After Germany's military leaders signed the instruments of surrender in Reims and Berlin, Allied governments declared May 8 as Victory in Europe Day. Crowds packed Trafalgar Square and the Champs-Élysées, Winston Churchill addressed cheering Britons from a Whitehall balcony, and church bells rang across the continent for the first time in years. The war in the Pacific ground on, but Europe's guns had finally fallen silent.
The formal surrender had actually been signed a day earlier, in the early hours of May 7 at Reims, but Stalin insisted on a second, grander ceremony in Berlin to satisfy Soviet pride and to ensure the Red Army received equal billing in the victory. So the world waited an extra day before Churchill, Truman, and eventually a battered, jubilant Europe could exhale together on May 8.
In London, more than a million people flooded the streets. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth appeared eight times on the Buckingham Palace balcony, joined at one point by their teenage daughters, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, who slipped out anonymously into the crowds to celebrate among ordinary Britons — a detail the future queen recalled fondly decades later. In Moscow, where the toll of the war had been almost incomprehensible, Stalin's radio announcement triggered fireworks and gunfire into the night sky.
Yet joy was shadowed by grief and unfinished business. Concentration camps had only recently been liberated, their horrors still being tallied, and millions of Europeans returned to cities reduced to rubble. For Japan, the war would grind on for three more months, ending only after atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Key people: Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, Harry Truman, King George VI