Interesting detail on the surrender ceremony in this lady's obituary: Susan Hibbert - Telegraph Susan Hibbert, who died on February 2 aged 84, is thought to have been the last British witness to the signing of the German surrender in May 1945 – a document that she typed up and whose completion marked the end of the Second World War in Europe; minutes later she conveyed that momentous news to London with the historic signal: "The mission of this Allied Force was fulfilled at 0241, local time, May 7th, 1945." Staff sergeant who typed and witnessed the German surrender, and cabled the news to London In May 1945, as Susan Heald, she was a British staff sergeant in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) based at Reims in north-eastern France. The surrender took place in a windowless room in a corner of a small red-brick schoolhouse – the temporary headquarters of General Dwight Eisenhower, commander-in-chief of the Allied Forces. Eisenhower's American staff photographer, Albert Meserlin, who caught the moment on camera and is thought to be the only other surviving witness to the surrender, is now 88. As one of the very first to know of victory in Europe, Susan Heald, a fortnight before her 21st birthday, quietly celebrated with Veuve Clicquot champagne served in a mess tin. As a secretary for the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), Susan Heald played an essential role in the countdown to the end of war – typing and retyping the final surrender document. "For five days we were typing documents," she recalled later. "We started early in the morning and finished late at night. I typed the English documents, three other secretaries typed the French, Russian and German versions." Drafts were sent to Washington, London and Moscow. The main document was very short but there were numerous attachments. "In those days we didn't have computers," she remembered, "but had to bash out our typing on those old Imperial typewriters. Naturally, if we made a mistake, the whole document had to be started again." With Hitler's suicide at the end of April, leadership of Germany had devolved to Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. On May 6 General Alfred Jodl, chief of staff at the Wehrmacht, arrived to represent him in Reims. Susan Heald began typing the Act of Military Surrender that morning and finished some 20 hours later in the early hours of May 7. "Staff officers and interpreters were coming and going. We were not allowed to leave the room. There were constant changes and amendments. I often had to start again from the beginning. The British version of the surrender was quite basic, although a lot of people had worked on it." When finally typed, the documents were taken to the "war room", which was covered from floor to ceiling in maps. In the centre of the room stood a large, black wooden table, described by one reporter as the "most important table on earth". Pencils, papers and ashtrays had been arranged on it with military precision, their positions measured with a ruler by an American captain. At about 2.30am the Germans were called in. Ten Allied officers had taken their places at the table, but for reasons of protocol General Eisenhower remained in another room. After a prolonged wait Susan Heald and her colleagues were invited in to watch history being made. "We were very, very tired. We had been waiting for ages. The actual signing was carried out quietly and solemnly. There was no celebrating." An interpreter read out the surrender terms. General Jodl then rose stiffly, turned to General Eisenhower's chief of staff, Lt Gen Walter Bedell Smith, and announced (in English): "I want to say a word." Then, proceeding in German, he declared: "With this signature the German people and the German armed forces are for better or worse delivered into the victor's hands. "In this war, which has lasted more than five years, they both have achieved and suffered more than perhaps any other people in the world. In this hour I can only express the hope that the victor will treat them with generosity." There was no answer, and there were no salutes. The Germans rose and left the room. Susan Heald and others left inside celebrated quietly. "We had some champagne but we didn't have any glasses so we had to drink it out of army mess tins. We passed the tins around and had a few sips." Although exhausted, she was given one further task: to type the signal informing the War Office in London that the Allied Force had "fulfilled" its mission and that the war in Europe was over. While millions celebrated across Europe, Susan Heald slept. "When the surrender was over, we just disappeared. I went to bed and didn't get up for two days. I was so exhausted." She was mentioned in despatches for her work on Eisenhower's staff. Sixty years later she was honoured at a reception in Reims hosted by the French prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, and awarded the city's medal of honour. "I feel very privileged to be part of history," she said. Susan Nona Heald was born on May 21 1924 in London. Through her paternal grandmother, Henrietta Stewart Brown, she could trace her ancestry back to the 17th-century American religious reformer Anne Hutchinson, which meant that she was recognised as a Colonial Dame of America. Other ancestors included William Hutchinson, governor of Massachusetts, and Henry Bull, governor of Rhode Island. She was brought up with her father's second family after her parents divorced when she was four. Her father was Conservative MP for Chertsey from 1950 to 1970 and later (as Sir Lionel Heald, QC) attorney general in the Churchill government between 1951 and 1954. Educated at the Godolphin School, Salisbury, Susan remembered lying on the grass while revising for the School Certificate, watching the Battle of Britain being fought in the skies overhead. Instead of university she elected to go to secretarial college, completing a two-year course in nine months. Her passable French led to a job interview at the Foreign Office which, to her surprise, was conducted in French by a major on the Foreign Office roof. Told she was too young at 17, she realised she was being interviewed as a possible Resistance worker, "and I was rather glad I didn't get involved in that". She joined the ATS instead, working with highly-classified documents stamped with the code name BIGOT, her security clearance checked with the question: "Are you bigoted?" Although aware of the build-up to the landings in France, it was only when she and her comrades heard a commotion outside that they rushed out to find the sky full of aircraft and gliders heading for Normandy on D-Day. Susan Heald was sent to London to work at Eisenhower's headquarters, first at Bushy Park, Twickenham, and later at Southwick House, on the cliffs overlooking the sea at Portsmouth. Before her posting to France, she spent summer evenings listening to the orchestra of Glenn Miller, who was based there before he disappeared. After the German surrender Susan Heald moved to Frankfurt to work at the Control Commission for Germany, in a division issuing licences to newspapers and information services, and sharing a desk with the future press tycoon Robert Maxwell. Later she went to Berlin, where she met and married Basil Hibbert, a former RAF fighter pilot with 226 Squadron. When her father entered parliament in 1950, Susan Hibbert was employed as his secretary, and remained at Westminster, working for him and later for other MPs, for some 35 years. Susan Hibbert's husband, who later became a director of John Lewis, predeceased her in 2001. They had no children.
