The bitter taste of victory
“The pilots were slumped in their chairs. No one spoke a word, or sang, or anything”
Today, Britain remembers VE Day as a moment of victory and celebration. But in mainland Europe, memories are sometimes a little more complicated. On 8 May 1945, huge crowds took to the streets to drink and dance the night away in Paris and Brussels, just as they did in London. But according to the French newspaper Libération , “It was only the young who felt exuberant” – among the older generations there was, instead, an air of indefinable melancholy.
In Rome, according to at least one witness, “the atmosphere was sober and calm, even among the civilians”. In a letter to his wife, shortly after the celebrations, Len Scott, a former journalist, claimed that despite a certain amount of “feeble cheering”, the celebrations in the Italian capital passed “as uneventfully as a church parade”.
In some parts of Europe, there were no celebrations at all. In Prague, for example, the last German units did not surrender until 9 May: amid continued fighting and chaos, there was no time for organised festivities. In parts of northern Yugoslavia, fighting continued for another week.
One of the most vivid accounts of VE Day in mainland Europe was given by the French fighter pilot Pierre Clostermann, who was stationed in Fassberg in Germany when the Armistice was announced. According to Clostermann, the mood on his airfield on 8 May 1945 was downright gloomy. “That evening in the mess was like some extraordinary vigil over a corpse,” he later wrote. “The pilots were slumped
