Victory in Europe Day: 80th anniversary

While declaring war in 1939 was a straightforward matter, arranging the German surrender would prove somewhat more complicated

- Allan Mallinson

ON 3 September 1939, two days after the Germans invaded Poland, the prime minister.

Neville Chamberlain, made an announcement on the BBC: "This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany." On 29 April 1945 General Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force (AEF), signalled the war's stuttering finale in his weekly intelligence summary: 'The German army is dying the slow death of a thousand pockets. In the east, the capital was invested and a great part of it stormed: territory and command finally lost all semblance of unity when the advancing Russians joined up with the Western Allies on the Elbe. Yet there was no sign of actual surrender. Hitler was still alive in his bunker under the shattered Chancellery building in Berlin: who but he could give the order? A fortnight earlier Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery, commanding the 21st Army Group comprising the 2nd (British) and 1st (Canadian) armies, had received a message via the Dutch Resistance that the Germans, cut off in a huge 'pocket' in western Holland by the advance of the 2nd Army into Germany and the Canadians to the Zuider Zee, were prepared to discuss ways of feeding the 3.5 million civilians who were facing starvation there.

The Germans had flooded the polders and sent livestock and railway rolling stock east across the Rhine, exacerbating the unusually severe weather conditions in December and January, when canals and rivers froze, further hindering transport of what food there was.