Telfer - The summer of 45: stories and voices from VE Day to VJ Day

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickenss opening to a Tale of Two Cities seems the most apposite description of May 1945 in Europe at least. The war in Europe was over: it was the best of times, and people danced on the streets in celebration, lit bonfires, played pianos and sang, kissed strangers, dusted off special tins of meat and sometimes quality bottles of booze that they had been saving for just such an occasion and drank freely. Yet the war in the Far East continued, and in Europe every possible terrible thing that could be done to a human being was being done to human beings on a staggering scale, especially in Germany, but also in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria, Hungary and even France and Holland.

Victory was not enough to stop torture, rape, robbery, starvation, humiliation, murder and homelessness; and in many cases, victory was actually the catalyst for these things to take place because of revenge, retribution and victors claiming their spoils. The crimes and heartaches of the war were still being unearthed, concentration camps still being uncovered; people were still being killed, were still living in fear and trying to get home or find a new home; the agonising hunt to find family members dead or alive gripped millions of people across the world; the horror of what had unfolded in the past six years was still fresh in peoples minds and for many was ongoing. It was the worst of times.

People felt passionate about the future and how it must be different from the past; it was the epoch of belief. People distrusted politicians more than ever and those in authority who had sent millions to their deaths; it was the epoch of incredulity. The end of the war in Europe coincided with late spring and early summer and the sun warmed those who had endured a hard winter. There was hope in that summer that things would improve, that new buildings, newly enlightened government, new social contracts, new opportunities would spring from the wreckage: it was the season of light. There was despair that people were doomed to do barbaric things to one another for the rest of time; despair from mourning; despair even from long-awaited reunions gone wrong: it was the season of darkness.

These contrasts of darkness and light in themselves make the period from May to September 1945 a particularly fascinating one, full of every shade of human experience. In some senses, there are two different stories the story of theoccupied countries and those that had not been occupied like Britain and the United States. In what had been fighting zones until very recently, the terror and the suffering were often horrendous. In the non-occupied countries, there were varying degrees of difficulty, but nothing on the scale of what was being faced in Germany, for instance. But the picture is also rather more complex than that. The different stories and experiences of people in this time vary widely from the joys of a young woman dancing uninhibitedly in the West End of London at the end of the war in Europe to a Japanese schoolboy who, in a heartbeat in August 1945, lost everything and everyone he had ever known. From a female German journalist in Berlin, facing the daily terror of rape by Soviet soldiers, to a British soldier in Germany hoping desperately to be demobbed soon so that he could go back to his family. And, of course, misery and joy, hope and despair, poverty and plenty were juxtaposed more sharply and immediately than that, within each and every country. This is the principal focus of this book the real lives and experiences of these different people as around them events on the most monumental scale took place.

This mosaic of stories from those people who witnessed and participated in these historical events forms its own historical narrative, a social history that offers a uniquely personal perspective of what can otherwise easily become dry historical discourse with little understanding of the impact on peoples everyday lives. The events that they were witness to were not just significant at the time, but so markedly defined the post-war, global, geopolitical landscape that the way in which people reacted to those events then seems especially interesting now. Indeed, these are the stories that helped shape the twentieth century and beyond.

As well as the end of the war in Europe and eventually in the Far East, too the summer of 1945 also witnessed the birth of the United Nations and the beginning of the modern welfare state. The United States cemented its position as the pre-eminent global power with military bases and influence all over the world. The first and only two nuclear weapons to have been used in warfare were detonated and the world entered the atomic age. The Potsdam conference in July 1945, following on from Yalta, in February, with leaders from the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain attending, worked out the post-war settlement and the future of a continent on the back of napkins.

Europe was divided in two between the east and the west, with an iron curtain drawn between them and distrust between the Soviets and the West was fast approaching Cold War levels levels by September 1945. This indeed was the beginning of the Cold War: a nuclear face-off between the two new global powers in the heart of Europe and through proxy wars around the world. Nationalist movements such as in India, Syria, Malaya and Vietnam developed increasing hope that they would soon be able to cast off their colonial yoke. The concept of a Jewish homeland in Palestine became a tangible hope for many survivors of the European camps. When taken together, these events and developments that all took place within a few months in the summer of 1945, mark the year as one of the most significant of the twentieth century.

The Summer of 45 tells a parallel story of headline events and the human stories that lie beneath them, such as the voices of the pilots who dropped bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, killing tens of thousands of Japanese civilians,and some of the eyewitnesses who were on the ground when it happened.