Dirksen wrote the following letter the day after he arrived in Paris:

As this is written, I’m sitting in a sitting room on the second floor of the Hotel Ritz.  It looks out upon the Place do la Concorde.  In the center of this square is the statue of Napoleon, made of captured cannon.  People are streaming through the place.  Most of them are moving down to the Champs Elysees.  It’s the wide boulevard where the Arc de Triomphe is located.

Ever since last evening when we arrived from Rome, people young and old, have been seeking to cast off restraint.  They want to slough off the fatigue and weariness of nearly 5 years of conflict.  They’ve wanted to go on an emotional binge.  One could discern the fever rise.  Today it burst the bounds as news was officially proclaimed over the radio.

Planes zoomed over the Arc de Triomphe.  Flags are everywhere.  Youngsters are parading.  The bells proclaimed the glad fact of an armistice in this theater.  Trucks and jeeps filled with youngsters traveled everywhere.  The city is filled with soldiers.  Traffic is in a snarl.  The spirit has been unleashed.

I presume it was much the same at home, and rightly so.

I had an experience of my own.  At 2:30 we drove to Versailles where the treaty of 1919 was signed.  The celebrated hall was closed.  I talked to the guard and told him who I was.  He had but one arm.  He lost the other in the battle of the Somme in the last war.  We shook hands and I pointed to my Legion button.  So he escorted us to the Hall of Mirrors where Wilson, Orlando, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and the German representatives signed the treaty which officially concluded the last war.

The Hall is magnificent.  The murals depicting the triumph of French arms over the centuries are superb.  Rotten as the Bourbons were, they had imagination and left a legacy to other generations.

At 3:00 o’clock  [10:00 a.m. Eastern time] I stood where Wilson stood.  Outside a gun on a Yank tank began a salute to victory.  The bells tolled noisily.  Joyfully, a crowd of people several blocks distant sang the Marseillaise.  The spirit of victory was in the air; it was everywhere—in hearts, and minds and faces of people.  It was over, in part, a load had been lifted .....

How ironical it all seems.  I saw our troops in the stinking heat of India and the mud of Italy.  I’ve seen them in the bleak stretches of North Africa and in the desert wastes of Iraq.  I’ve visited with 5000 of them if I’ve talked to one.  Magnificent soldiers they are, asking little and giving much.  I’ve seen them in the hospitals—legless, armless, sightless—the grim human wreakage [sic], washed up by the waves of conflict.  They conjure up a vision of the millions upon millions of men, women, and children—civilian and military who are the casualties of this struggle, and as I see them marching along in grim, ghostly columns, I think of where I stood this day and what a miserable job this generation has made of a peace that all hoped would endure.

After Dirksen recounted the devastation he had seen, he continued:

And as I meditated upon this indescribable destruction and misery, I saw Wilson again at Versailles, in company with Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Orlando and the rest.  What a failure it has been; here are the bells and guns of another victory to prove the failure of a generation ago when I was in uniform and served in this very same land against the same enemy.

Will we succeed this time in building a structure of peace that shall have full and fair opportunity to endure? I wonder.   I’ve seen some things, Mumsie, that are disturbing.  Already I see Freedom being mocked and leeched away in certain places.  I see the vigorous propagation of certain ideologies which imperil the very thing for which young Yanks have died.  I see the selfish grasping for power, the economic advantage which can only weaken and then destroy that sense of fairness and that faith which is so requisite to a well-ordered and contented world.

In any event, I believe I see more clearly than ever before what is needed—and needed now—if we are to sterilize the seed of World War III.

Will go to Germany while I’m here and then come home.  I’m getting closer and closer.  It won’t be too long now and then we shall have a celebration of our own—that of sweet reunion.  Love.41

Document Note:  Everett Dirksen was nearing the end of his trip as he left Italy mid-day on May 7.  At 3:30 p.m., the pilot of Dirksen’s flight from Rome to Paris brought the message that in two or three hours the war in Europe would be over.  Dirksen’s log entry at 4:00 read “flash—Germans have unconditionally surrendered, (Thank God).”  On Tuesday, May 8, in one of his most lengthy and detailed letters, Dirksen described the scene in Paris as Victory in Europe arrived.  This letter is one of the site’s “anchor documents.”  [Source:  Everett M. Dirksen Papers, May 8, 1945, Personal, f. 34]