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The period from mid-April to mid-May in the spring of 1945 was probably the most dramatic month of the 20th Century. An extraordinary se-quence of historical events unfolded..

On April 12 President Roosevelt died suddenly. It was the most unexpected news imaginable. His illness had been kept secret and the shock was enormous. I was 11. He’d been president since before I was born, the only president I ever knew. The war in Europe was ending fast yet he didn’t live to see it happen and that single fact is what saddened everyone more than anything else that night. We all cried. The victory celebrations ending the costliest war in history, the defeat of the Nazis, were only days away yet we all cried.

Four days later Russian and American troops met, splitting Germany in two. Following that was the discovery of the concentration camps, revealing to us unimaginable grimness and horror. We saw it in the newsreels at the movies. On April 25 the United Nations was created, as the conference in San Francisco convened to form its charter. On the 29th newspapers showed pictures of Mussolini and his mistress, shot and hanging upside down at a gas station in Milan. The next day, the news came from Berlin that the Russian flag was flying from the Reichstag. (We were all very disappointed. All through the war we assumed we’d get there first.) On that same day in Berlin Hitler’s suicide was announced, another disap-pointment. We wanted him to be captured alive! Our sense of "we" was imbedded in our psyches. Everyone, from the President down to four year old children were consciously contributing to the "war effort" and the news of the war had been our common concern every day for more than three and a half years.

Finally it happened! Although technically Germany surrendered on May 7, causing confusion in the world’s time zones, President Truman proclaimed the following day to be VE-Day (Victory in Europe Day), May 8, 1945. It would be three more months before the Second World War was over, when dropping two atomic bombs and Russia’s last minute declaration of war on Japan, convinced the Japanese to sur-render on August 14, VJ-Day.

I was not at home on Long Island, 17 miles from Times Square. I was in a small town called La Feria, Texas, (meaning "The Festival") population 1000. (now close to 10000) down in the Rio Grande Valley near the Mexican border, far from my school, my friends and family.

My father had been stationed in Portsmouth, England for two years and in Panama before that. Now, after a short visit home, he was about to drive to Texas where he’d been assigned to the Army Gunnery School, Harlingen Army Air Field, in Harlingen Texas to install training equipment for fighter pilots.

Because I had seen so little of him, it seemed like a good idea for me to accompany my Dad to Texas as an opportunity for us to bond. However, I was torn between the supreme adventure of traveling across America, (throughout the war gas rationing had restricted everyone’s travels to no more than 10 miles or so) or leaving my very sick springer spaniel Bings and my very sick grandmother who, together, received 100 per cent of my devotion. Less important, but still hard for me to do, was to aban-don my collection of three and four inch war news headlines from the New York newspapers just as the most exciting headlines of the war were approaching. Also, the anticipated victory celebrations were felt to be imminent and I imagined that the one in Times Square would be the most spectacular in the world. A short bus and subway ride could get me there a half hour after the news was announced.

I decided to go to Texas. We left Valley Stream, Long Island at 6 AM, Eastern War Time, on April 12 in a thick fog and I began the most intense period of my young life.

By nightfall we’d reached the toll booth ex-iting the brand new Pennsylvania Turnpike Superhighway. It was then that the cashier told us the news.. "President Roosevelt has died!"

Six weeks later, while I was gone experiencing the most exciting adventure of my life thus far, my dog had died and my grandmother had died and the most sensational headlines of the war had come and gone. But on May 8th, along with the rest of the world I was jubilant!

It was a Tuesday morning and I was alone in our airy room along the covered verandah on the second floor of the two storey Hargrove Hotel. Under a clear blue southern Texas sky it was already very hot. Standing on the open verandah and looking to either end, the long wooden deck lined with lounge chairs resembled photographs I’d seen of the prominades on ocean liners. Using my imagination I could look out from the railing, erasing the lawn beneath, the trees and nearby houses and convert the vista before me into the ocean…or anything else for that matter.
I don’t remember the exact moment I first got the news or how it came to me… the ra-dio, or from some person in the hotel. I was elated, naturally…but at the same time I was disappointed. This was not the way it was supposed to happen. I’d always known that when the war came to an end I would rush to Times Square. I’d seen pictures of the celebrations around the world when Germany surrendered in 1918 ending the First World War. My grandfather did then what I wanted to do now: rush to Times Square along with thousands of others. What made it more exasperating for me was what I saw on the front page of the Valley Morning Star after breakfast. There, in the center of the page under the headline was a photograph taken the day before in Times Square showing thousands of people gathered before the Times Building with it’s continuous news text racing around the building awaiting the first flash of the greatest news of their lives but, alas, I was all by myself a couple thousand miles away.

My father had already left for work when the message came over the radio: "Please stand by for an important announcement". At exactly 8:00 AM Central War Time in Texas, in a brief radio address to the waiting world, President Truman in Washington im-mediately followed by Winston Churchill in London made it "official".. Ger-many had surrendered.

I expected to hear shouting all over the hotel and peo-ple racing from the nearby houses into the street. The birds kept chat-tering but otherwise, not a peep. So, what I did next I felt compelled to do to dispel my intense desire to be somewhere else. I pretended I was there.. on Times Square.. in New York City.. on the morning of May 8, 1945. ..Not down on the square among the throngs of celebrants but standing on a balcony of the Hotel Astor, high above Broadway, overlooking the festivities.

I went to the bathroom and took 4 white bath towels from their racks. I unfolded them and spread them on the two beds. Then I grabbed a roll of my father’s black electrician’s tape and began pressing strips of tape on the four towels to simulate the flags of the allies: The United States, Great Britain, Russia and China. The Union Jack was easy… two full length crosses. Our flag was tricky. I used lots of criss-crossed tape for the stars. Nationalist China wasn’t easy… the tiny rays coming out of the sun were simple to do but the sun itself meant mak-ing many little pieces of tape into a round circle. Finally the Russian flag was, I remember, a failure. I had no clear recollection of how the hammer intersected the sickle.

When I finished this task I began Phase Two of my celebration plan. I gathered newspapers and scrap paper from around the room, sat on the bed efficiently folding piles of paper, then tore page after page into tiny pieces until the wastebasket was almost full.

I gathered everything and went out on the empty verandah. One by one I hung the four "flags" over the railing and pretended to hear the crowd cheer progressively louder as each banner was put in place: China, Russia, and then a mighty cheer went up when the British flag was unfolded. Finally a deafening roar accompanied the Stars and Stripes. Now, I grabbed fistfuls of my home-made confetti and tossed it down into the throng. It was all over in a couple min-utes. I’d made little or no noise except the simulated sound-effects of the roaring crowds, audible to me alone. What remained, of course, was the neatly shorn green lawn below speckled with the shadows of leaves and hundreds of little white schnitzels, as my German speaking grandmother would have called them. One passerby, an old man, was puzzled by the sight until I announced "Germany just surrendered!" and he looked up with a smile and a wave. I looked forward to the responses of other passersby throughout the day who I knew would love the opportunity of sharing in my VE-Day festivities.

However, moments later I was brought swiftly down to Earth when Mrs. Hargrove arrived. She stood on the grass in her black dress and white apron, hand on hip. She was not sweet and she didn’t particu-larly like me. She was very short and I towered over her, a Yankee kid, no less. She called up to me as only a Texan could:
"…get your sweet ass down here and pick up this mess. …and are those my towels you ruined? Your daddy’s sure as hell gunna hear about it."
And so, on this day, the most festive day of the century thus far, the only festivity going on in La Feria.. the one town in America whose name means "festival".. had been terminated.

Hitler and his war had become history but there were still people in the world who were able to let a neat little lawn in a tiny Texas town trump that tremendously happy event and in the process rain on an eleven year old’s parade.

Harvey Dodd
Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA
2005

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