Chapter 12: Count the Long Years Home

For many millions of people the war did not end with a signature or a broadcast but years later, on the day they stepped off a ship or a train and saw their own families again. Some of those days came in the autumn of 1945, others came in 1956, and for a very few soldiers the war ended only in the 1970s.

You will remember the soldiers and civilians on the southern islands in September 1945, sitting outside their huts in the evening and looking toward the sea. The ships they were watching for did come, but slowly, one after another, over many months and in some cases many years.

In this chapter I would like you to count those years with me, not as a list of treaties only, but as the time that families spent waiting at piers, at stations and at their own kitchen windows.

Millions of people waited for ships that came one at a time.

At the end of the war more than six million subjects of the island empire were living outside the home islands. About half of them were soldiers and sailors, and the other half were civilians: farmers, clerks, teachers, merchants, and their wives and children. Most of them had no way to return on their own, because the island empire had lost nearly all its ships during the war. The Allies lent cargo ships and landing ships for the work, and the first returning vessels began to arrive in the autumn of 1945.

By the end of 1946 more than five million people had come home. The ships unloaded them at a small number of reception harbours, where they were given a medical check, a little money, a train ticket and a meal. Many arrived with only a bag on their backs, and many had walked for weeks to reach the port where they could board. You can imagine how a harbour felt on such a day, with a gangway lowered, a crowd waiting behind a rope, and every face searching the faces coming down.

Not every face was found. You should picture, too, the people who turned away from the rope when the last passenger had passed.

In the same years, the movement ran the other way as well. Many people from former colonies and occupied lands who had been brought to the home islands for work now went home on the same ships.

In the lands of the war in the west, the movement of people was even larger. At the end of the war several million men and women who had been brought far from their homes as forced labourers were living in camps, and most of them went home in the summer and autumn of 1945. At the same time millions of other people lost their homes when the borders were moved, and they travelled west on foot, on carts and in crowded trains. In both regions the end of the war meant not peace at once, but a great movement of people across the map, like the moment when a crowded station empties after the last train has been cancelled.

An old suitcase in a junk shop carried a painted name.

One Saturday morning I walked into a junk shop beside a small railway station. On a shelf between old coffee grinders and boxes of buttons, I saw a brown cardboard suitcase with metal corners. Someone had painted a name on its lid in white letters, with a number and the word for a transit camp beneath it. The shopkeeper told me that he had bought it with the contents of a house, and that he knew nothing about its owner.

I did not buy it, and I have often wondered whether I should have. That small case had travelled a very long way, perhaps from a camp in the far north and east, perhaps from a prison barracks, to a home where someone had carried it up to an attic and never opened it again.

When you see such a case in a shop window, you might stop for a moment and read the name. It was once the whole luggage of a man coming home.

The radio read the names of the missing every day.

The radio that had carried the emperor's voice in August 1945 found a new and gentler task in the following summer. From 1946, for more than fifteen years, the broadcasting service of the island empire ran a daily programme in which an announcer read out the names of missing people. A mother would write in with the name of her son, his unit and the last place he had been seen. A returning soldier would write in to say that he knew what had happened to a comrade. Then the announcer read the letters slowly, one after another, in a calm voice.

You can imagine a family sitting near the set every evening, listening for one name among hundreds. Most evenings the name did not come. Sometimes it did.

In the lands of the war in the west, the search services of the Red Cross kept card files with millions of names. Families wrote to them for years, and clerks matched cards by hand, letter by letter. If you have ever waited for a train that is very late, and listened to every announcement in case it is yours, you know a small part of that feeling.

Those daily lists of names were a quiet kind of prayer.

The prisoners in the far north and east came home last of all.

The western Allies released most of their prisoners of war by 1947 and 1948. The eastern ally kept many of its prisoners much longer, and set them to work rebuilding its own ruined towns and railways. By the figures usually given, between about five hundred and seventy-five thousand and six hundred thousand soldiers and civilians of the island empire had been taken to camps across the far north and east of its lands after August 1945. Most came home between 1946 and 1950, but tens of thousands did not. By the official count, about fifty-five thousand of them died in the camps, far from their families, in the cold.

Prisoners from the war in the west were held for many years in the same way. The last of them were not released until a chancellor from the west travelled to the capital of the eastern ally in September 1955 and asked for their return. The first trains arrived at a transit camp in a small village in early October 1955, and the last groups came home in January 1956, more than ten years after the end of the war.

At that transit camp a bell hung on a wooden frame. It rang each time a train of returning men arrived, and people from the surrounding villages walked to the camp when they heard it. Some came to greet a son or a husband. Others came only to look at the faces, in the hope of hearing news of someone who had not yet returned.

I once stood beside that bell on a quiet autumn afternoon. It was silent, of course, and a few dry leaves lay on the stone beneath it. I tried to imagine the sound reaching the farmhouses across the fields, and the mothers putting down their work and walking toward it.

The courts tried the leaders of the defeated powers between 1945 and 1948.

For the victors and for the defeated alike, the war did not seem finished until its leaders had been judged. On 20 November 1945 an international military tribunal opened in a large courthouse in an old walled city where the defeated regime in the west had once held its great rallies. Twenty-two men were tried there before judges from four of the Allied powers, and the judgments were read on 30 September and 1 October 1946. On 3 May 1946 another international tribunal opened in the capital of the island empire, with judges from eleven nations. That trial lasted two and a half years, and its judgments were read in November 1948.

I will not describe the sentences in detail. You should know only that some of the accused were sentenced to death, others to long prison terms, and a few were acquitted. Some of the judges themselves wrote dissenting opinions, and the fairness of these courts has been discussed by thoughtful people on every side ever since. Many other trials took place in smaller courts across both regions in the same years.

You will meet the families of the accused, too, if you read the memoirs of those years. They also waited outside courtrooms, and they also grieved.

What I would ask of you is to read these trials as part of the long ending. They were an attempt, however imperfect, to answer through law and procedure what the war had decided through force.

The treaties of 1947 gave the former partners their peace.

On 10 February 1947 the Allied powers signed peace treaties with five former partners of the Axis. These were the first Axis partner whose armistice was signed under the olive trees in 1943, and the four smaller partners who had left the war in 1944. The treaties were signed in a gilded room with a great clock, in the foreign ministry of the republic of the western Allies on the continent. They fixed new borders, set reparations, and limited the size of the armies, but above all they ended the state of war.

You may notice how long it took to reach that day. Between the tent in the olive grove in September 1943 and the gilded room in February 1947, more than three years had passed. If you think of a train that has stopped at a signal outside a station, you know how slowly the last few hundred metres can pass, even when the platform is already in sight. Peace treaties are like that. The fighting stops long before the signal finally turns green.

Subtract the day of the broadcast from the last landing.

Take a sheet of paper once again and write at the top the date of the noon broadcast, 15 August 1945. Below it, write the date on which the last large group of prisoners from the camps of the eastern ally landed at a harbour of the island empire: 26 December 1956. Now count the years, months and days between them.

You will find eleven years, four months and eleven days, which is 4,151 days in all. Then think of a child who was three years old on the day of the broadcast. That child was fourteen when the father came home, and the man who walked down the gangway was a stranger at first. Try to put your own family's dates beside these, the year of a grandparent's birth or a parent's school days, and you will see how much of a life fell inside that space.

I find this exercise more moving than any long description. A single subtraction tells you how long a mother waited at the window.

The peace treaty with the island empire was signed in an opera house.

On 8 September 1951 the peace treaty between the island empire and forty-eight Allied nations was signed in the same opera house on the far shore of the ocean where the Charter conference had opened in April 1945, a building raised after the first world war as a memorial to its dead. The prime minister of the island empire spoke at the conference and signed for his nation. The eastern ally sent a delegation to the conference but did not sign. The treaty came into force on 28 April 1952, and on that day the occupation of the island empire ended, almost seven years after the broadcast. On that spring day some families went quietly to the graves of their dead to tell them the news.

You may find it fitting that this ending took place in a building dedicated to remembering the dead. Many of the delegates spoke of reconciliation rather than of punishment. The treaty itself expressed the hope that both sides would act in friendly association to promote the common welfare and maintain international peace.

A small mountain republic received its freedom on a palace balcony.

On 15 May 1955, in a baroque palace on a hill above a capital, the foreign ministers of the four occupying powers and of the republic itself signed a state treaty that gave a small mountain republic back its full independence. After the signing they stepped out onto the balcony, and the republic's own foreign minister held up the signed document for the crowd waiting in the garden below. People cheered, and many of them wept. The last foreign soldiers left that country in October 1955, and its parliament then declared that it would remain neutral.

I like to think of that balcony as a kind of station platform, where the ministers stood together for a moment before their trains took them back to their very different lands. In the garden below, you would have heard the bells of the city churches ringing across the rooftops for a long time that afternoon.

The joint declaration of 1956 ended a state of war without a treaty.

On 19 October 1956 the island empire and the eastern ally signed a joint declaration in the capital of the eastern ally. It ended the state of war between them, restored diplomatic relations, and promised the return of all remaining prisoners. The declaration came into force on 12 December 1956, and six days later the island empire was admitted to the United Nations. A full peace treaty between the two, however, was not signed in all the years covered by this book.

The last large group of prisoners sailed home in the last days of December 1956. Their ship came into a harbour on the northern coast, where a long wooden pier reached out into the water. On that pier, for more than ten years, mothers and wives had come to meet every ship. Some of them had waited there each time, year after year, for a son who never came down the gangway.

If you ever stand on such a pier, you will feel how quietly the water moves against the posts. The waiting there was very long, and it was very patient.

A sergeant came out of the jungle in January 1972.

For a very few soldiers the war went on in the forest long after everyone else had gone home. Some had never received the order to stop. Others had heard rumours of the end but believed them to be a trick, because they had been trained to think that surrender was impossible.

On 24 January 1972, on a large island in the ocean, two local fishermen checking their traps near a river met a thin man in clothes woven from tree bark. He was a sergeant of the army of the island empire, and he had lived hidden in the jungle for twenty-eight years, the last eight of them completely alone after his two companions died. He returned home on 2 February 1972 to a nation he no longer recognised, with fast trains, tall buildings and televisions in every house. He spoke of his shame at having survived, and he asked that people remember the comrades who had died beside him. You may find, as I do, that his first thoughts on coming home were for the dead and not for himself.

Your own memory of a long absence may help you here. You can imagine the train journey from the airport into the city, the speed of it, and the silent man at the window watching the lights pass by.

A lieutenant laid down his sword in March 1974.

Two years later, on a small mountainous island far to the south, a lieutenant of the island empire was still carrying out the order he had received in 1944: to remain and continue the fight. A young traveller from his home islands found him in February 1974. The lieutenant said that he would come out only if his own commanding officer ordered him to do so.

His former commanding officer, who had become a bookseller in a small town after the war, flew to the island. On 9 March 1974, in a clearing in the forest, he unfolded a sheet of paper and read aloud the order releasing the lieutenant from his duties. The lieutenant listened in silence. You can picture the forest around them, the heat, the sound of insects, and the paper trembling a little in the older man's hands. Two days later, on 11 March, he handed his sword to the president of the island republic in a short ceremony, and he was pardoned.

In December 1974 one more soldier was found, on another island in the south, a private who had been born on a former colony of the island empire. He returned in January 1975 not to the home islands but to his own island, and to a family that had believed for thirty years that he was dead.

When you think of the noon broadcast of 15 August 1945, remember that it took almost thirty years for its words to reach this last soldier, the way a letter that has gone astray may arrive long after the person who wrote it has fallen silent.