Seniors recall celebrations here that accompanied Nazi surrender
Seventy years ago this Friday there was literally dancing in the streets of Butler.
May 8, 1945, marked Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender and the end of World War II in Europe.
And for a shrinking number of Butler County senior citizens the long-ago celebrations that day are still fresh in their memories.
Wendy Phyllis, 91, of the Arbors in Butler, was a 20-year-old working at the Diamon News Agency on the ground floor of the Knights of Pythias Building at 413 S. Main St. at the end of the old viaduct.
Phyllis said, “Diamon distributed the Butler Eagle and out-of-town newspapers to different stores around town.”
On May 8, 70 years ago, she said, “Main Street was wild. People were all over Main Street. People were going crazy. We were selling papers the whole length of Main Street.”
“That evening and the day after, people were crazy,” said Phyllis.
“People stayed downtown. Everybody was happy. People were hugging and kissing and just were very happy,” she said.
“We expected it,” she said of Germany's surrender. “We all knew there was something coming up.”
Edna Weckerly, 92, had just graduated from Mars High School when she started working at the Spade Shirt Co. on Brugh Avenue.
“I lived on Chestnut Street on the corner there. The bus terminal wash by the old Troutman Building,” said Weckerly, a resident of Concordia these days. “The bus horns started blowing, the factory sires started blowing. It was mayhem.”
“It started real early in the morning. It was startling. People didn't know what was going on,” she said.
At least at first. Once people learned of the Nazi surrender, the mood turned to jubilation.“Everyone was so happy because our boys, we figured, would be coming home then. It was a complete celebration,” said Weckerly.A celebration that was a result of decisions made four years earlier during the dark days following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, said Deb Kruger, a history instructor at Butler County Community College.“The focus was on Europe, because of the alliances and earlier programs such as Lend Lease,” said Kruger. “Hitler had to be defeated.”While Japan used its Axis pact with Italy and Germany as a pretext for occupying English, French and Dutch colonies in Asia, the United States and its allies took the fight to Hitler.“It was at the urging of (Russian leader Josef) Stalin who said he couldn't fight on the continent by himself,” said Kruger.Invasions of Nazi-occupied North Africa and Italy followed leading up to the invasion of France beginning with D-Day, June 6, 1944. Less than a year later, the Germans surrendered.In fact, Regis Neff, 100, heard the news while with his field artillery unit in Germany.“I was in the Army in Germany. I listened to it on the radio, probably,” said Neff, a former North Oakland resident, who now lives in Concordia at the Orchard, 1312 N Main Street Ext.
For Neff, V-E Day meant he could perhaps see the end of a long stint in the service.Neff had been drafted into the Army on April 13, 1941, for what was supposed to be a year of miliary training.After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Neff's enlistment was extended to four years, five months and 19 days.Despite his work setting fuses on hundred-pound shells, his family, said the only injury he suffered during the war was breaking his tailbone while riding in a Jeep over rough roads.It wasn't just Neff and his comrades, who fought their way across Europe into Germany, that led to victory, according to Kruger.“Italy and Germany didn't have the industrial might to deal with what America could bring to the war,” said Kruger.“The United States was able to turn out material quickly to help win the war.”And Weckerly was part of the country's effort to churn out supplies.Working for Spade, the company switched from dress shirts to uniforms.“First we made Eisenhower jackets and Navy peacoats and Army trousers,” Weckerly said. “And that was at the Brugh Avenue plant that burned later.”“It made us feel closer to the servicemen by working on these clothes,” she said.
Then she moved to the second floor of a building at Brady and Main streets where the company set up a production line to make parachutes.“So, I worked there for about a year. They (the parachutes) were white, and they were the ones that were used to drop medical supplies behind the lines,” she said.“It was hard work. When we neared the end of a contract, we would sew an awful lot of hours overtime. We would sew 10 hours a day some days,” she said.Kruger said the efforts of Weckerly and other female workers helped the United States to victory.The Nazis were reluctant to use women in their factories seeing their roles as mothers to future soldiers.“They gave medals to mothers and used slave labor to produce war material,” said Kruger. “It was not as effective.”Still, May 8, 1945, wasn't a complete triumph. Imperial Japan was still fighting in the Pacific, and many paid a heavy price for victory.“I had a cousin who was killed when he went into Italy,” Weckerly said. “My fiance went into England and Normandy and he was in Belgium, France and Germany.
Her fiance, Howard Weckerly, and she were married a month after he arrived home on Oct. 23, 1945.Weckerly, who was attached to a chemical warfare unit, was wounded by a German “buzzbomb,” an early version of a guided missile that Germany deployed in the late stages of the war.“His health was never good from the time he got home. He was wounded by shrapnel in Luxembourg,” she said.“Shrapnel hit him in the side of the head. He lost hearing in one ear and had damage to his teeth and jaw,” she said.Neff, who married Averill Black in January 1943 during a week's leave. After the war, his daughter Ruth Douthett said, he returned to North Oakland where he built a house and he and his wife raised four children.Douthett said her father was a 50-year member of both the Chicora Moose and VFW post marched in Veterans Day parades well into his 90s.For Weckerly, no parade can match the happiness that spontaneously broke out 70 years ago.“It was a complete celebration. Butler, I don't think Butler was as ever alive as it was that day.,” she said.“Everyone was just so thankful. It was a long war and people just waited and waited for loved ones to get back home,” she said.“It was just a horrible time for people. It was worldwide. It almost seemed like there was no end to the tunnel,” she said.
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