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Showing posts from May 3, 2015

Victory in Europe Day

Today is Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day. At 0241 Tuesday, 7 May 1945 Generaloberst Alfred Jodl, Stabschef Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (roughly the equivalent of our Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), representing Germany’s armed forces, surrendered to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force. The ceremony took place at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims, France. One-hundred and seventeen days later Japan would surrender and World War II was over. World War II was the largest and most terrible event in human history. The war was fought on every continent including Antarctica. Conservatively, 60 million people died and millions more were wounded, displaced, or missing. The end of the war marked the economic and political decline of Europe and the emergence of the United States and the Soviet Union as the world’s two dominant powers. It was the beginning of the Cold War, the Nuclear Age, the dissolution of European colonial empires, the