We’re only at the beginning, but these images show us how we will surely end.
This is Times Square on V-E Day, 75 years ago today, newly alive and overrun with ecstatic New Yorkers. No longer would the lights on Broadway be dimmed, the food be rationed, nor would the city endure a nightly curfew at 1 a.m., as opposed to midnight for the rest of the nation — a kindness conferred by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.
Presiding over it all was Liberty’s Sister, a 15-ton replica of the Statue of Liberty — her own torch and floodlights gone dark during the war, save for two occasions: first to mark the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944, and on May 8, 1945, to celebrate the surrender of Nazi Germany.
New York City had also gone still, having sent off 850,000 of her service members, more than any city in America, to join World War II.
For those left behind, the city was suddenly a grim and scary place. A then-staggering $70 million was spent on welfare. La Guardia was forced to ban begging on the subway. (Sound familiar?) There was such a meat shortage that horse replaced beef. Desperate mothers and fathers abandoned 1,000 babies a year at New York Foundling Hospital.
Then, as now, New York wasn’t alone. And when Germany surrendered, the world erupted together, tens of thousands flooding the streets, not just in Times Square but in London, Paris, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Holland, Luxembourg and Belgium. (Moscow would join one day later.) Traffic in Cape Town came to a stop. That night, Scotland lit up for the first time since the war began.
For this storied generation, terror and trauma — the Great Depression followed by World War II — threatened to become the new normal. But they would not allow it. Their resilience and fortitude, their sense of shared sacrifice for a greater good and a happy outcome, has much to teach us now.
On this momentous anniversary, V-E Day will be celebrated virtually, allowing the world to still honor the shrinking number of WWII veterans — like 95-year-old Charles Shay, an Army medic who was taken prisoner by the Germans. Two years ago, he moved to Normandy, France to be closer to the American soldiers who died there.
Despite all he endured, Shay told Stars and Stripes that his memory of May 8, 1945, was of waiting for a boat in Bremerhaven, Germany, that was to take him to America.
“I was just happy to be going home,” he said.
President Harry Truman dedicated these spontaneous celebrations to FDR, who died one month before the Allies defeated Germany. “The flags of freedom fly all over Europe,” he said in his address to the nation. But he cautioned against wishing for the world we longed for rather than the world as it was — battles still raging in the Pacific, Japan as much a threat as ever.
“Every American,” Truman said, must “stick to his post until the battle is won. Until that day, let no man abandon his post or slacken his efforts.”
Those words inspire us now, as we learn new ways to live even as we grieve, as we fight to maintain faith and hope when the world seems most random and cruel.
And these images remind us of a time, not so long ago, when New Yorkers well knew that the war wasn’t over, but the end was in sight — and that was enough for jubilation.