![]() Mackenzie King, who was in San Francisco on 7 May attending the founding conference of the United Nations, wrote in his diary: "This has been a good day - a happy day one in which the burden has been greatly lightened from the knowledge that Nazi militarism has, at last, been destroyed." In a radio address the next day, Mackenzie King told Canadians, "You have helped to rid the world of a great scourge." Allied headquarters ordered the news to be withheld for 24 hours, although Germany announced the surrender.Ī week earlier, Adolf Hitler had committed suicide in his Berlin bunker. Eisenhower General Ivan Susloparov for the Soviet Union and General François Sevez for France. local time on by Colonel General Gustav Jodl, the German army's chief of staff Lieutenant-General Walter Bedell Smith, chief of staff for the Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. The military surrender agreement for the German forces was signed in Rheims, France, at 2:41 a.m. The first, on 28 April, was erroneous the second, on the morning of 7 May, was merely premature. Two early reports of a German surrender had primed people for celebration. ( See also Victory in Europe (VE-Day) Remembered.) The country was in an expectant mood - eager for victory and ready for peace. ![]() More than a million Canadians had served in the armed forces - 42,000 had been killed and tens of thousands more were wounded or awaiting liberation in prisoner of war camps. Over the course of the Second World War, the country's economy had been transformed, a generation of young men had been mobilized to defeat the Axis powers, and since 1942 a debate over conscription had divided both Canadians and the government of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.īy the spring of 1945, Canadians had waged war against a relentless enemy on the North Atlantic, at Dieppe, Hong Kong and Normandy, in the air over Germany, and most recently, in the Netherlands and the Rhineland. Canadians had been at war since September 1939.
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