VE Day is an event clouded in mythology. Allan Little looks at what really happened that day, in Britain and throughout Europe, using the BBC archive.
On the afternoon of 8 May 1945, BBC war correspondent Wynford Vaughan-Thomas stood in the town square of the medieval city of Luneburg in north-western Germany. RAF aircraft flew. A white sheet of surrender hung from one of the windows of the old town hall.
“The leading citizens of Luneburg are standing waiting,” Vaughan-Thomas reported, “and behind them are Bren gun carriers and lorries passing in a steady stream.
“And there's an endless line of German soldiers, the disbanded wreckage of the German army. But no-one even bothers to notice them any more. They tramp by to the nearest prison camp and even the citizens of Luneburg don't lift their heads to notice them.
“The war for them is over,” said Vaughan-Thomas.
A British army spokesman addressed the crowd.
“People of Luneburg, the Nazi government and the German Wehrmacht have surrendered unconditionally to the Allied Expeditionary Forces,” he said, and his voice, amplified by a PA system, carried across the square and into Vaughan-Thomas's microphone and, through radio, into homes across the United Kingdom and…
