“Many people died, including world leaders. April, they say, is the cruelest month.”

By Craig Shirley

IN APRIL OF 1945, life-altering events happened. The old order was dying, and a new America was being built.

And many people died, including world leaders. April, they say, is the cruelest month.

In 1945, Americans were still reeling from the attack on Pearl Harbor where many men remained unidentified four years later. Hawaii had once been a peaceful and idyllic island chain in the Pacific. One resident, Gene Paterson Ames, wrote to her mother immediately after the attack of hearing the tinkling of Japanese shell casings falling from their planes as they flew overhead, looking for anything to shoot.

“At first, I just went to pieces,” she wrote frankly. “All of us did.”

She also wrote of the carnage there, of trenches being dug around houses, about her husband being deployed to help guard the beach against a possible invasion. She was shortly evacuated to the mainland. Her husband, Major Alan Strock, later became a much-decorated soldier, fighting for four years in the Pacific.

On December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor was a sitting duck. Now, by 1945, it was the Gibraltar of the Central Pacific.

In the first months of 1945, the great war correspondent Ernie Pyle was killed in the Pacific, and Auschwitz and Buchenwald were discovered as were their horrors. And then Franklin Roosevelt, on the verge of victory over the Axis Powers, died suddenly at the age of 63. He died in April of 1945, just as Abraham Lincoln died in April 1865. Harry Truman became president of the United States. British leader Winston Churchill had once called FDR the “best friend” to England. Churchill once dubbed Roosevelt “the greatest man I have ever known.” Churchill and FDR were part of the “Big Three” along with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Of the “Big Three” Churchill and Roosevelt never completely trusted each other, definitely not Stalin; but all were united in their desire to defeat Nazism.

In the early years of the 1940s, young women had inundated Washington looking for work. So had minorities. Washington, before the war, had been a sleepy Southern town that flooded often and then frequently reeked as the Potomac spilled over its shallow banks while mosquitoes buzzed everywhere. Charles Dickens once visited Washington and was appalled at the filthy conditions. After the New Deal and then during the war, it grew exponentially as well as bureaucratically. Washington had quickly become the capital of the world. “If the war lasts much longer, Washington is going to bust right out right out of it pants,” wrote Life magazine in January of 1943.

Even in the thick of the war, movies continued. Disney launched their new feature, The Three Caballeros. Many movies had a war theme, but some were focused on suspense, as with Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck, produced by David O. Selznick.

Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR’s wife and fifth cousin, had reshaped the office of the First Lady into a newly powerful position, unlike women who had preceded her. She was a force to be reckoned with. Even so, FDR practically died in the arms of his lover, Lucy Mercer Rutherford, far from Eleanor. FDR was vacationing in his beloved Warm Springs, Georgia, when he died of an intracerebral hemorrhage. In the following days, a national magazine featured on its last page a picture of the lonely dog Fala waiting in vain for his master, FDR.

Still, the war was nearly won by FDR and Churchill, despite their flaws. The phrase “April in Paris” took on a whole new meaning while jet planes flew overhead in Europe continuously. Night after night, Allied planes bombed German cities.

In April, the despicable monster Adolf Hitler, half crazed and trapped in his bunker, finally committed suicide. So did his longtime mistress, Eva Braun. They left behind the many Germans and Europeans who participated in the so-called Final Solution as a means of exterminating millions of Jews, political opponents, Poles, Russians, homosexuals and other worthy human beings. All told, he was responsible for the deaths of millions of people and had destroyed many countries. Hitler’s mission had also been to change the face of Europe by destroying the existing culture and replacing it with a Germanic one.

Hitler may not have changed the face of Europe, but the war did change the face of the home front and the world. Two of his last orders included “Clausewitz” which was the final defence of Berlin and the Nero Decree which was an order to destroy as much material as possible to prevent it from falling into the Allies hands. He was a monster right to the end.

Plexiglass was developed for wartime and peacetime use. Americans debated Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America while simultaneously debating Can Democracy Recover by Louis Marlio. Liberty ships dotted the oceans. Future presidents Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush all served in uniform in the war, as did millions of other young Americans.

Under the cover of secrecy, engineers developed giant bombs while Americans drove cars, sparingly because of gas rationing, that included Fords, Plymouths, Chryslers, LaSalles, Mercurys, and Nashes, although they also traveled by planes, trains and busses.

In Buchenwald, thousands of German civilians were forced by U.S. Army officials to bear witness to the Nazi atrocities there. Many fainted and more cried. George Patton, who had seen so much in war and peace, threw up at the spectacle of the human carnage by the Germans. In the news often, Patton was due for his fourth star.

Hitler ally Benito Mussolini was dragged down by the mob, as was his mistress, and they were both shot by a firing squad then hung upside down for public display and ridicule in Milan. And POWs hated the Nazis. With good reason, too, as they were horribly treated. Same for the Japanese, who were ghastly in dealing with American POWs.

The battle for Okinawa was initially thought to be “very light,” at least according to the Washington Post, but it turned out to be one of the bloodiest battles of the entire war.

Millions of men went to war in Europe and the Pacific and to other parts of the world as military personnel, but so did millions of civilians, especially women. In the thick of the war years, Americans everywhere were volunteering for the war effort, giving blood, saving scrap metal, growing victory gardens. Propaganda posters were in heavy use. Australia suffered a drought, but women’s stockings and silk lingerie ads were ubiquitous as the war was winding down and silk was no longer needed for military parachutes.

Far and wide, war bonds, known as Liberty Bonds in 1918, were for sale and civilians bought more than one billion dollars’ worth of them. The bonds were used to pay for the war effort. Bonds were advertised, put on promotional posters, and written about in magazines such as Life, Look, Harper’s, The Saturday Evening Post, and Reader’s Digest.

Millions – perhaps billions – in plundered gold, money, jewelry, and paintings were discovered in secret Nazi caches in Europe, stolen mostly from the Jews of Europe.

“There’s a war on!” was a repeated phrase and headline, delivered both sarcastically and seriously. The Washington Post reported in big black letters “Report Nazi Surrender” on April 29. (The actual date was May 7.) The next day it was reported “Mussolini, Mistress Slain by Patriots.”

As of the end of December 1944, under two million men had separated from the army through all forms of discharge: honourable and otherwise, killed in action, wounded and missing, and POWs.

To fight the war, Roosevelt had essentially created a new government and laid it on top of the old government. The once middle-class town of Washington was changed by the patrician from the Hudson Valley in New York. Government intervened in every aspect of the American economy and culture, right down to the price of diapers and a bottle of ketchup. Though it had failed to defeat the Great Depression, it had succeeded in defeating Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan.

The military depended on Campbell’s Tomato Soup, and cigarettes were in high demand. Chesterfield cigarettes were advertised featuring women fetching slippers for a man and his smokes. Makeup ads also sometimes depicted women as men’s pets. They wore hose for their legs, and the Andrews Sisters were still thrilling crowds with their crooning while Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were still entertaining movie audiences.

The contrasts were unavoidable: Slavish falsehoods about the Soviets’ “worker’s paradise” appeared in all the magazines and newsreels while a hotel room in Miami was going for around $37 dollars a day with 200,000 visitors expected-there were plenty of steaks too.

Many were experiencing bittersweet feelings as they were happy with the victory yet devastated at the loss of a son in uniform.

It was a meanness of times, but it was also a kindness of times. It was a blending. It was an ending. And it was a beginning. The great Winston Churchill was famous for saying, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Such was April 1945.

Craig Shirley is the author of April 1945: The Hinge of History from which this article was excerpted. His earlier book December 1941 appeared multiple times on the New York Times bestseller list. Shirley is chairman of Shirley & Banister Public Affairs and is a widely sought-after speaker and commentator.