DAYTON–The nation's attention is so captivated with coronavirus that remembering an historic milestone from World War II seems to have gotten lost in all the noise.

This Friday and Saturday, May 8 and 9, marks the 70th anniversary of the surrender of Germany in World War II.

It was V-E Day...Victory-Europe and it culminated a fast-moving week. Adolf Hitler had committed suicide on April 30 and Allied ground forces and Russian armies were rushing to crush the Third Reich.

The world celebrated and then U.S. and Allied attention turned to defeating Japan.

The capitulation of Germany came barely two months after the bloodiest month in World War II, February, 1945.

Few local veterans of World War II remain, but we checked in with 96-year-old Fred Gritman, who was a combat engineer with the U.S. Army's 91st Infantry.

"The Germans had just about given up," said Gritman, who was a 30-year industrial arts teacher in the Dayton School District and now resides in Walla Walla. "It was kind of wild."

Gritman's recall of V-E Day is naturally a little hazy. He was completing his 12th month of combat, moving through Italy's Po Valley.

"We ran into a bunch of Germans," Gritman said. "We started shooting at each other. We were shooting at them, they were shooting at us. We ended up capturing about 150 Germans.

"They wanted to give up," Gritman recalls. "They didn't want to fight anymore."

The Orofino, Id., native was 19 years old when he was drafted, and his job was clearing mines. Each German mine contained from 10- to 15-pounds of TNT, he said, and it was powerful enough to blow the track off of an American tank, not to mention the injuries it would inflict upon the tank personnel.

Removing mines and moving obstacles was "sometimes very exciting," he said.

After completing basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., Gritman was sent to engineering school in Golden, Colo. By December of 1942, he was assigned to the 91st Division at Camp Adair, near Albany, Ore.

-File photo

As a combat engineer, "our job was to get the infantry where they wanted to go," Gritman said.

His division trained in North Africa, then crossed into Italy in late May, 1944, about a week or two before D-Day, June 5, 1944.

Gritman was a veteran of the battles for Rome-Arno, North Apennines and the Po Valley.

"I was 19 when I went in and 22 when I got out," Gritman remembers. "I saw a lot of things."