May 8 is the anniversary of Victory in Europe Day. It celebrates the formal end of the war in Europe and complete surrender of the German military.

Adolph Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, but the actual surrender took over a week as elements of the German Army continued a futile defense against the rapidly advancing Soviet Armies.

The Soviet Armies crushed all defeat in and around Berlin over the next several days. They also raped about 80,000 German women along the way. Additionally, the Soviet troops looted buildings and murdered an unknown number of Germans.

The German Instrument of Surrender was signed at 22:43 German time on May 8.

It reads,

The German High Command will at once issue orders to all German military, naval and air authorities and to all forces under German control to cease active operations at 23.01 hours Central European time on 8 May 1945…

The war that Germany had started on September 1, 1939 by invading Poland on a false pretext was finally over in Europe.

For England and Europe, the war was almost six years long. For the United States World War 2 started with the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In both the Atlantic and Pacific, the issue was in doubt for several years.

In some ways the war had started earlier with other events. On October 3, 1935, Italian troops invaded Ethopia after a border incident between Ethopia and Italian Somaliland. Mussolini ordered Italian troops to attack Ethopia. Italy won due to it’s superior weaponry and in part because Britain refused to intervene on behalf of Ethiopia.

Japan invaded Manchuria in September of 1931 and China in 1937. On September 12, 1937 Japanese planes attacked and sank the USS Panay on Yangtze River. The Panay was a US gunboat, killing three people on board and injuring 48 people on other US flagged ships. Japan claimed that their pilots had not seen the US flags on the ships, however photographic evidence contradicts that.

In some ways these precursors were the shape of things to come while much of the world wanted nothing but peace.

The Victory in Europe not the end of World War 2. The war would continue through the spring and summer of 1945 until Japan surrendered unconditionally on September 2, 1945 when the Instrument of Surrender was signed on board the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Harbor. Japan had ceased fighting on August 15 (August 14 in the US) 1945.

Depending on which date you pick World War 2 could be considered to have lasted almost 15 years.