Gen Alfred Jodl, centre, signing the unconditional surrender of all armed German forces in Reims on 7 May 1945. Photograph: AP
Daniel Boffey, Kim Willsher , Angela Giuffrida and Philip Oltermann, The Guardian: The man who stopped the war: 97-year-old recalls VE Day coded message
US radio operator who sent news of German surrender among war generation marking VE Day 75 years on.
“I finished it,” says Gregory Melikian, 97, “but my heroes are the guys that hit the beaches, so many of whom never came back.”
Seventy-five years ago, in the early hours of 7 May 1945, the supreme allied commander Gen Dwight Eisenhower selected Sgt Melikian, then a 20-year-old radio operator, to send the coded message to army groups and allied capitals announcing Germany’s unconditional surrender.
Of the three operators working in the Reims school that housed the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, Melikian was the youngest, an enlisted Illinois University student shipped to France just the year before, and that made him first choice for the US general.
“We were across the hall from the war room [where the German surrender was signed by the German general Alfred Jodl],” says Melikian. “There was a guy from Texas aged 36, another guy from South Carolina, 27 or 28, and yours truly. Eisenhower’s exact words were: ‘I want Melikian to send this coded message and talk about it for the rest of his life.’ It was 74 words to the world saying that tomorrow, 8 May, at 11.01pm, hostilities will cease and that we will stop shooting at each other.
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WNU Editor: My father learned about the end of the war from a leaflet that was dropped throughout the area. He was about 30 or 40 kilometres west of Berlin. He was part of the 1st Ukrainian Front, and they had just been chewed-up by Wenck's Army group who had wanted to surrender to the Americans, British, and Canadian forces. In the last three days of the war, out of a force that was around 500 Soviet soldiers, only 150 survived, my father included. A few minutes after reading the leaflet a German sniper almost picked him off. As he told me more than once. He and the survivors of his group then spent the next few days just hiding in the woods.
