VE Day: 8th May 1945.
US And Europe Mark VE Day Anniversary (BBC)
UPDATE: The Old Boy comments:
Here’s the Irish Times cover. The text was approved by the censor; the arrangement of photographs in a ‘V’ was very definitely not.
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Everything. As It Happens.
The ‘PINK Edition’ is it, right, well then, that’s enough of that….. Nuala! get the brush, James lift the carpet for your sister, while I speak to Father Maguire.
More tea Father? I hear the war is over, the pinkos won the referendum.
Clampers, forgive the directness, but… do you work for yourself or for someone else? If it’s someone else, do you work for the public service or a private sector company? Sorry, I shouldn’t ask – but you post *so* frequently…
Uh-oh, snared! Leggit!
Let’s just say it’s not always 9 to 5
Would it be mean to suggest that they withdrew their armed forces, took stock, and sent out the bankers …
Here’s the Irish Times cover: (sorry about the low quality, I had to do a screengrab)
http://i.imgur.com/nPuGsho.png
The text was approved by the censor; the arrangement of photographs in a ‘V’ was very definitely not.
Cool :)
brilliant cover, thanks for that
Excellent, any more background on the censor issue? I mean I know it’s embarrassing looking back now, but were things THAT BAD? Jaysus, I could see us being all happy like the Ukrainians were with the arrival of the Nazis for about ten minutes till they realised what the craic was. Oh, you’re going to use us all as slave labour and starve us to death, unless we’ve already been executed? Sound.
Our neutrality was quite fascinating and it was a lot more pro-allies than you’d think. If i remember rightly, if any Germans found themselves in the Republic, they were interned; British airmen would be (and it’s like the words from my history book are burned into my brain) “spirited back across the border under cover of darkness”
The public stance was, of course, utter neutrality, which meant that Dev (and I’m no apologist for him) had to go through the condolences of Hitler’s death thing. Although he could genuinely have been saddened, I dunno.
I see. I had thought the condolences thing was voluntary. Civil war politics I guess.
As Ivan said, the policy of neutrality was somewhat flexible, although this was only really the case as it became apparent that the Allies would win. The censorship office, on the other hand, didn’t do flexibility, and carried out its functions under the Emergency Powers Act and associated Executive Orders to the letter. This included a strict press neutrality provision.
At one early stage of the war, The Irish Times was forced to report that a correspondent had drowned in a fishing accident abroad, when in fact he had been embedded with the British Army when the troop ship he was on was torpedoed in the Mediterranean. The Irish Times, which was just emerging in its modern form under the editorship of Bertie Smyllie, having being an overtly Unionist paper, resented the restrictions more than the party-friendly Press and Independent.
Cheers Old Boy, you’ve given me a bit to go on there.
I borrowed a DVD from my local library recently titled, The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler, Leading Millions Into The Abyss; it’s well worth a watch as there’s some fantastic contemporary footage, and it also features testimony of former Nazis and ordinary Germans.