Bidspirit auction | Signed The Day The War

Signed The Day The War Ended by Martin Gilbert. Harper Collins Publishers, 1995. Harback. The story of May 8, 1945, the day the Germans surrendered and the Second World War in Europe came to an end, is recounted through archival documentation woven together with the diary entries and letters of soldiers, sailors, and airmen, combatants and civilians, young and old, prisoners of war and resistance fighters, the liberators, the liberated, and the defeated describing where they were on that day. A moment-to-moment account of that day along with the day’s events that led to changes in the post-war landscape that were to affect the rest of the century. Book excerpt: “All over the world the news of the unconditional surrender was sparking strong emotions. In the African city of Brazzaville, where General Charles de Gaulle had raised his standard of defiance in 1941, Natasha Kounin was working in the news department of the Free French radio station. 'My colleagues and myself awaited eagerly for the last seventy-two hours the imminent announcement of Germany's unconditional surrender,' she later wrote. 'I happened to be the responsible editor for the shift, and will never forget the overwhelming emotion which engulfed all of us when the long - awaited dispatch fell on my desk. It seemed as if six years of nightmare had come to a “happy end”…. We wept, laughed, drank and danced all the night.' ”