Well, VE Day is the sort of nickname that the world press gave to the day when victory in Europe was achieved.  So VE stands for victory in Europe, which obviously is where we are going with this episode, but we’ve got a ways to go yet.  And the eventually victory over Japan is going to be called VJ Day, but that one doesn’t get all that much traction, for some reasons that we’ll go into next episode.  But lots of newspapers and countries around the western world were very excited about VE Day, and the name kind of stuck.

At the end of the last episode, we left about 150,000 Allied troops holding a small but solid beachhead in Normandy.  The D-Day invasion was a huge Allied victory, but it was only the start of a long and difficult road to the defeat of Nazi Germany.  But it was, indeed, the beginning of the end.