(Editor’s note: On Memorial Day, May 29, the new World War II Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C., will be dedicated. American Legion Post 283 will host a corresponding event on that Saturday to honor Westside veterans and to observe the memorial dedication. The festivities will begin at 11 a.m. with a satellite broadcast of the Washington dedication ceremony, followed at noon by a patriotic program and luncheon. Veterans who wish to attend or would like a Certificate of Appreciation should write to the American Legion at 15247 La Cruz Dr., Pacific Palisades, CA 90272 and provide their name, address, phone number, branch and years of service, and whether or not they can attend. The following story is the first of three articles that will revisit WWII through the experiences of three Palisades veterans. Next week: Joe Klein, D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge.) By BILL BRUNS Managing Editor In February 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower established Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Forces in Reims, France, outside Paris. Several months later, as the war in Europe was rapidly drawing to a close, Capt. Ted Bergmann was assigned to SHAEF in Paris as a radio public relations officer. He was 24 years old. ‘On May 6, my superior said that something was going to happen in Reims’maybe the signing of the surrender’and I’d better get up there with a recording crew,’ recalls Bergmann, who has lived in Pacific Palisades since 1975. ‘We got to Reims in the early evening and went to the War Room, where we set up our equipment. We installed a microphone at every chair around the conference table, and a newsreel crew set up lights and cameras.’ At about 8 p.m., Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff General Walter Bedell Smith entered the room and barked his disapproval: ‘What in the hell do you think this is, a Hollywood sound stage? Get those goddam microphones off the table!’ Smith was taken aside by a Navy captain, Eisenhower’s aide’who also happened to be a former CBS Radio vice president’who explained that the event facing them was going to be a historic moment and should be recorded for posterity. ‘The general relented, but only partially,’ Bergmann recalls. ‘We could have only one microphone, which we put in the middle of the table, and we couldn’t have any wires showing. So I ordered a hand drill and drilled a hole in the table for the microphone wire.’ Bergmann says that at about 10 o’clock, everyone was told that the show was on. In marched all of the Allied representatives, who took their positions on one side of the table. Then three German officers were ushered in. Smith addressed the Germans, asking, ‘Are you prepared to surrender on all fronts?’ They replied, ‘We are prepared to surrender to the Americans, the British and the French on the Western Front, but not the Russians on the Eastern Front.’ ‘That’s totally unacceptable,’ said Smith. ‘You must surrender on all fronts unconditionally.’ The Germans explained that they were not authorized to commit to surrender on the Russian Front. Asked why, they said they feared the Russians would ‘take our armies and march them into Russia to be used as slave labor.’ Russian Marshall Susloparoff erupted with gales of laughter at hearing such a ‘preposterous suggestion,’ according to Bergmann. Bergmann continues: ‘The Germans were told to go back and get the authorization to surrender on all fronts or there would be no surrender. They were ushered out and our side of the table broke up and left, leaving me there with the technicians and the newsreel guys. I had brought along a bed roll, so I rolled it out under the table and went to sleep. Suddenly, at about 2:20 a.m., all the lights came back on and somebody shouted, ‘Get up’they’re back!’ So I rolled up my bed roll and we proceeded to have a surrender.’ The war was not officially over, however. ‘The agreement signed in Reims at 2:41 a.m. on May 7 would not become official until the heads of state ratified it: Truman, Churchill, DeGaulle and Stalin,’ Bergmann says. ‘If word leaked out to one side before the other, it certainly would have caused needless casualties on the front lines. Therefore, everyone in the room was warned to keep the signing a secret for 24 hours. ‘Eisenhower entered the War Room after the signing was completed and the Germans had been dismissed. A short time later, I recorded Ike’s statement declaring the end of the war in Europe. The recording was never used, however, because an Associated Press correspondent named Ed Kennedy failed to honor the secrecy agreement. Once back in Paris, Kennedy telephoned his London office to spread the news. Then it was on the wire to New York, and the surrender was announced.’ Let’s now skip ahead to 1990, when Bergmann and his wife, Beverly, returned to France on a vacation, and he visited the War Room in Reims for the first time since the War’s end. On the wall in the War Room, which now is a museum enshrined in glass, was a large photograph of the signing ceremony (shown on this page), and Bergmann saw that he was clearly visible in the picture. ‘I turned to a custodian in the museum and tried to explain that I wanted some of the postcards that had been published of that photograph. In trying to make him understand, I pointed to myself in the picture and said, ‘C’est moi, c’est moi!’ (It’s me!) ‘The custodian became very excited, as though I had stepped out of the photograph,’ Bergmann continues. ‘No one who had been present at the signing had apparently ever been back to the War Room. Most of the men present then were probably in their 50s, and would now’if they were still alive’be over 100 years old. The custodian asked me for my name and address so that the museum could invite us to the 50th anniversary celebration of the signing in 1995.’ When Beverly began making inquiries about the planned celebration in March of 1995, she was met with some unexpected suspicion at the city hall in Reims. The Minister of Culture’s office asked for some verification of her husband’s claim to being present at the signing, so she faxed several documents to Reims and the Bergmanns were finally rewarded with an invitation to be guests of the government for the anniversary event. ‘We later learned that there were a lot of people calling and claiming to have been present at the signing, and the city discovered that none of them were legitimate,’ Bergmann recalls. The Bergmanns were wined and dined for three days at the May celebration. ‘In addition to reviewing the French and American troops marching before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, I was treated as a celebrity and interviewed by American and French television and newspapers,’ Bergmann says. ‘They asked me, ‘What was your personal reaction when you stood at the table and watched the Germans sign the peace treaty?’ and I told them simply: ‘We won! We won!” The highlight of the trip was the commemoration of the signing in the War Room with U.S. Ambassador Pamela Harriman and the mayor of Reims. ‘I was honored there as the only witness to the official surrender in attendance,’ Bergmann recalls. ‘I surprised my hosts by presenting the museum with the photographs and recordings I had made of the surrender. I also explained why there was a hole in the middle of the table, something they had never noticed because an ashtray had been placed over the hole and nobody ever moved it because the room had become a shrine.’ Bergmann then presented the museum with something else: a small, porcelain ashtray’one of several that he had taken from the conference table as a souvenir in 1945. Seeing this, Ambassador Harriman replied in mock horror: ‘You stole it and it took you 50 years to give it back!’ ‘(Editor’s note: Ted Bergmann is a pioneer television executive, having gone from radio broadcasting into television in 1947 and five years later, at age 31, becoming head of the Du Mont television network. He later was co-producer of the popular series ‘Three’s Company.’ This article has drawn heavily on Bergmann’s first-person story in ‘The Journal of the Caucus for Television Producers, Writers & Directors,’ published in 2002.)
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
