"[2] The documents for Germany's surrender in World War II were signed on May 7, 1945, at 2:41 a.m. local time at General Dwight D. Eisenhower's headquarters in Reims, France.
[3][4] Edward Kennedy, as the AP's Paris bureau chief, had been among a group of reporters hastily assembled aboard a C-47 aircraft, and told only when aloft that they were to cover the official signing.
[5] All of the journalists on the plane were asked to pledge that they would embargo the story until SHAEF had issued its own official announcement of the event; Kennedy complied.
[3][4] After a German radio station in Allied-controlled Flensburg broadcast the news, however, Kennedy believed that military censors must have allowed it.
[citation needed] The official announcements of the surrender varied from German foreign minister Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk early May 7, to Winston Churchill on May 8, and Joseph Stalin on May 9 (accounting for the Soviet Victory Day).
He concluded, correctly, that the Soviets were insisting on a formal signing ceremony in Berlin for what amounted to propaganda reasons, and the Allies had agreed to wait until that took place to appease Stalin.
[8] The following summer, the military acknowledged that SHAEF had not simply permitted the German broadcast, but ordered it, and that it had been made almost two hours before Kennedy's dispatch.
[7] In 1948, in the August issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Kennedy published a personal essay about the embargo event explaining his side of the story.
[1] A monument to Kennedy stands in Laguna Grande Park in Seaside, California, with an inscription referring to his famous scoop: "He gave the world an extra day of happiness."