Price Day, who was editor-in-chief of The Baltimore Sun, Evening Sun and Sunday Sun, was a modest and unassuming man.
He always dressed in carefully pressed gray flannels which he wore with a blue Oxford cloth button-down shirt and a tie that was perpetually set at half-mast, an open vest or sweater, and penny loafers.
A shock of unruly hair, boylike, vied for real estate over his right eyebrow. His eyes were framed by old-fashioned round horned-rim glasses.
He was seldom without a cigarette whose ash he allowed to grow and grow until it fell to the floor.
It was a game he played as he strolled through the paper’s hallways while making his rounds to call on his editors.
An inward person and a lyrical writer, Day had been one of The Sun’s war correspondents since 1943, when he was assigned to cover the war in Europe.
In early 1945, he was assigned to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) in Paris, which was under the command of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Three months later, he was an eyewitness to the German surrender at Reims, France, perhaps one of the most momentous events and news stories of the war.
After a meeting at SHAEF headquarters, several men from the various wire services and Day were invited outside and then boarded a bus.
“Our destination — unknown to us — was Reims. The date was May 6, 1945,” he wrote.
At 1:58 a.m. on May 7, a warm spring morning, SHAEF’s public relations director summoned the newsmen together.
“I think something is going to happen shortly,” he told them. “Gentlemen, I think this is it. All of the staff officers have been recalled,” Day wrote in his Sun account, who was the only correspondent in the world representing a newspaper.
The surrender activities took place May 7 in room 119 at the College Moderne et Technique de Reims, which later became known as the “little red schoolhouse.”
At 2:39 a.m., the German delegation filed into the room.
Col. Gen. Alfred Gustav Jodl, “long the brain of the German high command and now, for the moment, its chief of staff,” Day wrote, had arrived to oversee the process of surrender while hoping “to prevent the utter extermination of the Oberkommando Wehrmacht,” entered the room.
“Jodl was as pale, but more rigid — elaborately correct in a new gray green uniform, with wide scarlet stripes down the flared trousers, and polished black boots,” Day wrote.
Once the German delegation was seated, U.S. Army Lieut. Gen Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, watched as four other Americans, three Russians, one French and three British officers sat at the table.
“The actual ceremony could hardly have been more brief. Smith asked Jodl, in effect, if he understood the import of the proceedings,” through a translator.
“Everybody sat down at the places marked for each around the wide, much-used oak table. Jodl did not glance at the maps that covered the walls of the room — SHAEF’s until-then secret maps of the battlefronts.”
Smith signed for the Western Allies, and other signatories included French Major-Gen. Francois Sevez and Gen. Ivan Susloparov of the Soviet High Command.
Jodl’s signing was the last. Price checked his watch. It was 2:45 a.m. Central Europe Time, while in Baltimore it was 8:41 p.m. Eastern War Time and still Sunday.
“Jodl signed his name and carefully put down his pen. Europe’s long war was over,” Day wrote.
Jodl arose from the table, stood stiffly erect, and launched into an “arrogant little speech,” Day observed.
“‘With this signature,’ he said in German, ‘the German people and the German armed forces are, for better or worse, delivered into the victors’ hands.
“‘In this war, which has lasted more than five years, they both have achieved and suffered more than perhaps any other people in the world. In this hour I can only express the hope that the victors will treat them with generosity.”
Just after 3 a.m., Eisenhower, accompanied by British Deputy Air Chief Marshal Arthur W. Tedder asked Jodl tersly, “Do you understand the terms of this unconditional surrender and are you ready to comply with them?”
“There was no answer. There were no salutes. His face gray with strain, but his step steady, Jodl turned and walked from the room,” Day reported. “This was how it was — the victory of all the Allies over all the German forces on land, sea and air. This was not an armistice, it was surrender, total and complete.”
Despite the surrender being embargoed, it was Edward Kennedy, the Associated Press chief on the Western Front, who was the first to flash the word of Germany’s capitulation to a war weary world.
Five years, eight months and six days — ever since Hitler’s troops invaded Poland — the world finally received the news it had hoped for.
The guns on the Western front fell silent on May 8, while the Russians continued fighting until one minute past midnight on May 9.
Jubilation broke out in Baltimore as the sound of honking car horns, whistles and City Hall bell filled the air as crowds jammed Sun Square and Howard and Lexington streets. The neon lights flicked back on for the first time the war began because of blackout orders.
President Harry S. Truman declared May 8 V-E Day.
Mrs. John D. Helm, a 19-year-old who lived on south Hanover Street, gave birth May 7 to a daughter she named Victoria Europa.
For the mother of Staff Sgt. Meade O. “Jack” Hesson, who had been born on Armistice Day in 1918, and lived on West Lanvale Street, the surrender brought tragic news. She learned that her son had been killed in action April 14 in Europe.
Lee McCardell, who had covered the 29th Division and later Gen. George S. Patton Jr.’s Third Army, as a Sun war correspondent wrote of that day: “I was one of the lucky ones; one of the lucky ones who could think about going home. There were others, not so lucky, who would never go back.
“They were the dead whose graves belonged to the sandy wastes of North Africa, the olive groves of Italy, the hedgerows of Normandy and the hills of the Ardennes. Men who, in some mathematical calculations of the infinite, were killed in battle in order that we, the lucky ones, might survive.”
After the war, Day covered the Nuremberg War Crime Trials, and in 1948, obtained the last interview given to a newspaper by Mohandasa K. Gandhi before his assassination.
In 1949, he received the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.
Day died in 1978, having never written a memoir or autobiography.
