Tragedy, Cruelty and Grand Delusion: A Guest Post by James Holland

A deep dive into the eight surrenders that put an end to an endless world war, told in exacting detail by one dynamic duo. Holland and Murray leave no stone unturned in this sweeping account of our world’s greatest conflict. Read on for an exclusive essay from James Holland on writing Victory ’45.

Al Murray and I have been friends for eons and podcasting partners since the spring of 2019, when we started recording WW2: We Have Ways of Making You Talk.  Discussing all things World War 2-related, we’ve now chalked up some 900-plus episodes. I’ve written a good number of histories, and Al has written several too, including two brilliant books on the war, and so last fall, with the prospect of the 80th anniversary of the end of the war looming, he suggested we write a book together about how this most cataclysmic of conflicts finally came to an end – and not just in Europe but in the war against Imperial Japan too.

I’d never written a book with a fellow historian before, but we thought about the war in similar ways, so we started to talk it through. What interested us both was the notion of ‘unconditional surrender’ that President Roosevelt announced to the world at the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, and how that played out. Some have argued this was a mistake and lengthened the war, but how could the Allies have possibly offered conditions to Nazi Germany or Japan after the monstrous crimes they’d committed during the war? Wars can only really end with clarity – and this was what was imposed on first Nazi Germany and then Japan, when the end finally came.

We were also very interested by the domino effect of the surrenders: first of German forces to the Allies in Italy, then to Soviet forces in Berlin. These were followed in quick succession by the German surrender to Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery in northern Germany and to General Alexander Patch in Bavaria and Austria. By the time the final surrender came to General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Supreme Allied Headquarters in Reims in the early hours of 7 May, there was hardly much of Germany left.

Yet VE Day is commemorated here in the west – and in Germany – on 8 May, a day, ironically, when no surrenders were signed. Rather, the final German surrender ceremony took place at 12.43am on 9 May – to Soviet forces in Berlin. Even the end in Japan – following the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japanese cities – involved the announcement on 15 August and the formal surrender on 2 September. 

While we aimed to follow these myriad surrenders and some of the people involved, you’ll find stories here that will be new to even WW2 aficionados. It’s been an utterly fascinating project with a compelling cast of characters: ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events, rivalries and skullduggery, inspirational sacrifice and nobility to a higher cause, tragedy, cruelty and grand delusion. It really was a dramatic end to a highly dramatic, complex and truly global war.