1945: The conditions of surrender

Harry Leslie Smith remembers the end of Second World War for him.

It's Remembrance Day. So, here is an extract from Love Among the Ruins. In it, Harry Leslie Smith recounts the emotions and senses he felt as the Second World War came to an end and a new world was being forged from the ashes of that horrendous conflict.

1945: The conditions of surrender 

I don’t know why, but the winter rains stopped, and spring came early in 1945. When Hitler committed suicide at the end of April, the flowers and trees were in full bloom and the summer birds returned to their nesting grounds. Not long after the great dictator’s corpse was incinerated in a bomb crater by his few remaining acolytes, the war in Europe ended. After so much death, ruin and misery, it was remarkable to me how nature resiliently budded back to life in barns and fields and across battlegrounds, now calm and silent. The Earth said to her children: it is time to abandon your swords and harness your ploughs; the ground is ripe, and this is the season to tend to the living.

I was 22 and ready for peace. I had spent four years in the RAF as a wireless operator. I was lucky during the war; I never came close to death. While the world bled from London to Leningrad, I walked away without a scratch. Make no mistake, I did my part in this war; I played my role and I never shirked the paymaster’s orders. For four years, I trained, I marched, and I saluted across the British Isles. During the final months of the conflict, I ended up in Belgium and Holland with a unit that was responsible for maintaining abandoned Nazi airfields for Allied aircraft.

When Germany surrendered to the Allies in gutted Berlin, I was in Fuhlsbüttel, a northern suburb of Hamburg. At the time, I didn’t think much about Fuhlsbüttel, I felt it was between nothing and nowhere. It was much like every other town our unit drove through during the dying days of the war. Nothing was out of place and it was quiet, clean, and as silent as a Sunday afternoon. Our squadron took up a comfortable residence in its undamaged aerodrome.

While I slept in my new bed in this drowsy neighbourhood, the twentieth century’s greatest and bloodiest conflict came to an end at midnight on 7th May. On the morning of the 8th, our RAF commander hastily arranged a victory party for that afternoon. The festivities were held in a school gymnasium close to the airport.

The get-together might have been haphazard and the arrangements made on short notice, but there were no complaints because death was now a postponed appointment. Our individual ends, from road accidents, cancer, or old age, were to be pencilled in for a date in the far distant future. There was a lot of excitement, optimism and simple joy generated during the party because we were young and pissed on free beer. RAF officers, NCOs and enlisted men marked the passage from war to peace, dancing the bunny hop in the overheated school gymnasium.

No one considered or asked on that day of victory, ‘What happens next?’ That was tomorrow’s problem. I certainly didn’t question my destiny on that spring afternoon. Instead, like the Romans, I followed the edict: carpe diem. I ate too much, I smoked too much, and I drank too much. And why not?, I reasoned. The war was over and I had survived, whereas a great many had been extinguished as quickly as blowing out a flame on a candle.

I still didn’t want to think about tomorrow, even when our victory party was no more than a hungover echo of patriotic songs and dirty limericks playing inside my head; I was content to wait and watch. I was perfectly happy to observe my mates plod onwards like dray horses back to their old lives. I was satisfied to enjoy a moment that wouldn’t last, peace without obligation. I relished the mundane luxury of sitting on a bench with a cigarette between my fingers. I indulged in the sensual pleasure of feeling the warm spring sun hover over my face. I was liberated from home and the dismal dull world of a mill town, where one’s life was charted to end as it began: in a tenement house, under grey, dense skies. I wanted to simply enjoy and savour my release from the threat of death.

During those first few days of peace, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of good fortune. It was really blind luck that I had endured. My survival was the mythical lucky dip at a fairground raffle. I was alive while millions of combatants and civilians simply perished in this long and brutal conflict.

It wasn’t long after road workers had swept the streets clean from our victory parade that I began to realise my four years of service to the state hadn’t altered me greatly. Perhaps I was a bit more educated and less naive about the world. I had certainly acquired some now-redundant skills in marching and Morse code. I was also more aware that suffering and hurt was not a commodity in short supply. Possibly an outsider might have even considered me more cynical and crass after my years with the RAF. Yet underneath my cocksure attitude, I was still the same self-conscious, lonely, awkward teenager who had volunteered to join the RAF in December 1940.

No matter how relieved I felt with Hitler dead and peace at hand, it reminded me that my personal destiny was now my own responsibility. Considering that the war had rescued me from the nightmare of my past life, I was a bit frightened by peace. I was comfortable in my RAF blue uniform, which made me look the same as Bill Jones, Will Sanders, or a multitude of other boys from counties all across Britain. I didn’t want to be Harry Smith from Halifax, a former manager at Grosvenor’s Grocers, son of a cuckold, from the backside of town.

So for as many moments as I could grasp, I took smug comfort in the anonymity of military life. I relished the new laid-back approach both officers and NCOs took to commanding our group. It was a simple decree to live and let live. As long as there was no scandal, we were allowed to pursue our own pastimes for amusement or profit.

As the spring dissolved into summer, I began to appreciate that the war had been relatively harmless and uneventful for me. My life must change, I ventured because I was one of the fortunate few; I was healthy and alive. The question was how to modify my existence that had been laid out since my parents’ rapid and one-way journey into poverty and rough living.

While shaving one morning in the wash hut, I said to my mate Dave: ‘I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t want to be working at a mill back in Halifax or be a grocer.’

Dave took a while to reply because he was absorbed in taking careful strokes around his chin with a razor. ‘It’s all in the cards you are dealt before you are born. Some get a lucky hand while others get shite. If all you get dealt is deuces, there’s nothing you can do about it, except learn how to fucking bluff.’ Dave paused, looked at his clean face, and added as an afterthought to the rules for a successful life: ‘You also need a good fry up in the morning.’

Was he right? Was it just down to luck? He might have been on to something. So far, every direction my life had taken was a simple act of chance or whimsy. After all, flat feet and a flaccid patriotic sentiment led me to the doors of the RAF. Most likely, had I picked another branch of the armed forces, I would have ended up as a name stencilled on a cenotaph to be washed in the indifferent rain falling on Halifax. So, for the present, I left my life in the hands of fortune reinforced by bullshit.

On the days I was permitted to leave our base, I strolled until my legs ached, exploring my surroundings as if they were the ruins of Troy. To remain alive in 1945, the Germans were reduced to the most primitive form of commerce: they bartered and begged, and they did it in every imaginable location. I encountered Germans in back alleys, on street corners, or by the entrance to the train station, huddled in small groups trading their heirlooms for food.

In the beginning, I was emotionally detached from the Germans and the destruction around me. Their suffering played as blandly as a sepia-toned newsreel at the Odeon cinema. The immensity of the pain endured by both the innocent and the damned was too much for me to absorb. What lay outside of my privileged life in the camp was a festering sore that fouled the air. I tried to keep my distance from the Germans and their troubles.

Keeping my heart cold and lofty didn’t last long because I was a young man looking for a bit of emotional adventure. Within two weeks, I was trying to start conversations with young German women. When I called out, ‘Excuse me, Fräulein,’ most walked by me or jumped over to the other side of the street. Some women smiled politely or giggled to their girlfriends at my bad accent and limited vocabulary.

This game ended for me on the day I travelled up Langenhorner Chaussee, in Fuhlsbüttel. It was a road populated with attractive two- and three-storey apartments, which were shaded by linden and cherry trees. It was a middle-class neighbourhood that stretched towards the horizon in relaxed prosperity. The street was a quiet and pleasant quarter that seemed immune from the tragedies unfolding all around it. It wasn’t until I walked further up the road that I discovered no district in Germany was inoculated against hunger.

On the other side of the street, a commotion was brewing between an elderly man and a young woman. They were haggling over the value of a silver fork for a packet of cigarettes. I loitered and observed them struggling to barter their way out of starvation and ruin. Suddenly, I noticed a woman who made my heart and head stumble in aroused confusion. It appeared she was also bartering for food, but there was something different in her body language. It suggested to me a dignity and a pride that wouldn’t yield to her circumstances.

Extraordinary, I thought; and I said aloud, ‘You are beautiful.’