Victory Day's varied interpretations

In the Russian mind, the real war was fought and won by the Soviet Union. The war in the West was merely a sideshow.

A Russian man celebrates the anniversary of V-Day in Toronto, Canada (via Alamy/ 2KBM8NP)

Tomorrow is 8 May, which will mark the 80^th anniversary of VE – Victory in Europe – Day. It will fall on a Thursday which is the day on which I conventionally do not write a column but slightly ironically I shall also be out and about and attending the London Defence Conference in, well, London. It also means that to a small extent I get my oar in before many of the media here in Britain go full jingo.

Monday’s Bank Holiday served well for many of the celebrations, capped once again by the Royal Family appearing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace to watch the RAF fly-past and for a brief moment we could all put aside our gripes about poor public services, the creaking NHS, crumbling infrastructure, rampant immigration, both legal and illegal, unfair taxation, rising food prices and just be proud of being great and British despite the fact that not one of us did a darned thing to help with the defeat of Nazism. It was our parents and grandparents whose social and moral standards are now so widely poo-pooed who did the fighting and dying. But please let’s not have that get in the way of a bit of decent flag waving.

As much as the next man, I get goose bumps and my chest swells when I read or hear those wonderful words spoken by John of Gaunt in Richard II, placed there by William Shakespeare in Act II, Scene 1 which are:

“This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”

Yes, that’s the right place and backed up by the BBC, ITV and the other free to air TV stations running all the classics from “The Battle of Britain” to “A Bridge too Far” to “The Dambusters” to “Saving Private Ryan” as well as anything with period footage, as long as it has of course been colourised, then duty has been done. But with President Trump having declared 8 May to no longer be VE Day but Victory Day (he’s probably watched too many Hollywood movies to know that anyone else fought in the war), with the Russians celebrating 9 May as being the day they won the Great Patriotic War and with most of the rest of Europe marking it as Liberation Day, we once again find ourselves standing alone.

I cannot but agree that the contribution of fighting men from the erstwhile colonies – Canada, Australia and New Zealand excepted but South Africa included – tends to be forgotten as does a lot of the fighting that took place away from Western Europe and especially post-D Day. We love Monty, the 8^thArmy at El Alamein and the SAS in the North African desert and maybe even Operation Husky, the July 1943 landings in Sicily but then conveniently forget the totally bloody misery of the winter of 1943/1944 where the fighting up through southern Italy was attritional and more redolent of the trench warfare of the Great War than of the tanks progressively pushing the German army back in the late summer of 1944 into the Falaise pocket or the breakthrough at St Lo.

All the while the war in the East was being fought and won by the Soviet Union. In the Russian mind, that is where the real war was being won, albeit at great cost to both Stalin’s and Hitler’s troops and to this day, as far as Moscow is concerned, the war in the West was not much more than a sideshow, a diversion to drain the Eastern front of men and materiel.

I have read as much as I can about war in the East, both 1914-17 and 1939-45 as well as the great Russian civil war that followed on from the defeat of Imperial Russia by Imperial Germany and, although I have tried so hard, I have not done well. I am not at all acquainted with Russian geography which makes it all that much harder to get one’s head around what was happening where and in what order, apart from which the profusion of names of General officers who came and went at the whim of Joseph Stalin is hard to keep up with.

Having read the excellent works on the Soviet’s war against Germany written by Jonathan Dimbleby who I had previously only known as a member of the Dimbleby dynasty of BBC television journalists, I now know a lot more. His father Richard had helped set the once high bar at the BBC and his brother David’s 1980 series “Walking On Coals: The White Tribe Of Africa” opened my eyes to the real case of the Afrikaners and the apartheid trap in which they found themselves. I had never thought of Jonathan as an historian and how wrong I was. He isolates the war in the East from that in the West and one can come to understand why the Russians think of it as THEIR war and the one that THEY won. After all, it was the Red Flag that was raised over the Reichstag and not the Stars and Stripes or the Union Jack.

It was not, however, until I began to read some of the comments by US General Mark Clark that I got closer to the problems we face in Ukraine. Clark had led the US army in Italy, and I have long regarded his headlong rush to liberate Rome as being an act of military vanity. I might not be entirely wrong, but it is when I came across his opinions on working with – or against – the Soviets in Austria where he commanded the allied occupational forces that I properly respected his understanding of what he was dealing with. His notes on the struggles with Ivan Konev, his Soviet opposite number, are worthwhile reading to which might well be added by a listen to the recent Engelberg Ideas podcast “How Russia negotiates” by Iuliia Osmolovska. Scary stuff, both of them.

The late Hilary Mantel came to prominence through her fictionalised biographical trilogy based on the life and times of Thomas Cromwell. I couldn’t get my head around her writing style – sorry – but I loved the BBC’s multi-part Wolf Hall version with Mark Rylance as Cromwell and Damian Lewis as Henry VIII. Mantel had been invited to give the prestigious Reith Lectures in which she, very much against the fashion, warned of ascribing roles to women in history that they had not played.

In that vein, I also felt aggrieved that a war memorial was erected in 2004 on Park Lane in London to the animals of war, eight years before the Green Park memorial to the 55,573 members of Bomber Command, 44% of all who served, who lost their lives was unveiled. For every 100 Bomber Command airmen, 55 died in action or as a result of injuries sustained, 3 survived their injuries, 12 were taken prisoner, 2 evaded capture and only 12 actually survived their tours of duty physically unscathed.

The crowds all get gooey when one of the last Lancasters flies over – there’s only one based in this country - but the boys of Bomber Command had to wait until after the mules and horses and carrier pigeons had been honoured before they got their memorial, albeit a very, very special one. There was at the time no campaign medal struck for Bomber Command and nor was there, by the way, for the seaman who found themselves in the Battle of the Atlantic, widely regarded as the longest battle of all times.

The last of those with first hand memories of VE Day, even as children, will soon be gone although, if maybe only to be controversial, to me the war did not end until 9 November, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall finally fell. I see a war between France and Germany that lasted from 1870 to 1989, that contained three conflagrations in the shape of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, the Great War from 1914-1918 and World War II from 1939-1945. At 119 years, it lasted longer than the 116 years of the Hundred Years War, 1347 to 1553. It can surely be argued that, had France not so fervently insisted at Versailles that Germany be completely beggared in reprisal for the Great War, there would have been no Hitler and no World War II and in subsequence no Cold War. I certainly agree with the former, less so with the latter.

With VE Day, only half the job had been done and there was still much fighting, and with the help of the Manhattan Project a lot more dying, before VJ Day on 2 September. Servicemen returning from the Asian theatre in late 1945 found hero worship was worn out. The celebrating had been done and, like millions of soldiers of all nations, they found themselves more of a public embarrassment than being treated to the approbation that they might have expected.

It is hard to pinpoint when Britain was at its mightiest. Geographically and economically it was surely during the Empire, morally maybe in 1815 after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. Either way, by 1945 it was, Churchill or no Churchill, a rapidly declining power and with a few notable exceptions our politicians have over the past 80 years done well in accelerating the descent.

I have hanging over my fireplace my late father’s officers' sabre and his medals. He had himself served with SOE, Special Operations Executive, often referred to as Churchill’s private army. Just two nights ago, we watched a programme relating the war fought by the Waffen SS “Das Reich” Division with special emphasis on its famous race to the Normandy coast, which was significantly slowed by French resistance actions, many co-ordinated by SOE operatives, the most famous of whom was Violet Szabo. The story of Szabo’s actions, capture and murder were dramatized in the 1958 film “Carve her Name with Pride”. Thanks to my father’s background I had the honour of becoming a member of London’s Special Force’s Club where along the main staircase are the photographs of those who gave their lives.

My old Dad – we never knew exactly what he did or didn’t do – was proud but bitter when it came to his time with SOE. Although highly trained and ready to “do his bit”, he was left feeling that SOE operatives were pushed around like chess pieces by a bunch of public school boys who served at headquarters in Baker Street and who were less interested in the fate of those in the field than in getting out and meeting their popsies at the Café Royale in time for the tea dance. SOE internal security was certainly lax as the infiltration and total destruction of the Dutch network was to demonstrate. But I guess there are human failings everywhere. When I did once bounce the idea off my dad that I might join the army after university, he scoffed. I never revisited the subject.

The Duke of Wellington, when asked whether he was going to record his memories of the Battle of Waterloo is reputed to have replied that writing the history of a battle is like writing the history of a ball. Recent fashion has been not to write historiographies – I think most have already been written - but to record the memories of individuals who were there and in the thick of it. That can also go a bit too far for every man had a different experience and when recollections all have been added up one still often does not get a uniform picture. I’m sure most of us have seen “The Battle of the Bulge” or the episode of “Band of Brothers” that records Easy Company, 2^nd Battalion, 506^thParachute Infantry Regiment, 101^st Airborne Division’s experiences during the Ardennes counteroffensive but who has ever heard of the battle of the Hürtgen Forest? This part of the war was, like the fight in Southern Italy a year earlier, more redolent of the Great War where more than likely as many men were killed by flying timber and wood splinters than by being hit by bullets or shrapnel. Hürtgen was really, really nasty and not right for Hollywood.

Returning to Wellington who said, “Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won: the bravery of my troops hitherto saved me from the greater evil; but to win such a battle as this of Waterloo, at the expense of so many gallant friends, could only be termed a heavy misfortune but for the result to the public.” The victorious veterans of the Falkland War are now in their 70s. Troops who fought in the Gulf are in their 50s and every year we somehow succeed in making new veterans whom we will salute when they march past the Cenotaph in the Remembrance Day parade but then conveniently forget. As someone said to me on Sunday: “We put up immigrants in hotels while our veterans are sleeping rough and begging for the price of a cup of tea”.

To us, VE Day is the 80^th anniversary of the total capitulation in Germany whilst Austria succeeded and to some extent still does in presenting itself as the first victim of German expansionism and has turned 8 May into its own Liberation Day. Whilst we are listening to and watching the recorded memories, new and old, of the last who remember the end of the war in Europe let us please not forget the 75 to 85 million people who died during the course of the war and who never had the chance to tell their side of the story.