When my wife reminded me that Friday marks Victory in Europe Day’s 75th anniversary and suggested we engage our godson in learning about the date’s significance, I reached out to two reliable historians — my mother and my friend, Barbara Folk.
World War II loomed over my mother’s girlhood and Barbara was a young woman serving this country during the war. War memories and VE Day’s importance remain engraved in their minds.
My mother grew up in a small Colorado Plains town untouched in the last century by most of the world around it. People grew corn and sugar beets, raised livestock, and lived the lives of 20th century rural Americans.
Fort Morgan’s population included German-Americans like my grandparents’ neighbors, and the story goes that the government sited a German prison camp at the edge of town on the premise that animosities might be reduced between the locals and the prisoners because of shared heritage.
Heritage and ancestry coupled with immigration helped define America’s involvement in World War II. Europe in 1941 when the U.S. entered the war wasn’t just a place on the other side of the Atlantic. It was the homeland left behind by people who came to America seeking better lives, but intent on preserving their German or Polish or Italian or Irish or Norwegian heritage.
My mother doesn’t remember the prisoner of war camp. But VE Day remains clear in her mind because it meant her father’s best friend, “Doc” Richards, could finally come home. Barbara walked out of a Norfolk, Virginia movie theater with a friend and into chaotic VE Day celebrations already spilling through the streets.
People were overturning buses in their enthusiasm and she recalled how the military police or some other authority ordered her into a van to whisk her away from the mayhem.
Unlike Europeans who had to rebuild lives out of rubble when the war ended, Americans were ready to resume lives defined by work, homes, cars and The American Dream. They stormed Salerno, Anzio and Omaha Beach and parachuted into France, but they were anxious to end the war in Europe and the one against Japan in the Pacific.
The press and Congress hoped unrealistically to defeat Germany by Christmas, 1944 and when the Ardennes offensive pushed the conquest of Germany into 1945, Americans knew World War II would end with a hard slog through town after ruined town and island after bloody island.
The late great Walter Hoey told the story of his brother’s death as the war in Europe wound down and how his mother heard the news in the family’s Broad Street apartment and focused her rage and sorrow on the ice box, pushing it across the kitchen without saying a word.
In 2002, Roland Regan gave me a signed copy of the book he wrote with Christopher Mauriello. Their fathers never met but they were the “citizen soldiers” historian Stephen Ambrose wrote about and who chronicled their war experiences in letters and photographs.
Roland Regan Sr. was born in Lynn and Frederick Mauriello was born in Boston and grew up in Revere. By early spring, 1945, their respective combat outfits were fighting in Germany from river to river like so many warriors before them in previous centuries.
For combatants like Regan and Mauriello, war’s exhausting mental and physical strain detailed in “From Boston to Berlin” muted VE Day enthusiasm.
“The memories of lost friends during the war and anxieties about being sent to the Pacific Theater limited the celebration,” their sons wrote.
Frederick Mauriello’s letter to his mother written on May 8, 1945 is included in the book written by his son and Roland Regan Jr.
“The way we feel about the ending of the war is one of the biggest disappointments in our life,” Mauriello wrote. “We can’t generate a feeling of excitement or enthusiasm. We seem tired and lazy. There seems to be no thrills left in life … We have finished a gigantic task … Today should be a day of prayer instead of revelry … Prayers for those who gave all to their country. Those whose ears and eyes have been closed by the touch of death … Go on and celebrate. Tonight I live in recollections and memories. Love, Freddy.”
