Why are we marking the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe in 1945? The brief answer is because we got short-changed over the 75th anniversary on 8 May 2020. That occurred during the Covid lockdown, and it was commemorated only by VIPs – properly dressed and properly distanced – with brisk formality. So, May 2025 is intended as delayed compensation, taking in as well Victory over Japan (15 August). Bells, beacons and bunting. Fly-pasts and the “Great British Food Festival”. Solemn commemoration in Westminster Abbey and street parties across the country. The government’s VE-VJ Day website wants “every schoolchild in the country to have the opportunity to connect with the stories of the end of the Second World War”. Another website, ve80.com, proclaims this theme: “Together, we honour the past and celebrate a future built on unity, hope, love and peace.”
Yet anniversaries take their colour from the present as much as the past. That theme would have fitted the outburst of relief on 8 May 1945. And even the mood of VE Day 50, celebrated in 1995 just after the disintegration of the Soviet Union when some American pundits were extolling a “unipolar world” and “the end of history”. But history has rolled on since 1945 and 1995. Frankly, it’s hard to talk about “a future built on unity, hope, love and peace” in the era of Putin, Trump and Xi Jinping.
The post-1945 era was sometimes called “the long peace”. That was a gross simplification: remember the savage wars of the Yugoslav succession in the 1990s. But they were largely waged in faraway countries of which we knew little. By contrast the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a blatant act of aggression in the heart of Europe by a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Nato allies rallied round with material and financial aid to Ukraine, but they were waging a proxy war under the banner (parasol?) of Joe Biden’s White House.
Donald Trump said goodbye to all that with his sudden pirouette towards Putin. He has undermined European confidence in the US guarantee of European security rooted in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949. He also exposed the failure of America’s Nato allies (and the US itself) to take defence seriously in the three decades since the Soviet collapse. When the House of Lords Defence Committee was examining Ukraine last September, it was sobered to hear that the British Army – under-strength even against its reduced target of 73,000 trained troops – would fit comfortably into Wembley Stadium (capacity 90,000).
It is therefore crucial that today’s young people do not merely understand what VE Day was like, but appreciate what the war cost the men and women of the 1930s because they and their leaders had neglected defence preparedness in the era of Hitler and Mussolini, apparently trusting in the post-1918 mantra “Never Again”. The price they paid was six years of living with death – with the ever present sense of one’s own mortality, the gnawing anxiety about loved ones, nearby and faraway, and the endless separations and ruptures, many of them life-changing.
Take the stories of my parents-to-be, brought together by a chance holiday meeting in the Lake District in 1937 that neither could forget. They finally got engaged in February 1940 but did not marry until October 1945, after he returned safely from the war in Italy. That was their real moment of victory. My father was the eldest of three boys growing up in South London during the slump of the 1920s, so he had to leave school at 14 and start earning money. His younger brother was able to continue his studies and became an industrial chemist. That gave him exemption from military service. During the war the third brother paid for his pacifist principles with gruelling land work, social ostracism and the break-up of his engagement. He remained single for the rest of his life.
Millions of families could tell similarly chequered stories. Perhaps Covid offers some cues and clues for those born in the current century about living through war. But the pandemic deaths (some 230,000 over three years) came silently – not amid ear-splitting bombardment and appalling destruction. And the war experience went through sharply distinct phases: the adrenaline rush of invasion panic in 1940; the Blitz of 1940-41; the “long tunnel” of 1942-43 when defeat seemed unlikely but victory remote; and the expectant build-up to 6 June 1944. Yet the relief of D-Day was tempered by renewed air attack from Hitler’s new V for Vengeance weapons. The first V-1 (a primitive cruise missile) hit London a week later; the onslaught from V-2 ballistic missiles began in September.
The V1 “buzzbombs” were particularly feared because, when the “buzz” stopped you knew you had only a few seconds before the bomb exploded. My mother-to-be certainly never forgot that moment. An only child from Manchester, she was conscripted into the local army pay office.
That meant she could be billeted at home and look after her widowed mother. In the summer of 1944 she and some friends were enjoying a short period of leave in London. One day they opted to go to a restaurant for lunch before taking their holiday postcards to the nearby Post Office. Had they chosen stamps before sustenance, this essay would not have been written.
The last year of the war was a roller coaster: the German blockage in the Bocage in the summer of 1944; then the sudden breakout that liberated Paris on 25 August and Brussels on 3 September – taking the Allied armies to positions they had not expected to occupy until May 1945. Despite an alarming Christmas setback in the Battle of the Bulge, on 24 March 1945 Churchill witnessed the Allied invasion of Germany and, as evident from the unexpurgated edition of Alanbrooke’s War Diaries, celebrated in style by peeing in the Rhine.
In those final weeks before Nazi Germany surrendered, the impending victory gained a shocking moral clarity. “I have never seen British soldiers so moved to cold fury as the men who opened the Belsen camp this week,” BBC reporter Richard Dimbleby told radio listeners on 19 April 1945. “I picked my way over corpse after corpse in the gloom, until I heard one voice raised above the gentle undulating moaning. I found a girl, she was a living skeleton, impossible to gauge her age for she had practically no hair left, and her face was only a yellow parchment sheet with two holes in it for eyes… And beyond her down the passage… there were the convulsive movements of dying people too weak to raise themselves from the floor.”
Such stories are now commonplace. In the 21st century we’ve become almost inured to images of the Nazi Holocaust and of other atrocities in later wars from Cambodia and Bosnia to Bangladesh and Sudan. But throughout the war the British government had bent over backwards to avoid a repeat of the sensational “atrocity” stories that German brutality in Belgium had fostered (rumours of crucified Allied soldiers, factories that turned corpses into soap, and so on).
In April 1945, likewise, the initial reaction of incredulous BBC staff was to embargo Dimbleby’s account of Belsen until it had been verified by newspaper reports. Only his threat of resignation forced them to broadcast a highly edited but still harrowing version, heard by 10-15 million people in Britain. Dimbleby, though a seasoned war reporter, was so shocked by his first glimpse of a Nazi camp that he broke down five times while doing the recording. His BBC colleague Wynford Vaughan Thomas could not remember him so outraged: “Here was a new Dimbleby, a fundamentally decent man who had seen something really evil.”
Visual evidence from Belsen confirmed Dimbleby’s account. Film and photos taken by the British Army Film and Photographic Unit provided the raw material for count-less press stories and newsreels. The Daily Express mounted an exhibition in Trafalgar Square of 22 particularly gruesome photos from Belsen and other camps entitled “SEEING IS BELIEVING”. The larger moral was rammed home by the newsreel “Horror in Our Time” which interspersed footage from the camps with shots of 1940 while the commentator observed: “Never forget, but for the Battle of Britain this might have been you.”
“The Good War” was a phrase coined by the American journalist Studs Terkel in the 1980s to contrast the Second World War with the defeat and shame of Vietnam. But it also captures how most people in Britain have viewed 1939-45 in contrast to 1914-18, the “War to End Wars” that had to be fought all over again 25 years later. It was won at half the cost (450,000 UK dead, rather than 880,000). We have not fought Germany again.
Yet “good war” is an oxymoron. And if you probe the victory, it becomes more complex. Take, for instance, the “Blitz”, a contraction of Blitzkrieg. The historian Malcolm Smith has noted how “the British prefer to use a German word for such a ‘German’ act, as if there could not be an English word to cover the stunning and brutal destructive power of air attack”.
Yet the total UK death toll from all forms of German bombing in the Second World War amounted to 63,000. The best scholarly estimates suggest 60,000 civilian deaths in France from British and American bombing and up to 80,000 in Italy. These “forgotten blitzes” remind us that the French and Italians paid a high price for their liberation by the Allies from Nazi domination.
The moral contradictions go even deeper. The period 1940-41 is indeed a heroic story of British self-defence, which denied Hitler total victory. Churchill then kept the British death toll down by resisting pressure from Stalin and, at times, Roosevelt to fight on the continent until the Allies had full control of the Atlantic and the Channel. Consequently the burden of the land war in Europe between June 1941 and June 1944 was largely borne by the Red Army. During those three years it inflicted about 90 per cent of the German army’s battle casualties (killed, wounded, prisoner and missing). The total Soviet death toll from the war amounted to perhaps 27-28 million. But the postponement of the Second Front in France until June 1944 meant that, if the Red Army did defeat the Wehrmacht, Stalin would end up in control of Eastern Europe – including Poland, for whose independence Britain had declared war in 1939.
As George Orwell wrote in 1942: “War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil.” I doubt that my father ever read Orwell, but I think those were his sentiments, both in 1945 and after. And, deep down, I feel that if the generations had somehow been reversed, I would have followed his course and not that of his pacifist brother.
I also realise that my own life has coincided with an unusual caesura in history. I was too young to do National Service (abolished from 1960) but old enough to have all my education paid for by the state (aka British taxpayers). And it’s now also clear that, during much of my adulthood, defence was not much of an issue because of a largely unquestioned reliance on the US commitment to European security, embodied in Article 5 and backed by the Pentagon’s nuclear arsenal.
But that’s the world we have lost in the era of Trumputin. It’s virtually impossible, in May 2025, as Putin’s war against Ukraine grinds on, to honour the enormous Russian losses of 1941-45 or to celebrate the special relationship that Trump is now undermining. And it’s not just the former allies who look different but also the defeated foe, denazified and demilitarised after 1945. Germany’s young people were taught to renounce the Führerprinzip, embrace the values of democracy and join hands with their neighbours in alliances for peace. Yet we shall be marking the defeat of the Third Reich just as the incoming German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is planning a major campaign of rearmament – unprecedented in the history of the Federal Republic since the 1960s – as a response to the Trumputin turning point (Zeitenwende).
Assuming his coalition deal holds, Merz will be confirmed as chancellor in the week of VE80. And waiting in the political wings is the Alternative für Deutschland, a populist party of the nationalist far right which could take control of the German armed forces after a future election.
The rather messy way we in the United Kingdom are marking VE Day, then, may actually be appropriate. In France, 8 May is a public holiday; likewise in the city of Berlin; but not in the UK. Our government decided to hold a few of the commemorative events on the 8 May while confining the “street parties, barbecues and community get-togethers” to the previous bank holiday Monday. The aim was to avoid another public holiday but the action also says, sotto voce: whatever we do, we cannot hope to recapture the mood of that original VE Day. This is 2025, not 1945.
That’s why I hope that generations born in this century can do more than just “connect with the stories of the end of the Second World War”. Surely they need to grasp why the majority of their forebears accepted in 1939-45 that war might on occasions be necessary, especially if your country had let down its guard. A future “built on unity, hope, love and peace” does not come without cost. To quote old Latin tag: Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war. That remains the essence of deterrence.
In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes wrote: “In the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” Hobbes, who composed his book in the bloodstained wake of a decade of brutal civil wars across Britain and Ireland, wasn’t postulating a fixed human nature. He used the word “inclination” – referring to the inbuilt tendency of every human being to put “me” at the centre of the universe.
The task of education is to control that tendency and open the minds and hearts of young people to the humanity of others, to help them build civil societies and foster civilised values. But it is also to make them aware that across history there have always been megalomaniac leaders driven by “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death”. As we recall VE Day, Hobbes’s warning should not be forgotten.
David Reynolds is emeritus professor of international history at Cambridge University. His most recent book is “Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him” (William Collins). With Russell Barnes, he co-hosts the “Creating History” podcasts
[See also: David Attenborough at 99: “Life will almost certainly find a way”]
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This article appears in the 07 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Peace Delusion