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VE Day unforgettable for those that were there

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Staff Sgt. Arthur Moore, who was wounded in Belgium, stands on 42nd Street near Grand Central Station in New York on VE Day.
  • Originally published May 7, 2009 at 5:33 p.m., updated May 8, 2009 at 9:09 a.m.

"Our pleasures were simple. They included survival."

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Supreme Allied Commander

World War II

The final victory over Germany came on May 7, 1945, at a schoolhouse in Reims, France, which served as Gen. Dwight Eisenhower's headquarters.

There, Nazi Gen. Alfred Jodl signed the document of unconditional surrender, and the European theater of World War II was closed.

But since word of the surrender took a day or so to reach American shores, we celebrate "VE Day," or Victory in Europe, on May 8.

In an interview many years ago, I had the privilege of talking with Shiner resident Earl Parker, who was one of the troops at that surrender ceremony.

He told me he wept as the surrender was accomplished, and at first I could not understand that. Shouldn't that have been a moment to throw your military hat into the air and whoop it up?

No, not for Mr. Parker, who was Cpl. Parker that day, and still not even 20 years old.

"I was spared," he remembered thinking that day. "A lot of guys weren't. I thought of them, and the fact they couldn't be there to see it. And I thought of all the soldiers who had made it, and the civilians, and how they would be spared because of this surrender."

And that is what moved Cpl. Parker to tears in the schoolyard at Reims, at the end of the most global and bloody conflict in the history of mankind. Through it all, from the day he landed on the beach in Normandy to that final day of victory almost a year later, Parker said he was overcome with sympathy for the poor civilians caught up in war - sometimes killed, sometimes left homeless. "You can't imagine the destruction of war," he says, "and people have no idea what those poor people went through."

Gen. Jodl, Hitler's chief of staff (Hitler was already dead), couldn't have known, as he surrendered Germany's remaining forces, that he would be tried for war crimes and hanged in October 1946, along with many other Nazi architects of unspeakable atrocities.

As for Mr. Parker, he returned to his home in Shiner and is still going strong.

In fact, he told me just this week, he received a phone call a while back from a man he served with, a man who was also there on that fateful May 7 so long ago.

And so he traveled to his old comrade's winter home in Florida. "We had a lot of reminiscing to do," he said. "After all, we'd just made contact with each other after 57 years. He just called one day and asked to speak to Earl Parker."

Some things people share and never, ever forget.

For Earl Parker, that first VE Day was certainly one of them.

All of us should remember that day, and the sacrifices that were made leading up to it.

We can't afford to forget - ever.

Jim Bishop is a senior editor for the Advocate. Leave him a message at 361-574-1210 or jbishop@vicad.com or comment on this column at www.VictoriaAdvocate.com.


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