Carry ON Up The Elbe

Today (25 April) marks Elbe Day, the date in 1945 when American and Red Army soldiers met each other for the first time on the banks of the Elbe near the German town of Torgau. The two sides had been advancing for weeks from west and east respectively: Torgau was the point at which they finally cut Germany in two. Some two weeks later the Russians would take Berlin and the war in Europe would be over. Elbe Day tends to be overshadowed by VE Day on May 8 (May 9 in Russia) and has not always been officially recognised. In recent times the Russian invasion of Ukraine has tarnished the memory of that historic meeting, and in 2022 the Biden administration cancelled the joint ceremonies to mark the event. Today, as Trump seems set on a rapprochement with Putin's Russia (despite the ongoing Ukraine war), the anniversary is being reinstated in Washington - though Russian propaganda (in the shape of the official government newspaper Pravda) has been quick to use the event to trumpet its message that Nazism is again rearing its head in Europe - especially in Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states, where the Kremlin claims to see 'revanchist' anti-Russian initiatives on the march again. Russia, Pravda staunchly proclaims, as the country that suffered the most in WW2, 'will never allow the lessons of the past to be forgotten'. We can easily dismiss such obvious special pleading, but the unique resonance of the Meeting on the Elbe is worth remembering, not just as a symbol of the wartime Allies celebrating victory over Hitler's Reich but as a moment when ordinary comrades-in-arms were able to fraternise in the knowledge that, after years of war, peace lay just round the corner. In keeping with many such historic moments, however, the Elbe get-together (which both sides had plenty of time to prepare for) was rather less glorious and more cack-handed than one might think. In the first place, the American GIs failed, as agreed beforehand by the two armies' top brass, to make their approach known by firing a green-coloured star shell. Instead, not having an American flag to hand, they painted a white sheet in a poor approximation of the stars-and -stripes. Not surprisingly, the Russians at first thought the Yanks were Germans playing a trick. In the end, one man from each side was sent forward to the centre of a damaged bridge that crossed the Elbe. The two men embraced awkwardly and gave 'V for Victory' signs. It was only the next day that a more formal meeting took place in which dozens of soldiers from both sides smiled for the cameras and shook hands, swearing to forsake war in the name of their fallen comrades. In place of the partially destroyed bridge over the river, Soviet and US squaddies together built a new one - a bridge of friendship. That was then. Today that bridge seems a long way off.

If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again.

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