Chapter 7: Sign It Twice

A liaison general waited in a schoolroom full of maps.

At a little after two o'clock in the morning on 7 May 1945, General Ivan Susloparov sat at a long table in a schoolroom whose walls were covered from floor to ceiling with maps. He was the liaison officer of the eastern ally at the headquarters of the western Allies. He had been woken in the night and told that a surrender would be signed within the hour. He had asked his own capital for instructions. None had come. He now had to decide, alone, whether to put his name on a paper that would end the war in the west.

You will remember the car that carried a general from the defeated army through the spring dusk toward a cathedral town on the evening of 6 May. That car had reached its destination long before midnight. The general inside it, Alfred Jodl, had spent the night in talks in an office on the floor above. By two in the morning the talks were over, and the papers were ready.

I would like you to look closely at that room, because it is not what you might expect. There were no chandeliers and no velvet. The building was a red-brick technical school near the railway, taken over as the headquarters of the supreme commander. The room was its map room. Pins and coloured threads on the walls still showed the positions of armies. Charts listed supplies, casualties and the state of the railways. Under the bright lamps, the chalk dust of the old classroom still lay in the cracks of the floor. If you have ever sat in an old classroom after the pupils have gone home, with the chairs pushed back and the smell of ink and floor polish in the air, you will have a sense of the plainness of the place in which the war in the west was brought to its end, and you may find, as I do, that its plainness suits the gravity of what happened there better than any palace could.

Two earlier signings had already stopped the guns in parts of the west.

Before we sit down at that table, you should know that the war in the west was already ending piece by piece. The first piece fell on 29 April, in a great palace in the south. There, two envoys of the Axis commanders in that theatre signed a surrender to the Allied commander. It took effect at noon on 2 May. Nearly a million soldiers laid down their arms.

The second piece fell on 4 May on a windy heath in the north of the defeated country. In a plain army tent with a trestle table covered by a blanket, envoys from the north signed a surrender of all forces in the northwest of their country and in the occupied lands along the northern coasts. The field marshal who received them wrote the time on the paper himself, at about half past six in the evening. The surrender took effect at eight the next morning.

On 5 May a third surrender followed in the south of the defeated country, in a house near a large town, and it took effect the next day.

You can think of these signings as the doors of a long train being closed one by one before departure. Each door shut a part of the war. But the train itself, the war as a whole, had not yet moved. That required a single document, signed for all the forces on all fronts at once. The supreme commander of the western Allies insisted on it, and the eastern ally insisted on it too. Neither side wanted the other to receive a separate surrender behind its back. Each remembered too well how the last war had ended in rumours and bitterness. You should also remember that every hour of delay had a cost that could be counted in lives, because in the east of the defeated country the fighting was still going on, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians were moving westward along crowded roads in the hope of reaching the lines of the western Allies before the guns fell silent.

The table in the map room was set a little after two in the morning.

At about 2:30 the officers came into the map room and took their places. On one side of the table sat the chief of staff of the western Allies, General Walter Bedell Smith, whom you met in the olive grove, a tired man who had led the talks through the night. Around him sat senior officers of the western staffs, General Susloparov for the eastern ally, and a general of the liberated western nation in whose country the school stood. On the other side sat the three men from the defeated army: General Jodl, an admiral, and a young major who served as their aide.

The supreme commander himself was not in the room. He waited in his office along the corridor. He had decided that he would not meet the envoys until they had signed.

The newspapermen allowed into the room stood against the walls under the maps. Their cameras and lamps made the small room hot. Several of them later wrote how quiet it was. There was no speech and no ceremony. A few low words were spoken, a few papers were passed across the table, and the scratching of pens was the loudest sound.

At 2:41 in the morning General Jodl signed the act of military surrender. Then the Allied chief of staff signed. General Susloparov signed as a witness for the eastern ally, and the general of the liberated western nation signed as a further witness.

When all the signatures were in place, General Jodl stood up and asked to speak. He said, in a few sentences, that with this signature his people and his armed forces were delivered, for better or worse, into the hands of the victors. He said that he could only hope the victors would treat them with generosity. Nobody answered him. He sat down again, and the room was silent for a long moment.

I find that silence the truest part of the whole night. It belonged to everyone in the room, and to everyone who was not.

The supreme commander sent a single sentence to his superiors.

After the signing, the envoys were led along the corridor to the supreme commander's office. He asked them, through an interpreter, whether they understood the terms they had signed and whether they would carry them out. General Jodl answered that they did and would. The envoys were then led away. The supreme commander's staff began to draft the message that would tell the governments of the western Allies what had happened.

Several long and proud drafts were tried and set aside. In the end the supreme commander chose a short one. It said that the mission of the Allied force had been fulfilled at 2:41 local time on 7 May 1945.

You might read that sentence aloud and notice how plain it is. There is no victory in it, no glory, and no enemy, only a mission, an hour and a date. I think that the men who had spent years sending soldiers to their deaths could not, that night, find any other words that seemed honest.

General Susloparov, meanwhile, went back to his own quarters. There he found a telegram from his capital. It forbade him to sign anything. It had arrived too late. You can imagine how long the rest of that night must have seemed to him, in a quiet room with a cold cup of tea, wondering what his superiors would say.

Count the hours between the signing and the silence of the guns.

The act of surrender did not stop the war at the moment of signing. It said that all forces under the command of the defeated army would cease active operations at one minute past eleven at night on 8 May 1945, by the clocks of the headquarters. The delay was needed so that the order could travel. It had to reach commanders in distant pockets, on islands, in the mountains and at sea.

Try this with me now. Take a sheet of paper and write two times on it, one beneath the other: 2:41 on the morning of 7 May, and 23:01 on the night of 8 May. Now count the hours between them. You can do it on your fingers, or on a clock face, turning the hands around the dial. You should arrive at forty-four hours and twenty minutes.

When you have the number, I would ask you to sit with it for a moment. Those forty-four hours were not empty. In them, soldiers were still marching and refugees were still walking along the roads. In some places, men were still fighting and dying, on every side, because the news had not reached them or because they did not believe it. If you imagine a clock running down those hours, you will feel how slowly the spring of a great machine unwinds, even after the hand that wound it has let go. I would ask you, too, to think of the signals officers who spent those hours at their sets in cold rooms and tents, sending the same few sentences again and again into the static, never quite sure whether anyone at the other end was still listening or still able to obey.

A child's exercise book on a market stall kept a date in pencil.

Some years ago, at a market of old books and papers in a small cathedral town, I found on a crowded stall a school exercise book from that spring. Its cover was thin and grey, and its pages were full of sums and short dictations in a careful child's hand. The stallholder, a woman named Odile, with a wool shawl around her shoulders against the morning cold, told me that she bought such books by the box from house clearances.

On one page, below a list of sums, the child had written the date, 8 May 1945, and under it a single line in pencil, pressed very hard into the paper: "Today the war is over and Papa can come home."

I do not know whether Papa came home. Odile did not know either. I bought the exercise book, and it lies on my desk as I write these words. When you think of the documents of that week, I hope you will think not only of the act signed in the map room, but also of pages like that one. They were written in kitchens and classrooms on every side, by children who could not yet know which fathers would return.

The eastern ally asked for a second signing in the defeated capital.

In the eastern capital the news of the signing in the map room was received with deep displeasure. The marshal and his advisers felt that a surrender signed in a provincial school, with only a liaison officer present for their side, could not stand for the end of a war in which their country had lost so many millions. They insisted that the surrender be signed again, with the highest commanders of the defeated forces present, in the capital that their armies had captured only days before.

The western Allies agreed. The signing in the map room would be treated as a preliminary act, and the definitive signing would take place on 8 May in the defeated capital.

You may find this doubling strange at first, even a little vain. I have come to see it differently. For the people of the eastern ally, the war had been fought on their own soil, in their own villages and towns, for nearly four years. To them, the ending had to be seen to take place in the capital from which the war against them had been directed, in the presence of their own commanders. A ceremony is a kind of language, and in that language a single signature in a distant school could not say enough. When you stand on a station platform and watch the same train arrive at two different times on two different clocks, you do not ask which clock is right, because each one tells the truth for the town that keeps it; in the same way, I think you can honour both signings without needing to choose between them, and remember that each was made in good faith by people who had paid a terrible price to reach that table.

Near midnight on 8 May the commanders gathered in an officers' hall.

On 8 May planes carried the Allied delegates to an airfield near the defeated capital. They were driven through ruined streets to a suburb in the east of the city. There, a plain two-storey building that had once housed an officers' school had been prepared for the ceremony. In its hall, long tables had been set up and covered with green cloth. The flags of the four Allied powers hung on the wall behind the main table. Electric lamps had been brought in, and a generator hummed somewhere outside.

The final text took many hours to agree, because the delegations had to settle small questions of wording and of who would sign in which place. The ceremony did not begin until close to midnight. The marshal of the eastern army who had taken the capital presided. Beside him sat the deputy supreme commander of the western Allies. Two further generals, from the western Allies and from the liberated western nation, attended as witnesses.

Then the three representatives of the defeated forces were brought in: a field marshal, an admiral and a general of the air force. They sat at a small table near the door.

The field marshal signed first, then the others, and the Allied commanders signed after them. It was already past midnight in the eastern capital, whose clocks ran ahead. There, the date was 9 May. That is why, to this day, the end of the war in the west is remembered on 8 May in many countries and on 9 May in others. Both days are true. You might think of it as one train arriving at one platform while the station clocks of two towns show different hours.

After the signing, the representatives of the defeated forces were led out. The Allied officers stayed at the tables. Food and drink were brought, and the toasts and singing went on until dawn. I do not hold the celebration against them. They had seen four years of the worst war in history.

The streets of the west celebrated while families waited for news.

In the western capitals the end had been announced on 8 May. Crowds filled the squares, church bells rang, and people danced in the streets until late at night. In the east the celebration came on 9 May, when the announcement was made and the night sky over the eastern capital was lit for victory.

But you must also picture the other houses, the ones where the curtains stayed drawn. Families there had lost a son in the last week of fighting. Others had heard nothing at all for months. In the defeated country, women stood in queues for water among the ruins and waited for news of husbands taken prisoner. In some places in the east and the west, the end of the war did not yet mean the end of fear. You will meet some of those people again, because for them the ending was only beginning. If you have ever waited for a telephone call or a letter that did not come, you will understand how the noise of the celebrations outside must have sounded in those quiet rooms, where the end of the war arrived not as a joy but as a final certainty, or as a question that would remain open for many more months.

I have stood in the hall of that former officers' school on a grey afternoon, when the light from the windows lay pale across the long tables. A guard stood quietly by the door. A small group of visitors spoke in whispers in several languages. Nobody laughed, and nobody hurried.

The lamps in the hall burned late into the first night of peace.

The war in the west had taken the lives of tens of millions of people. Soldiers had died on every front. Civilians had died in cities under the bombs, in villages, on the roads, in prisons and in camps. On 8 May 1945 no single document could hold their names, and none tried.

The two acts signed in the map room and in the hall are short. Each is little more than a page. You can read either of them in a few minutes. Yet each ended a war that had lasted nearly six years. If you ever read them, I hope you will read them slowly, and leave a silence at the end for the people they could not bring back. The pens that signed them were ordinary pens, of the kind you might find in any office drawer.

In the early hours of 9 May the lamps in the officers' hall were still burning. The generator hummed outside in the dark, and the long tables under the green cloth were strewn with glasses and papers. Beyond the windows lay the ruined capital, without light in its streets, where people slept in cellars and in the half-rooms of broken houses. For the first time in years, no planes would come over it in the night. In the quiet before dawn, a few windows here and there showed the small, wavering glow of a candle.