German officers look stunned as they file up to drop weapons in barrels after surrender
By Malcolm Muir Jr., United Press staff writer
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Quisling reported under arrest
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By Earl Richert, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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Army, Navy still gathering evidence
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‘Amazing lot’ of problems are beginning to develop, high U.S. official says
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Plan would allow Western Hemisphere to settle its own disputes
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By the United Press
Japan announced today that it will keep fighting as hard as ever in spite of Germany’s surrender.
The announcement, broadcast by Tokyo radio, was made after a special meeting of the Jap Cabinet under Premier Kantaro Suzuki.
While it expressed “deep regret” over Germany’s surrender, the official statement said the “sudden change of the war situation in Europe will not bring the slightest change in the war objective of the imperial government of Japan.”
So Virginia is still a ‘sinner’
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Ernie Pyle had some ideas about V-E Day.
His ideas, we think, are pretty much the ideas of most G.I.’s.
He wrote them long before V-E Day, which he never lived to see. He wrote them from his heart and out of the long months in which he trudged the bitter, tragic paths of war – war, which he once described as “a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and an exhaustion of the spirit.”
As we mark the end of fighting in Europe and turn to the tedious, painful months of death and anguish still to come in the Pacific war, listen to Ernie’s words on V-E Day:
The end of the war will be a gigantic relief, but it cannot be a matter of hilarity for most of us. Somehow it would seem sacrilegious to sing and dance when the great day comes – there are so many who can never sing and dance again.
We have won this war because our men are brave, and because of many other things – because of Russia, and England, and the passage of time, and the gift of nature’s materials.
We did not win it because destiny created us greater than all other peoples. I hope that in victory we are more grateful than we are proud. I hope we can rejoice in victory – but humbly. The dead men would not want us to gloat.
And all of us together will have to learn how to reassemble our broken world into a pattern so firm and so fair that another great war cannot soon be possible.
These are the words of a gifted writer, a writer who knew not only the filth and dirt and numbing horror of war, but knew the innermost confidences and thoughts and hopes and fears and ideas of the men who fight wars, and die in them.
For the great numbers of us at home, who have been so jubilant over the news from Europe, those of us who have fought the war in petty inconveniences and shortages, in small and paltry sacrifices, these are good words for us to know.
Let’s keep them in our minds until V-J Day, and in our hearts forever.
By Peter Edson
SAN FRANCISCO, California – Woodrow Wilson died with the understanding that it was right for the United States to stay out of the old League of Nations, in 1920. And the day before his death, he prophesied this country would join a new league of nations and that it would succeed. His daughter Eleanor Wilson McAdoo has just revealed these facts, breaking a family secret closely held for 21 years.
Mrs. McAdoo is in San Francisco in connection with her War Bond work and as a radio correspondent covering the United Nations Conference.
This story of her father’s death, making an important footnote to history and today’s big war news, has never been told before. Eleanor Wilson consents to its being told today because this seems the right moment to bridge the gap between the end of World Wars I and II; between the old League of Nations, which her father helped create, and the new United Nations organization being created at San Francisco.
Had Woodrow Wilson died as Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, at the height of his victories, the end of the League of Nations story might have been different.
The day before Woodrow Wilson died, February 3, 1924, he lay on his bed in the house on Washington’s “S” St., where the family had moved after leaving the White House in March 1921.
‘Thinking a long time’
In the room with him, watching him, was his daughter Margaret, Eleanor Wilson’s sister. The ex-President’s eyes were closed. He spoke quietly:
“It was right that the United States did not join the League of Nations.”
Startled, Margaret Wilson caught her breath, came to his bedside.
Woodrow Wilson opened his eyes and smiled. Again he spoke: “You think I’m raving, don’t you? I’m not. But I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.”
Her father had had much time to think, says Eleanor Wilson today. In Paris, he had contracted flu. Asthma had developed from that, and with it came broken sleep. The ability to sleep, to relax completely for five minutes or an hour, had been one of Woodrow Wilson’s greatest sources of strength. From a nap or a full night’s sleep, he could wake refreshed and able to cope with any new task.
But now, with one arm paralyzed and one foot dragging when he could walk, in the long days and the longer nights of wakefulness, Woodrow Wilson had done much thinking.
There was nothing the matter with his brain, Eleanor Wilson declares, and he was anything but the broken-hearted man he has been so commonly and so wrongly portrayed. But he had been thinking about his battle for a League of Nations for a long time. And now he was telling his thoughts to his daughter Margaret.
He said:
If we had joined the League when I asked for it, it would have been a great personal victory. But it would not have worked, because deep down in their hearts the American people didn’t really believe in it.
‘The time will come’
Margaret Wilson rose then and bent over her father’s bed. His eyes were clear, she told her sister Eleanor afterward, and they shone with a light as if he were happier in the assurance of what he had just said and what he was to say next:
The time will come when this country will join such a League, because it will know that it has to be. And then and then only will it work.
He laughed a little.
Eleanor Wilson recalls today:
He was really a gay soul. To us, he was never the cold, austere professor so many people have tried to make him. And he was never an egotist.
He was sincere, and he was a philosopher, and he was reverent at all times. But he had the grandest sense of humor, and that revealed itself in his last hours and his last words with Margaret on the League of Nations:
“You know,” he said, “God really does know better than I.”
By Bertram Benedict
The end-of-the-war-in-Europe celebration now is like the similar celebration nearly 27 years ago in that it comes several days after a premature report of the complete German capitulation. And although in 1918 the German Armed Forces signed an armistice in one fell swoop, instead of piecemeal as now, the German delegates had gone to Marshal Foch’s headquarters several days before they signed the armistice, so that the actual signing caught no one unprepared.
In 1918, the armistice signed on November 11 meant the end of all hostilities; in 1945, the war against Japan is still with us.
The popular celebration in the United States on November 11 was less spontaneous than the premature celebration four days before. The actual one began early in the morning with the ringing of church bells and blasts of air-raid sirens. Airplanes flew over many cities. Schools let out the children, who filled the streets. The stock exchanges closed. So did the courts.
Factories and stores released their employees, many of whom formed impromptu parades, in which effigies of the Kaiser were prominent. Bunting-clad trucks roamed the streets. Theaters, food stores and saloons stayed open, and the rule against selling liquor to men in uniform was widely disregarded. At 10 o’clock in the morning, President Wilson issued an armistice proclamation.
Dancing in Paris streets
In England, King George V made a brief speech from the balcony of Buckingham Palace. Prime Minister Lloyd George spoke to the people from a window of 10 Downing Street. A crowd stopped the car of Col. Winston Churchill, Minister of Munitions, and compelled him to say a few words. In Paris, there was dancing in the streets.
At one o’clock in the afternoon, President Wilson read the 35 items of the armistice terms to a joint session of Congress, after which he pronounced:
The war thus comes to an end; for, having accepted these terms of armistice, it will be impossible for the German command to renew it… The object of the war is attained… Armed imperialism is at an end; who will now seek to revive it?
Secretary of State Lansing also warned: “Before us lie new tasks and new burdens.” Sen. Borah called for an end of party politics in the “stupendous work of reconstruction ahead.”
Post-war warnings
Food Administrator Herbert Hoover warned that much food would have to be shipped to Europe to prevent famine. Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo warned that taxes would stay high. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels announced that the warship-building program would continue as planned; the Shipping Board made the same announcement for the merchant shipbuilding program,
Secretary of War Newton D. Baker said that perhaps a million of the 2,200,000 American soldiers in Europe would remain there for the task of occupation; those with the longest service would be replaced by men from home.
On the next day, the War Industries Board and the Fuel Administration lifted some of the restrictions on non-essential industry. Two days after the armistice, President W. H. Barr told the National Founders Association that the high wages, the 8-hour day, and the trade union domination of the war period would have to go if America was to prosper.
Public envisions 10-year occupation
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
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