Perhaps there is a memorial on a village green that you pass every day without reading, or an old photograph in a relative's drawer. I hope that by the end of this book you will look at them with new eyes and a little more patience.

The old man was gone but the stone remained.

I went back to that station many months later, on a summer evening, half hoping to see the old man again. I knew, of course, that it was unlikely.

He was not there, and the bench had been freshly painted, but the stone was the same. In the low light the first date on it stood out more clearly than the others, as if someone had wiped the dust away on purpose. It was a date in September 1943, the month of the tent among the olive trees. Beneath it the dates went on down the stone, through the autumn and the winter and the long year that followed, until the last line near the gravel. I stood in front of it as he had stood, and I read the names slowly, one by one, without hurrying. A freight train passed on the far track while I read. Its wheels clicked over the joints of the rails like the ticking of a very large clock.

When the last wagon had gone and the platform was quiet again, I took off my hat for a moment. I did it for the railway workers on that stone, and for the people of every side whose names are cut into other stones, in languages I cannot read.

Then my own train came in, slowing gently along the platform until it stopped. I climbed aboard and sat by the window, and I watched the little stone grow smaller in the evening light, its first date in September 1943 still catching the last of the sun.