Well, here we are, finally. The Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan have been defeated. Hitler has committed suicide, at least that’s the official story, Mussolini was captured and hanged, and the Japanese emperor had to go on a nationwide broadcast and admit that he was not a deity.

The Allies were firmly in control of all the Axis lands, and the countries that they had conquered. If you look at a map of the high-tide mark of the Axis control, which was probably mid-1942, they controlled all of Europe, except the UK and the remnant of the European part of the USSR. They controlled much of North Africa. The Axis controlled all of the western Pacific Ocean, and in mid-1942, they had inflicted huge damage on the existing militaries of the Allies.

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Well, here we are. Humans are about to devise the technology that could realistically end the world. For the first time, humans have the ability to basically eradicate all of life on earth, and it’s only restrained by, well humans. Yikes.

The war in Europe ended in May of 1945, but the war in the Pacific was still going on. We talked about the turning point in the Pacific, the Battle of Midway, a couple of episodes ago, but since then we’ve only talked about the war in Europe. So we need to go back a couple of years and catch up with what was going on in the Pacific.

Well, VE Day is the sort of nickname that the world press gave to the day when victory in Europe was achieved. So VE stands for victory in Europe, which obviously is where we are going with this episode, but we’ve got a ways to go yet. And the eventually victory over Japan is going to be called VJ Day, but that one doesn’t get all that much traction, for some reasons that we’ll go into next episode. But lots of newspapers and countries around the western world were very excited about VE Day, and the name kind of stuck.

At the end of the last episode, we left about 150,000 Allied troops holding a small but solid beachhead in Normandy. The D-Day invasion was a huge Allied victory, but it was only the start of a long and difficult road to the defeat of Nazi Germany. But it was, indeed, the beginning of the end.