WWII history

The man who stopped the war: 97-year-old recalls VE Day coded message

“I finished it,” says Gregory Melikian, 97, “but my heroes are the guys that hit the beaches, so many of whom never came back.”

Seventy-five years ago, in the early hours of 7 May 1945, the supreme allied commander Gen Dwight Eisenhower selected Sgt Melikian, then a 20-year-old radio operator, to send the coded message to army groups and allied capitals announcing Germany’s unconditional surrender.

Of the three operators working in the Reims school that housed the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, Melikian was the youngest, an enlisted Illinois University student shipped to France just the year before, and that made him first choice for the US general.

“We were across the hall from the war room [where the German surrender was signed by the German general Alfred Jodl],” says Melikian. “There was a guy from Texas aged 36, another guy from South Carolina, 27 or 28, and yours truly. Eisenhower’s exact words were: ‘I want Melikian to send this coded message and talk about it for the rest of his life.’ It was 74 words to the world saying that tomorrow, 8 May, at 11.01pm, hostilities will cease and that we will stop shooting at each other.