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At last reports CZECH Patriots controlled most of PRAGUE, but, as the
CZECH radio put it, the German troops were having "their last wild fling" and
were "behaving like devils." Some units had surrendered, but others fired on a
hospital housing their own wounded and used women and children as screens for
their tanks.
Representatives of the Scottish Command arrived in NORWAY to receive the
surrender of the German forces there.
In his broadcast to the German people announcing the unconditional
surrender, DOENITZ said: "We must face the facts squarely. The foundations on
which the German Reich was built have collapsed. The connection between state
and party no longer exists."
The German High Command, noting that in some sectors the British had
banned the use of the Nazi salute by PWs, ordered all German forces to use the
military salute, and broadcast instructions as to how it should be done.
King LEOPOLD of BELGIUM and his family have been rescued.
Dr. SCHAGHT, Hitler's finance minister in the early days of the Nazi
regime but later imprisoned by him, was liberated from a camp in ITALY. He
told reporters that the Germans will follow any lead which gives them food and
order."
A late bulletin announced that the Germans in PRAGUE had surrendered.
DEGRELLE, Belgium Fascist leader has been arrested in SPAIN.
HENRY M. MURRAY,
1st Lt. Infantry,
Public Relations, XII Corps.
It was hard to believe. And to most Americans there was a strange quality to the feeling they
experienced. It was so lacking in the exultant thrill of victory we had all been led to expect. In the little
Bavarian hill town of Grafenau, where the Corps CP had moved on 3 May, the news was received with
the same somewhat numb reaction. Perhaps the quality can best be conveyed by two eloquent passages
from the history of the 101st Evacuation Hospital. It was, after all, in such hospitals that the ultimate
payoff of the fighting was most clearly understood. The first quotation had been written many months
before the conclusion of the war, by an anonymous nurse of the "101st Evac":
"Nights in the hospital were long and grim. … For the most part you don't think or wonder or try
to reason beyond the moment. … But sometimes at night there is a lull when you sink onto a blanket-
covered box beside a hissing gasoline LA lantern and just listen, and it all comes over you with a rush.
… Strange thoughts in an unnatural setting as you hear the breathing of wounded men, like a weird
symphony in the darkness. … Noises, great and small … rain hurling against canvas … moaning winds
and the splash of muddy boots … a sudden cry, breaking the stillness like a trumpet … distant,
thunderous drums that shake the earth, reverberating …. The patients are restless – you quiet them with
words. They answer in low-pitched voices; whispers tense with pain and anxiety that wander, sometimes
clear, sometimes faint; but you listen, nor try to check their course ….
"A few precious moments come with midnight chow, when tense, weary doctors, nurses,
technicians, ward men gather. The strain is eased; perhaps talking and is laughter is immoderate – it
braces them from the 'graveyard shift'. … The tent is brightly lit, warm and pleasant with the smell of
strong coffee and hot food. You wipe the rain off the top of your steel helmet and perch on it, balancing
the mess kit in the way that has become second nature; or perhaps you gather around a table. There is a
rustling of tent flaps as another figure laboriously crawls through, glistening from the wet, fixing the
'blackout' behind him. Perhaps it's a surgeon who has just left a shattered brain case in 'OR' or maybe the
guard just relieved from his post (if so, he will beat his hands together and exclaim, 'That was the
longest two hours I ever spent!') Or it may be a driver in from a long convoy moving another hospital.
… it is occasions like these, when things seem clearly and easily defined – when everyone, great or
small, is working toward the same end, and those guys on litters become more personal and more
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