The Wall Street Journal: V-E Day Forged a World Still Worth Defending

Almost 75 years ago, on May 8, 1945, the pathogen of Nazism was finally eradicated with Germany's unconditional surrender to the Allies, after six years of war and tens of millions dead...

The end came in a redbrick technical college in Reims, in northeastern France, used as a headquarters by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander. At 2 a.m. on Monday, May 7, reporters and photographers crowded the second-floor war room where huge maps hung like tapestries on the faded blue walls, displaying the position of Allied armies across Europe. Gen. Alfred Jodl, operations chief for the German military, sat glassy-eyed and erect at an oak table as he signed on behalf of the defeated Nazi regime the "Act of Military Surrender," pared to 234 words in five paragraphs. The ceremony lasted just 10 minutes. Eisenhower sent a laconic cable to Washington and London: "The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 0241, local time, May 7, 1945."

The surrender officially took effect the next day, May 8, allowing time to notify Nazi garrisons in Norway and U-boat submarine crews across the Atlantic. Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader whose people had done far more killing and dying than any other Allied nation, would insist on highlighting Germany's complete ruination by holding a second surrender ceremony on German soil in a Berlin suburb on May 9. With an estimated 26 million Soviets dead in the war, that seemed reasonable enough.

As word spread of the Nazi capitulation, some American GIs reacted with honking horns and what one officer called "mad, dangerous" celebratory gunfire; a witness near Salzburg described ".30 and .45-calibers coming back down like a hailstorm." Yet many of the victors felt subdued, even somber. "I should be completely joyous on this occasion. As it is, it comes more as an anticlimax," a soldier wrote his family. "I remember the many who marched with me, and who also loved life but lost it, and cannot celebrate with us today."

An eerie silence soon descended across the former battlefields. The reporter W.C. Heinz watched American soldiers in central Germany wander aimlessly among blooming lilacs and apple trees, as if baffled to find themselves in a land so benign and beautiful. "We did not know how to kill time," Heinz wrote.

For the first time in 2,076 days, the sun set on a Europe without front lines, a Europe at peace, a Europe with no blackout regulations. "Lights scintillated—truck lights, jeep lights, tent lights, flashlights, building lights, farmhouse lights," a major in the 29th Division wrote. "Everything lit up." In Paris, snaking throngs danced down the Champs-Élysées as sirens sounded a final all-clear and church bells rang across the city.

In London, tugs on the Thames tooted a Morse code "V" for victory, and buglers blew "cease-fire." Crates of whiskey and gin, labeled "Not to Be Sold Until Victory Night," were manhandled into hundreds of pubs. Crowds outside Buckingham Palace chanted, "We want the king!"—and the king they got, along with the queen and two princesses, who appeared waving outside Buckingham Palace six times during V-E Day. The throng linked arms to sing Elgar's "Land of Hope and Glory," weeping together in sorrow and joy, for all that was lost and all that had been won.

In New York, half a million celebrants filled Times Square. Lights bathed the Capitol dome in Washington for the first time since December 1941, although streets remained quiet, perhaps because the battle for Okinawa had become a cave-by-cave bloodbath.

The Allies won because of material preponderance, Axis mistakes and superior leadership. The cohesion of the Allied coalition—four dozen countries united against Hitler's murderous aggression—brought victory. Crucially, Allied leadership included checks and balances to temper arbitrary willfulness and personal misjudgment. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill provided a defining aphorism: "There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them."...

—Mr. Atkinson is the author of "The Liberation Trilogy" on World War II in Europe, the first volume of which, "An Army at Dawn," won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in History. His latest book is "The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777" (Henry Holt).