To Victory

After the landings of summer 1944, the Allied maintained their efforts to liberate France and pursue the German forces that had retreated eastwards or entrenched themselves in strongholds along the Atlantic coast. Soldiers from the interior Resistance forces were integrated to units of the French Liberation Army throughout all of the fights of late 1944 and 1945.

The Alsace Campaign, initiated in September 1944, came to an end with the liberation the Colmar pocket on February 2, 1945, after fierce fighting and heavy losses. The German troops were well equipped, well entrenched and, above all, dominated by the idea that those fights were vital to the Reich. In their eyes, Alsace was a province of Reich to defend. For the French and American allies, it was a French region to set free. The extreme weather conditions of the 1944-1945 winter added to the radicalization and intensification of Nazi violence.

Civilian populations were severely affected. They suffered the consequences of devastating fights and were the victims of violent reprisals by the retreating German troops. 

Across the Reich, mass executions accelerated. The SS threw hundreds of thousands of prisoners on death marches.

Having overcome the German counter-offensive in the Ardennes, the Allied crossed the Rhine in late March 1945 and surrounded the industrial area of the Ruhr. Tactical and material superiority enabled them to pursue the German Armies as far as the Baltic Sea, Austria and the Czechoslovak border.

American and Soviet troops met on the banks of the Elbe on the 25^th of April 1945, while the Red Army was already engaged in brutal urban fighting in Berlin. The Soviet will to destroy the entirety of the enemy system led to the violent treatment of civilian populations, notably to mass rape. As the Reichstag fell, Hitler’s suicide on the 30^th of April marked the final defeat of the Third Reich and the victory of the Allies.

From May 7 in reims to May 8 in Berlin : surrender and capitulation

In February 1945, General Eisenhower, commander of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF), set up his forward post in Reims, on the premises of the Collège Moderne et Technique, now Lycée Franklin-Roosevelt. 

There, at 2:41 am on May 7, 1945, German General Alfred Jodl signed the unconditional surrender of the Germanarmed forces. The act  of surrender was countersigned by American General Walter Bedell-Smith, Chief of Staff of SHAEF, Soviet General Ivan Sousloparov, Head of the Soviet Military Mission to SHAEF, and, as a witness by General François Sevez, deputy to General Juin, then Chief Staff of the French National Defence. Eisenhower, while not present at the signing, received the plenipotentiaries immediately afterwards.

The news of surrender was passed on throughout the day of May 7, 1945, first to Marshal Keitel and Grand Admiral Dönitz, then to the various German staffs and commanders, so that all the weapons could be laid down on the evening of the 8^th of May. The effective and definitive application of the ceasefire between the Allied and German forces was thus implemented on the 7^th of May in Reims.

The news was announced in Allied capitals on the morning of May 8, 1945. In France, church bells rang out the end of the Second World war at 3 pm that day, while General de Gaulle made the announcement on the radio. 

The following explosion of joy gave rise to spontaneous, popular and festive gatherings that lasted all through the night. Meanwhile, the unconditional capitulation of the Third Reich came into effect at 11:01 pm (Berlin time, i.e. 01:01 am on May 9, 1945, Moscow time). The acts of capitulation were ratified by Marshal Keitel, representing the German High Command, and Soviet Marshal Zhukov for the Supreme Command of the Red Army, British Field Marshal Tedder on behalf of SHAEF, and General de Lattre de Tassigny, Commander-in-Chief of the French 1st Army, and US General Spaatz, Commander of the Strategic Air Forces, as witnesses.

The Liberation of the pockets: the final battles

At the time of the German surrender, French territory was not entirely free. “Pockets” of German resistance or “Festungen” (from the german word for “fortresses”) remained in the Alps (the Authion massif) and on the Atlantic and North Sea coasts. Entire cities were “pocketed” with German garrisons and civilian populations. 

While SHAEF focused on the German Campaign, the French Forces of the West, under the command of General de Larminat, were tasked with liberating the Atlantic pockets. Setting free the coastal pockets was a major strategic and political objective for General de Gaulle : it symbolized the return of republican sovereignty. 

Months-long sieges led to violent and destructive fighting. In Royan, already devastated by allied bombings in January 1945, 30,000 men from the Resistance and from infantry battalions of the Antilles and Oubangui-Chari advanced through the ruins during Operation Venerable (April 14-20 1945). On April 17, Admiral Michahelles, the German commander of Royan, was captured. On April 18, a final wave of bombardments resulted in the surrender of the bunkers in the Coubre forest. The Pointe de Grave, on the other side of the Gironde estuary, was liberated on April 20.

France’s last occupied towns were liberated without fights in the days following the German surrender. In Saint-Nazaire, the German garrison surrendered to the French on May 11, 1945. 

The chronology of the liberation of the Atlantic pockets is as follows: Royan on April 17, Pointe de Grave on April 20, Ile d'Oléron on April 30, La Rochelle and Ile de Ré on May 8 and 9, Dunkirk on May 9, Lorient on May 10, Saint-Nazaire on May 11.

Coming out of the war

After years of conflict, occupation and violent fights for the Liberation, the efforts required to bring France out of the war were considerable. Cities, infrastructures and industries destroyed by bombings needed to be reconstructed, the economy had to be revived, republican institutions re-established, bodies and mind needed healing. 

Rationing, which had been introduced during the Occupation, remained in place and only disappeared in December 1949. Material damages were substantial: 452,000 buildings were totally destroyed (twice as many asin the UK) and 1,436,000partially. Almost 20% of France'shousing stock was affected, and an estimated 5 million people were impacted. A new ministry, the Ministry of Reconstruction and Urban Planning (MRU), was set up in November 1944 to identify the damage, build temporary housing, plan urban development and produce modern housing.

Before reconstruction could begin, 13 million mines and unexploded engines had to be cleared of mainland France (most of them in Normandy and Provence). A dedicated department of the MRU was set up under the leadership of Raymond Aubrac, engineer and member of the Resistance. 3,000 and 48,000 German prisoners of war carried out the defusing. 

April and May 1945 were also marked by waves of returns. At the time of the German surrender, it is estimated that over 20 million people had been displaced by the war in Europe. Among those, 1,8 million persons were repatriated to France. 1 million were prisoners of war, 650,000 were young men forcibly transferred to the Reich for the Obligatory Labour Service (Service du Travail Obligatoire STO). Of the 166,000 men and women deported from France during the war, around 47,000 victims of Nazi repression (out of more than 90,000 deported on political charges) and just 5% of the 76 000 people persecuted and deported because they were Jewish, returned to France. 

Henri Frenay’s Ministry for Prisoners, Deportees and Refugees set up around forty repatriation centres to receive returnees, many of whom were in great physical, psychological and material distress. In Paris, the Gare d’Orsay and the Hôtel Lutetia were the backgrounds of long-awaited but painful journeys home. Returnees now had to try to resume a normal life despite the grief, trauma and disastrous economic conditions of a country needing to rebuild.

In 1945, France was swept by a series of far-reaching reforms, both economic and social. Prompted by departmental liberation committees, elected representatives and citizens drew up “cahiers de doléances” lists of grievances in which they expressed their wishes and concerns for the new era. For the first time, women exercised their right to vote and be elected in April, September and October 1945. 

In addition to urban planning, waves of nationalizations in industry, transport, electricity and the banking sector launched post-war economic planning. La Sécurité sociale – social security – is created on October 19th, 1945, one day after the foundation of another important symbol of France’s recovered sovereignty: The Atomic Energy Committee. 

Building peace after immense losses

Although May 8, 1945 marked the end of the Second World war in Europe, the conflict continued in Asia. Off Rangoon (formerly Burma), the battleship Richelieu took part in the Royal Navy’s naval and air operations in May. 

In French Indochina, Japan seized power directly in violent coup on March 9, 1945 and encouraged various independence movements in order to undermine the European powers in the region. Separatist and anti-colonial ideas also emerged in Algeria, where demonstrations organized on V-E Day were violently repressed. 

On August 6 and 9, 1945, the atomic bombings wiped Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the map. The scale of the destruction was unprecedented and brought the war to its climax. Man now possessed a weapon of mass destruction. 

The bombings and the simultaneous Soviet invasion of Manchuria led Emperor Hirohito to announce Japan’s surrender by a radio address on August 15, 1945. The acts of capitulation were signed on board on the American battleship Missouri moored in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945. General Leclerc represented France. 

The Second World war was now over. Between sixty and seventy million people died. It should be emphasized that civilian losses, the result of atrocities of all kinds, occupations and massive population displacements, genocides and aerial bombardments, estimated at between forty-four and fifty million deaths, accounted for two-thirds of the human toll. 

In terms of military losses, which amounted to between twenty-one and twenty-three million deaths, the Eastern European front and the Asiatic-Pacific Theater were the deadliest. Four million prisoners of war were killed during the conflict. The heaviest losses took place during the years 1944 and 1945, reflecting the intensification and radicalization of the conflict. 

Lastly, there are major geographical disparities to keep in mind while looking at the human toll: the losses of the USSR (around 26 million) and China (14 to 20 million) account for almost two-thirds of all deaths in the conflict. 

Building peace in the aftermath of the Second World war was also a challenge to tackle on the global scale. 

The physical and moral trauma of the war, the discovery of the death camps and the tragedies in the countries occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan dictated the need for war criminals to be tried and convicted. The concept of "crimes against humanity" introduced at the Nuremberg trials (from October 1945 to October 1946) and the Tokyo trials (from January 1946 to November 1948) remains a major milestone in international justice.

A new international order designed to promote peace and reconciliation emerged at the end of the world conflict. The United Nations came into being on October 24, 1945 following the ratification of the Charter of the United Nations prepared in June 1945 in San Francisco. In the preamble to the founding Charter, the peoples of the United Nations declared themselves "determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow mankind [...] to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom".

As the UN placed the promotion of multilateralism, collective security and fundamental rights at the heart of its activities, it adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948.

As the "Iron Curtain" announced by Churchill had already fallen across Europe, the need to defend the values enshrined in the Universal Declaration led to the creation other organisations: NATO and the Council of Europe were established in April and May 1949 respectively. It was also Churchill who, as early as 1946, called for a "United States of Europe": "Can the peoples of Europe rise to the heights of the soul and of the instinct and spirit of man? There must be this act of faith in the European family, this act of oblivion against all crimes and follies of the past. Therefore, I say to you “Let Europe arise!”.

Useful links

• Historical analysis and interviews with historians who are experts on the Liberation period
• Interviews with witnesses, children during the years 1944-1945
• The "Teachers Space": a toolbox for educational teams
• General de Gaulle's speech announcing the German surrender on May 8