I was born a few weeks after VE Day, but before VJ Day which marked the end of global warfare in 1945. At the time my father was in India serving as an Army Chaplain with the Gold Coast regiment and he didn’t actually get home to see me until the following summer.
My parents rarely talked about the war, and it was years before I learnt anything at all about my father’s time in India and Ghana. In fact, their generation just wanted to get back to normal life and protect children from information about the atrocities. We weren’t taught anything about the two World Wars in school, either. It was a shock, many years later, to learn about the Holocaust and the Blitz in the Second War, and about the slaughter in the trenches in the First War.
We were to have happy childhoods, unlike the generation just before us. Things didn’t get back to normal straightaway, though. There were still food shortages and ration books.
I used to hate Remembrance Sunday in those days. I started writing to a German penfriend in my teens (and we are still very much in touch), so I was uncomfortable with its latent anti-German sentiment. It was left to my generation to build the bridges with our former enemies, and that included the European project.
Remembrance Sunday also seemed to glorify war with its stories of sacrifice and bravery. In fact, I have never liked the use of the word ‘sacrifice’ in the context of war. Self-sacrifice is a deliberate act of allowing oneself to die for the greater good, whereas most people who die in war are doing their best to inflict damage while keeping themselves safe. Talk of noble self-sacrifice clouds the fact that young men (mostly) were pawns in a much larger game, with very little control over what they did. Of course, that is not to undervalue those people who did consciously die to save others, and were awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously.
However, I did respect what others did on Remembrance Sunday, since those older than me were remembering family and friends – people they really knew and loved – who had died in war.
By the start of this century Acts of Remembrance appeared to be dwindling out of existence, as the war generation left us. But then the Acts were revived as we reached certain milestones. In 2014 and 2018 we commemorated the 100th Anniversaries of the start and end of World War 1. Last year we recalled the decisive World War 2 D-Day landings, 75 years on. And we revived the practice of holding a two minute silence at war memorials at 11am on 11th November, whatever day of the week it was, and not just on the closest Sunday.
21st century Acts of Remembrance are rather different in tone from those I remember when I was young. For a start, they encompass other conflicts that have taken place since 1918. They also remind us of the horror and futility of war.
Today the UK is marking VE Day in a slightly muted way with a two minute silence at 11am and an address from the Queen this evening. Locally people are holding socially distanced street parties and virtual get-togethers. I think many of us were surprised to discover that today is a Bank Holiday, transposed from the usual first Monday in May.
I still have mixed feelings about it all and I haven’t called this post ‘Celebrating VE Day’. My mother enjoyed an amazing party on 8th May 1945, although separated from my father, but I won’t be dancing this evening.
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* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.
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21 Comments
Commemorate is okay. Celebrate is not. All the people who are getting excited about VE Day (and similar events) are people who were not there – if they wish they were they are deluded. A lot of people who were there know there is nothing to celebrate about war, even when “we” win. And the myth that “we” won the war (and the previous one) all on our own is promoted more strongly than ever. A house near us has French, American and Soviet flags as well as the Union Flag. What we should be celebrating is that we have had 75 years without a war in Western and Central Europe, the longest period since something like for ever.
An interesting read, Mary.
For anyone living before 1918, the title of the Great War was applied to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in which Britain fought France almost continuously for twenty-two years from 1793 to 1815.
After Waterloo, the Age of Congress was born and at every crisis all the heads of Europe would meet to debate and attempt to find a peaceful solution. War was not avoided completely, but local wars were prevented from escalating into pan-European conflict for one hundred years, until 1914.
On the centenary of the Battle of Waterloo in 1915, British troops, aided by a European ally, were once again fighting against the imperial ambitions of a powerful and well-armed Continental ruler in ‘the cockpit of Europe’. In 1815, German and British troops were ranged against the French – a hundred years later. It would have been bad form in 1915 to mark a victory over a country which was now an ally of Britain on the Western front.
Today, both France and Germany are close allies and friends. As you write “It was left to my generation to build the bridges with our former enemies, and that included the European project.”
Let us work to maintain those bridges for another century so that the conflicts of the 20th century can become as H G Wells hoped in the aftermath of WW1, that this would be the “war to end all wars”
Thank you for a beautifully balanced piece, Mary Reid. As a member of church choirs I’ve attended dozens of Remembrance Day services. I’d much prefer to commemorate wars with film footage of refugees and other depictions of the pain and misery wars cause rather than the inevitable bugles and other military ~”shallahumps and shallahoops.”
Had it not been for the pandemic there can be little doubt that the government would have placed great emphasis on the parallels between “Britain alone” (which of course we weren’t as Tony Greaves points out) and the allegedly glorious opportunities now available to a doughty Britain shackled from the restraints of Europe.
The delusion of British exceptionalism has done us great harm for the three quarters of a century. Jo Grimond was a junior officer in the war. In his Memoirs he writes (page 99):
“…we came out of the war being told we had saved the world by a unique act of courage against fearful odds. We naturally became convinced that the world must see that we were natural leaders of the West entitled by our deeds of valour and skill to rest on oars as far as work was concerned and owed a debt, indeed a living, by our neighbours.”
Our performance in dealing with the coronavirus seems to shows that, far from being world leaders, we are inpcompetant laggards. Instead of concentrating so much on past glories we should “get real” and concentrate on how we can contribute to the making of a fairer and more peaceful world in co-operation with our neighbours.
My parents lived in the constituency of Sir Winston Churchill. They probably voted for him. There was an aura around the great man. There is a story that a new MP tried to join a circle of admirers and said “Can I buy you a drink?” He is reported to have said “Whisky you fool.”
My history teacher said that “He is not a historian’s historian”. There was a 50 year rule affecting official secrets, from which he had a partial exemption because he was allowed to access papers he had written himself, including letters to allied leaders. The ruling was later reduced to 30 years, which I had hoped would be reduced by further increments.
He became a peace time Prime Minister. Foreign Secretary Antony Eden wanted to succeed him and eventually did, leading to the Suez crisis. Wartime conscription had continued, which would have affected me.
We now know that Churchill thought that the USSR would disintegrate during his lifetime. He had warned Moscow about the attack they suffered but they did not know whether to believe him, having memories of the Bolshevik revolution.
Sir Winston Churchill was an MP during the period of German re-armament, which was controversial in some British newspapers and among people who had lived through WW2, such as my mother.
With hindsight we can look back to the period that Churchill spent working for David Lloyd George, outside the cabinet, but making a contribution to the result.
Comparing notes, my wife (5 at the time) and I (3 and a half) have no memories whatsoever of the original VE day, although we both have other memories of World War II and other 1945 events. Considering from a historical perspective, I see VE day as a brief high spot before grim reality set in. Churchill’s radio speech mentioned the ongoing war with Japan, and there were the displaced millions and physical damage, and hunger and disease stalked Europe. VJ day was not so much a bright day as the horrific conditions endured in Asia were coupled with the realisation that the Allies had developed a weapon capable of making humankind extinct.
I was born in the 1960s, and brought up in the 1970s and have a totally different view of peoples’ views on WWII than Tony Greaves, above. It is a massive misrepresentation to say that people think “we won the war on our own” (presumably only those without the wisdom of the grand Lord Greaves). Even back in the 70s and 80s I was aware of the massive sacrifice of the Russians, and how hundreds of thousands of Volunteer Indian troops formed the bulk of those who fought the Japanese, and beyond.
However, people like me view that Britain’s role was significant, in not LOSING the European war at a critical point, and being one of the countries with the moral strength, with France and the independent ‘dominions’, to actually declare war on fascism, as opposed to those who were declared war upon (up to and including the USA – by Germany). Can you imagine how different the world would be if we hadn’t? We’d very possibly be approaching the centennial of the ‘greater reich’ spreading from the Atlantic to the Urals, Jews a tiny minority outside europe, and tens of millions of Poles, Slavs and others starved and gassed, and the rest working as serfs – a continent-wide North Korea.
The danger today is not the awareness of that history, of which we should be proud (even if it was the last struggle of a dying unjust system – the alternative was FAR worse). It’s the use of fragments of that history to support policy viewpoints today – like the ‘fact’ that the Polish ‘saved’ us in WWII – never more than a tiny percentage of pilots in the battle of britain, and a relatively small number (whose bravery and effectiveness was out of proportion to their numbers) of ground troops – all fitted and supplied by the UK; to justify hundreds of thousands of Poles being able to come and live and work here here freely, and the people who voted to stop that continuing, being ‘racists’.
And the danger is that the generations beyond me lose knowledge of what exactly world war two was about, and our role within it – I have read that many young people today can’t specify even who we were fighting AGAINST, and if asked to guess, propose ‘Russia’.
ALL groups like to present their ‘best aspects’ to others, and gloss over their deficiencies – including the Lib Dems: Happy to promote their ‘achievements’ in government such as raising tax thresholds (mainly benefitting the middle classes, ie themselves) and ‘pupil premium’ (re-allocating existing money) and playing down their role as volunteer enablers of the ‘health and social care act’ – something responsible for fragmenting and increasing the marketisation of the NHS, and possibly (according to one news report just yesterday) leading to more deaths right now.
‘I used to hate Remembrance Sunday in those days.’
I don’t think, as a child, I saw Remembrance Sunday in those terms. We used to take part in the service around 11 am at the War Memorial in Belmore Street in Enniskillen and then go on to the 11.30 normal church service. Later as my family expanded from exclusively Ulster Scots to European, I developed a wider perspective. One my grand-daughters had one great-grandfather who served in the RAF and another who was killed by American bombing in Slovakia. So I remember all who served or died including, of course, the 4 people I knew who died in Enniskillen in 1987.
I started school at the end of the war. My thoughts of the two primary schools I attended are that both had boys’ orphanages near them. I remember that the boys were walked by staff at the orphanage to and from school. They all wore the same design of clothes. No other children in either school wore a uniform.
I am sure that the reasons the boys were there did not all relate to the war, but of course very many must have.
They would now be called “looked after children” who are the responsibility of the local authority.
I learned a lot more about children who are looked after by the local authority when I was a councillor. I learned that most looked after children achieve poor results in school, end up in the criminal justice system – also called prison.
What was not clear to me, and isn’t now what should be done to change the situation to something that might be acceptable.
The thought in my mind is that the influence of something like a war is felt for generations after. It does not just stop after a few years.
9th May ’20 – 8:01am “Whisky you fool”
Margaret Thatcher nee Roberts
Tony Greaves 8th May ’20 – 5:12pm
Imagine you had lived in an occupied country, such as the Channel Islands, which we failed to defend, or have a look at the WW1 Belgian refugees in the town hall entrance
The Struggle for Europe by Chester Wilmot page 474
“As the news of the British approach spread like a running fire from town to town, men –and women — of the Resistance unearthed hidden arms and harassed the fleeing Germans. They prevented the blowing of bridges and the erection of road blocks, and when the enemy opposition was too strong for them to tackle unaided they went out to meet and forewarn the advancing armour. On the open road the columns raced along at 30 miles an hour, but in every town and village from the frontier to Brussels they had to crawl through crowds of cheering, laughing, shouting people. with wild delight in their voices and tears of joy in their eyes, the Belgians swarmed around the tanks and vehicles, thrusting into the hands of the embarrassed Tommies bottles of wine and beer, boxes of cigars and cigarettes, fruit, cakes and chocolate, flowers, flags and souvenirs.
By late afternoon the Guards were entering Brussels, and as they drove nearer the heart of the city the crowds thickened and the tumult grew. Only an hour earlier the streets had been bare and deserted, except for the last departing Germans. Now the buildings were plastered with flags, streamers and placards which the Belgians had prepared long since for this very day. In one square the tanks were halted by the throng and the Brussels police attempted to move the crowd back, but they could not restrain one little old woman who wore on her drab black dress her husbands medals from another war. She made a quick dart across to the nearest jeep, took the hand of the driver, kissed it and said “Je vous remercie, Tommy, je vous remercie.” And into his hand she pressed what was obviously all that she had — three cigarettes.
It was in this spirit that Belgium welcomed the Allies. Nowhere in France had the British troops been greeted with such warmth and real gratitude. It had been difficult for the French, so proud of military past,to admit that they owed their liberation to the americans and the British. whom they had always regarded as their inferiors in the art of warfare. The French had been thankful to be free, but, even in Paris, they had not been able to bring themselves to show their appreciation with the enthusiastic spontaneity which the Belgians demonstrated in Brussels and in every hamlet.
Forewarned by the fall of Brussels, the German garrison in Antwerp ahould have been able to hold the city long enough to cover the demolition of the key points in the docks and port installations. On September 4th howeverthe 11th Armoured Division, having skirted Brussels to the west, moved into Antwerp so boldly and swiftly that the leading tanks reached the docks by early afternoon and found them unguarded and almost unscathed. This was a tremendous stroke of fortune, for the sluice gates and the dockside equipment, all electricically operated, could so easily have been put out of action.
This brilliant coup was full justification for Eisenhower’s decision to give priority to the capture of Antwerp. as soon as the approaches on either shore of the Sheldt Estuary were cleared he would be able to bring in through Antwerp all the supplies he required to carry on the offensive deep into Germany. It was now apparent, however, that he would not need to open the port of Antwerp before advancing to the Ruhr for the British drive through Belgium had split the German front. Fifteenth Army on the Channel coast was cut off with its back to the sea. Seventh Army, exhausted by a succession of defeats and envelopments, was on the point of disintegration. Its remnants, retreating from the Somme before the flood of Allied armour were swept aside by the British and driven into the capacious hands of the Americans at Mons.”
The Struggle for Europe
How we won the war and lost the peace
by Chester Wilmot
shows how the military decisions taken by the Allies led to the occupation of most of Europe by the Soviet Union. It does not cover the internal politics, such as the policy that the whole of Europe, including Gibraltar, should be included into a single federal state of the Soviet Union, which did not happen, nor why the USSR sent troops to the Spanish civil war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(Picasso)
Tony Greaves 8th May ’20 – 5:12pm
I was born after VE day but I know what my father would have done, as he always did,
make a donation to the RAF Benevolent Fund.
https://www.rafbf.org/
Be glad to be alive and think of those who are not.
Christmas reading on LDV The struggle for Europe page 580-584
On the morning of Saturday, December 16th, Eisenhower received a letter for Montgomery, reminding him of a bet he had made the previous year that the war against Germany would be over by Christmas 1944.
Eisenhower replied that he would pay up on Christmas Day, but not before.
“After all”, he wrote, with a smile ” I still have nine days left.”
“Some 160 Americans were taken prisoner, and, as they were an ’embarrassment’ to the German tank crews, were lined up and machine-gunned. At least 142 were killed, but the rest, after feigning death, escaped by night to tell the grim story of the ‘Malmedy massacre’.
Incensed by this outrage, the American reserves entered the fight thirsting for revenge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Geneva_Convention
Eisenhower received a letter FROM Montgomery,
The Struggle for Europe by Chester Wilmot page 719
A Note on Sources
“The daily destruction of Nazi victims at the Mauthausen Concentration Camp was recorded in seven volumes bound in red leathe,r handsomely tooled.
In these volumes were recorded the name, sex, age, nationality, ‘camp number’, ‘death number’ and cause of death of the 35,318 men, women and children who were exterminated at Mauthausen in five years. The entries for March 19th, 1945 said one of the Allied prosecutors at Nuremberg, “serial numbers from 8,390 to 8,593. The names of the dead are all carefully listed . . . The victims are all recorded as having died of the same ailment, heart failure. They died at brief intervals. They died in alphabetical order.”
Conclusions: Page 717
Tom Paine had written on a drumhead by a camp fire in 1776
“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.
Tony Greaves 8th May ’20 – 5:12pm
After Victory in Europe there was Victory in Japan. Our navy had been put under US command in the Pacific. The BBC should be more specific today about prisoners. The Japanese had not signed the agreements which other member states of the Axis had signed and said so.
One of my teachers (Physics) was unable to move a rolling blackboard because of torture suffered from the Japanese. He was treated with respect bordering on awe.
Post war attitudes are dominated by the decision of the US President to use atom bombs devastating two cities as the Japanese head of state said “not to our advantage” without mentioning the widespread fires in Tokyo, built mainly of wood.
Japanese Prime Ministers visiting War graves nowadays frequently cause diplomatic upset in China. Modern Japanese politicians complain about the annexation by soviet Russia at what we in the west consider the end of the war. Others differ.