Today is the eightieth anniversary of VE Day. There is a lot of talk about the disrespect our politicians show towards people who gave their lives for this country and how we should remember them. I do wonder though, how the very few who are left would like this moment to be remembered.
I don’t remember anyone actually asking them, ever; or, if they even want it remembered at all.
Most of the ordinary men who came back from the war did not want to discuss their experiences. My father was one of them. They wanted to protect future generations from the horrors they experienced and apart from that, if you weren’t there, the average person would have no reference point to connect with what they were talking about, even If they were bombed in the blitz. The sheer horror of having to physically fight in a war left them somehow apart from everyone who hadn’t had that experience.
This was also true of the American troops who fought in Vietnam many years later.
Although VE Day is a celebration of victory at the end of war and part of the “lest we forget” narrative, we have already forgotten the most important part; which is the terrible things we are all capable of doing to each other that lie just beneath the surface of our so called civilisation.
Both the first and second world wars are seen and taught through the lens of certain people and a montage is created, to produce a story line that glosses over the sheer horror of it all.
As a result, like the Marvel universe, all the people who went to war happily marching off to defend this sceptered isle in a cross between it ain’t Half hot mum and Douglas Bader. Happy to cheerfully lay down their lives or become prisoners in appalling conditions whilst their commanders sat in a bunker or an office in Whitehall instructing them. Does that remind you of anything?
Don’t get me wrong, I think all those who fought deserve unbounded respect forever, not least because they really believed they were fighting for a better world for future generations and believed that they were part of something bigger than themselves that had to be done for the sake of humankind. Yes, they still believed that in nineteen thirty nine.
But I’m not so sure if pretending it is nineteen forty five and we are all going to have a great time when dad gets back is the way to do it.
I used to badger my dad incessantly to tell me about what happened in the war. He joined up underage. Having been brought up in a very small village in Cheshire, he had never travelled further than a day trip to Manchester before he became a soldier in the royal engineers. When he was twenty one, he was captured at the fall of Singapore and spent a year in Changi prison camp before escaping and travelling up the Malay peninsula and across to India to join the other troops.
When I was an adult, I asked him why he wanted to escape and not just sit it out until the end of the war.
He said that when they were marched in, the Japanese were very kind and gave them food and water. Then they lined them up and the camp commandant walked behind them. He stopped at the soldier next to dad and tapped him on the shoulder. One of the guards came up and hacked his head off. Dad said he didn’t know blood could go that high. The guards were scrupulously polite and smiled all the time. If you tried to escape and got caught, they shot your comrade not you. After a while they stopped feeding them more than once every couple of days. Dad said when he escaped, he stole a gun to shoot himself if it looked like he would be caught, so no one would die because of him. Until the day he died, he couldn’t be in a room with a Japanese person without having a panic attack.
Perhaps we sanitise our history because it would be too awful if we didn’t. Perhaps that is understandable; but we will never be free of cruelty and barbarism until we acknowledge that the seeds of that are in all of us, not just the “enemy”.
That is the trouble either modern times. They are so black and white. Cruelty and abuse are fine and called justice, if perpetrated against the enemy. Not so if perpetrated against approved victims.
Years ago, VE Day was celebrated in church as well as in public, which allowed people not only to give thanks for deliverance and to those who made it possible, but reminded them that they should try to be better people to ensure nothing like this ever happened again.
One of the original Chelsea pensioners who fought in the First World War was interviewed in the sixties. He said he cried when the Second World War was announced as the troops had been promised it would never happen again.
“All that cannon fodder and for what” he said.
I often wonder what the world would have been like if two generations of men had not been sacrificed. I like to think it would have been better. Although many more came back after the Second World War than the first, what came back was not the same person who left.
The social disruption and its consequences still echo today. We started the long road to disenfranchisement and cultural abruption because of it.
Yet in spite of all that, in many ways I envy as well as admire all those men and women who sacrificed everything for king and country. They had a firm belief and a solid sense of what they were fighting for. VE Day for them was the start of their country continuing to be the land of their ancestors and the place they loved and belonged too, that they could pass onto their children.
The threat had been overcome. It cost them dear, but was a price worth paying to keep our island home.
It would show more respect for what they did if we now fought to keep our island home from invasion and rule by lawyers, instead of holding street parties and mouthing platitudes.
Xandra H
Please continue on to the next article, a VE Day Tribute to the British Merchant Navy. (TA)