Читать книгу A Bloody Victory - Dan Harvey - Страница 9

PREFACE

The Führer was dead. Hitler had ended his own life in his command bunker under the Reichstag Chancellery building in Berlin. German wireless transmitted an announcement on 1 May 1945 that Admiral Doenitz had been appointed to succeed him as Führer, and the Allies had picked up the news. Already long certain of the pointlessness of continuing hostilities, the Wehrmacht (German army) sent communications to the Allies to open negotiations for surrender. In response, the Allies had insisted on any terms being unconditional. A surrendering document was drawn up by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force; the German delegation arrived in Reims to sign it, and when the German generals signed the unconditional surrender on 7 May, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, US General Dwight D. Eisenhower, asked Kay Summersby (formerly MacCarthy-Morrogh) from Inish Beg House, Baltimore, County Cork, to stand in the historic photographs and film. The war was over and at its official ending the Irish were there.

This was as appropriate as it was ironic, because at the very start of the war, on 4 September 1939, the day after hostilities began, 23-year-old pilot officer William Murphy, the son of William and Katherine Murphy of Mitchelstown, County Cork, was shot down and killed as he led a wave of Royal Air Force (RAF) bombers in an attack on the German naval port of Wilhelmshaven. All four bombers were lost. The sole survivor was Irishman Laurence Slattery of Thurles, County Tipperary. Willie Murphy’s death was thus both the first Irish and British death of the Second World War and Laurence Slattery became the first and longest serving western Allied prisoner of war. From its very beginning to its end, and at all places, times and events in between, the Irish were there, fighting with the Allies, for freedom and democracy, against the terrible tyranny of Nazi fascism. This book is dedicated to those same selfless Irish men and women, both native-born and of Irish descent, whose involvement must be acknowledged and not forgotten; the values for which they fought and died must never be lost.