V-E Day, when allies accepted Germany's surrender in Europe, marked 80 years ago with focus on finishing the job in WWII

On this day 80 years ago, Long Islanders celebrated victory as German forces ended fighting in Europe by surrendering unconditionally to the allies, an occasion memorialized by space-pressed newspaper headline writers as V-E Day.

Given what the world had endured over the last six years of World War II, the celebrations seem subdued, at least as portrayed in local newspapers. 

"Prayers and Pledge to Finish Job" was the headline in The Farmingdale Post. "No Jubilance," proclaimed the Nassau Daily Review-Star. Newsday went with "Throng Churches for Sober Victory Day," though a photograph below the headline showed five women identified as defense workers — not in church and possibly not sober — raising their glasses in a toast to victory. 

President Harry Truman set a stern tone in a May 8, 1945, White House news conference, reminding Americans that victory in Europe had cost men’s lives and asking them to gird for a final push against the Japanese in the Pacific theater, where fighting would continue for months.

"Let us not forget, my fellow Americans, the sorrow and the heartache which today abide in the homes of so many of our neighbors — neighbors whose most priceless possession has been rendered as a sacrifice to redeem our liberty," Truman said, according to a transcript from the University of California at Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project. "If I could give you a single watchword for the coming months, that word is work, work, and more work. We must work to finish the war. Our victory is only half over."

That message, reinforced by a largely compliant news media, was born out of American leaders’ concern that Americans were tiring of the fight even as the military readied for an invasion of Japan, said Stony Brook University historian Michael Barnhart.

"There was a great deal of pressure, particularly from wives and sisters, that troops, particularly in Europe, should get a break," Barnhart said. "There was no guarantee that the atomic bomb would work or be ready, and plans were for a major invasion of the southernmost Japanese island in the fall ... followed by invasion six months later of the main Japanese island. They expected very heavy fighting and casualties."

To the extent V-E Day lives in the popular imagination today, it is probably in photographs of Manhattan's Times Square, where The New York Times reported that as many as 250,000 people gathered. By contrast, Newsday’s V-E Day story described quiet streets in Long Island villages and "heavy attendance at the victory services of worship and Thanksgiving" in area churches.

"The wild jubilation feared by officials, and against which they had warned since the breakthrough in Normandy spelt the doom of Hitler’s Europe, failed to materialize," the paper reported. "Police forces were alert for emergency calls but the precautions proved needless."

Natalie Korsavidis, a Farmingdale Public Library librarian who has researched that community’s wartime history, said she found few mentions of V-E Day in Farmingdale Post archives. "I was expecting big monster headlines and parades — I was expecting to find all that, and I was surprised by how low-key it was," she said.

That could be because when the first V-E Day was recognized, war still permeated Long Islanders’ lives. In Farmingdale, with a 1940 population of just 3,524, 30 men were killed in action, according to a list compiled by Korsavidis’ library, and some of their deaths were fresh.

There and across Long Island, men were still being called up for service and casualties were still being announced. The same Post issue that carried the V-E Day story also brought word from a local woman, Lillian Beckham, that the U.S. Department of War had declared her husband, Guy, missing in action in the European theater. 

Lawrence Levy, executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, wrote in an email that the first V-E Day can be viewed as a point of interest in Long Island’s postwar development. When GIs returned from Europe and, later, the Pacific, they "came home to a Long Island that, at least in the years immediately after World War II, looked very much like the one they left, but would soon explode in population with escapees from the city. What didn’t change for more than a generation was reliance on a relative handful of giant defense contractors who would shift into the aerospace arena."

Tim Keogh, a Queensborough Community College historian and author of "In Levittown's Shadow: Poverty in America’s Wealthiest Postwar Suburb," said in an interview that as Long Island marked the first V-E Day in 1945, war was not the only source of anxiety: "A major topic, domestically, was job losses," he said, as the region’s industrial base, spun up over a few years from virtually nothing to massive scale, began to shrink.

"As of '39, there were only 4,000 industrial workers in any industry on Long Island, and by '44 there were 100,000," he said. "These were women, older men, teenagers, many people who had never worked in a factory: domestics, farmhands, chauffeurs, housewives who had a completely different opportunity that was about to be ripped away."

Republic Aviation cut 24,000 jobs, shut down and rehired 3,700. Sperry cut 30,000 jobs to 5,000. Grumman also had large layoffs. "This was all happening toward the summer and fall of '45," Keogh said.

A keyword search for "layoff" in the NYS Historic Newspapers database shows that the number of stories containing the word in Long Island newspapers more than doubled from 1944 to 1945. By August 1945, the Post was publishing stories about "Hundreds of Farmingdale war workers, economic casualties of victory."