VWE Day: a tale of two wars
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Next week we will be commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. More than 1,300 members of the Armed Forces, uniformed services and young people will march from Parliament Square to Buckingham Palace. A procession on Bank Holiday Monday will begin with a performance of a Churchill speech and will finish with a flypast including the famous Red Arrows. VE Day 80 street parties, picnics and community get togethers are being encouraged to take place across the country.
Some of this may sound familiar. In 2005, to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, the Queen and the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, attended a “memorial show” on Horse Guards’ Parade. In his book, Europe at War, 1939-1945: No Simple Victory (2006), Norman Davies describes this show: “It took the form of a series of musical and comic items from the wartime repertoire linked by a historical narrative. The latter was read by the actor Simon Callow and was interspersed with a selection of Churchill’s speeches… Hence ‘Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover’ alternated with ‘We shall fight on the beaches!’, and Flanagan and Allen numbers were followed by the theme tune from Schindler’s List, by ’A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ and, in the grand finale, by ‘We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when.’”
Twenty years on, it looks like we will get much of the same. TV news programmes will be full of familiar images of young servicemen and women dancing and hugging in Piccadilly Circus, of Churchill and King George VI waving to huge crowds from the balcony at Buckingham Palace, all intercut with popular songs from Vera Lynn. The focus will be on a very nostalgic vision of Britain, a frozen vision of the past.
Of course, there is much to celebrate. But also much to mourn. Almost 400,000 British servicemen and women were killed, wounded or missing in action (including deaths from the colonies). Nearly 70,000 British civilians were killed, including 43,000 who died in London during the Blitz. On 8 May many will be thinking of those they have lost.
The planned celebrations feel stuck in the past, as if organised by Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. But recent histories of the Second World War have started to tell a very different kind of story. There is a growing gap between the popular British memory of the war, with its cherished myths, and the most interesting new historical research. The tectonic plates are shifting: from the western front to eastern Europe, from books on diplomacy (such as AJP Taylor’s once famous The Origins of the Second World War), battles involving the British (the Battle of Britain, North Africa, the Pacific to D-Day) and famous British figures, such as Montgomery, to the very different experience of the war in central and east Europe.
As Norman Davies wrote in Europe at War, “The open-minded observer will be tempted to view the war effort of the Western powers as something of a sideshow.” Fewer than 5,000 British troops were killed at El Alamein, the decisive battle in North Africa; total casualties on both sides were about 40,000. Nearly a million died on both sides at Stalingrad, the turning point on the Eastern Front. Another 900,000 died in the Siege of Leningrad.
In his book, Bloodlands (2010), the American historian Timothy Snyder showed that the centre of gravity of the war in Europe was not the western front but Poland, Byelorussia (now Belarus) and Ukraine. They saw the most intense warfare and the worst civilian horrors from the very beginning of the war in September 1939 to the last Soviet battles against Germany in 1945. Belarus lost a higher proportion of its civilian population than any other country in Europe. Ukraine lost the highest absolute number — more, even, than Russia.
The new histories of the Second World War have moved from Paris and London to the Baltic and Soviet borders. Myths have collapsed under their scrutiny. We betrayed the Czechs, but Prague survived intact. We stood by the Poles, but Warsaw was destroyed. As the concentration camps were liberated, Soviet security forces started to fill them with new inmates. The new histories of the war are a moral grey zone.
Sir Antony Beevor has introduced a new generation of readers to the savagery and scale of the battles in the east from Stalingrad to the fall of Berlin in 1945. Jan T Gross has told us about how antisemitic Poles slaughtered their Jewish neighbours during and after the war. After the fall of Communism, archives opened up in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and historians like Gross, Norman Davies and Timothy Snyder, who read Polish, Russian and Ukrainian, revealed the scale of atrocities in the east, by local collaborators and by Stalin’s NKVD as well as by the Nazis. Stalin’s crimes against civilians in Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and the Baltic Republics were fully exposed.
The Second World War seems darker and more morally complex than ever before. The war films of Jack Hawkins, John Mills and Anthony Quayle and the cosy comedy of Dad’s Army and Allo ‘Allo all seem a long way away, all these years on. During the 1980s and 1990s the Holocaust and the Eastern Front have taken centre stage, both in terms of morality and in terms of the sheer scale of the violence. This is the lesson of the histories of the Second World War and the Holocaust written over the past thirty years.
Above all, we should remember that VE Day should be renamed VWE Day, Victory in Western Europe. There was little to celebrate in the East. Yes, the Nazis had been defeated and the Holocaust was over. Cities like Warsaw could now be rebuilt. But Britain and America stood by as Stalin annexed or occupied the eastern half of Europe, from East Germany to the Baltic Republics and Romania.
Go to east European capitals like Tallinn and Riga and you will see powerful museums of the Soviet Occupation, desperately sad photos of Latvians and Estonians deported to the Soviet Union by train, throwing scraps of paper out of the windows in the hope that someone might be able to pass them on to their families far to the west.
Then came new celebrations in 1989 and 1991 with the Fall of the Wall and of Soviet Communism, after almost half a century of censorship, propaganda and tyranny. Now with Putin and Trump, we see America stand by as Ukraine is invaded and asked to give up huge parts of its territory. Who will be next? The Baltic Republics again? Poland? Maybe Finland? Once again, western Europe will remain intact as parts of eastern Europe are threatened with annexation and destruction.
Our popular memories of the war, however, remain out of step. The 80th anniversary of VE-Day was a chance to show we have caught up. Yes, there is much to celebrate. There is also much to mourn and much to learn.
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