2025 will mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day on 8th May.
To commemorate this significant occasion the Parish Council is organising an event at Maidenbrook Country Park. The schedule is available below alongside a write up about VE Day by Rod Williams.
VICTORY IN EUROPE (VE) DAY – A PERSONAL VIEW
by Rod Williams – 08 March 2025
The 80th Anniversary of Victory in Europe is a cause for celebration, but also for remembrance. For those whose parents or grandparents lived through, or fought in, the war it is a cause for gratitude for all they endured and achieved. But all of us can acknowledge the huge cost in lives, suffering and destruction of the war, for all those involved – our predecessors, our allies and our German and Italian enemies.
British military deaths in the Second World War were 383,000 compared to 886,000 in the First World War. But in the Second World War some parts of the Armed Forces, like Bomber Command aircrew and the infantry in Italy and Normandy, had as high a casualty rate as infantry officers on the Western Front in World War One.
The Second World War was the first war to see sustained large scale battle at sea and in the air as well as on land. It was the first war to stretch from Londonderry in the west to Baku in the east, and from Murmansk in the north to the Libyan Desert in the south.
Britain went to war with Germany to honour the Prime Minister’s promise of March 1939 to support Poland if its independence was threatened. After Germany invaded Poland on 1st September, Britain declared war on Germany on 3rd September. After the outbreak of war a so-called ‘Phoney War’ lingered for about six months in which there was very little fighting. Then the Germans invaded Norway in April 1940, and the ineffective British and French help led to the resignation of the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, to be replaced by Winston Churchill.
The massive German offensive in the west, launched on 10th May, defeated Denmark, Holland and Belgium in only days, expelled the British Army from Europe at Calais and Dunkirk, and forced France to surrender, all in less than five weeks. The term ‘blitzkrieg’ was coined. Britain, now alone, had little option but to get over the shock of its Army being defeated and do whatever it could to defend itself against invasion.
The experience of the war for British civilians was privation and hardship. The mobilisation of the nation transformed life here for six years. Unlike the First World War, when conscription wasn’t introduced for two years, conscription was immediate on the outbreak of war and the economy was mobilised for war. In 1940, Britain spent 46% of its GDP on Defence – compared to 2.3% now. But whatever the hardship, we were spared the experience of most European people of living under enemy occupation for four years – except for the residents of the Channel Islands.
Britain depended on being able to use the sea, for survival and victory. What enabled our survival and victory was our winning the Battle of the Atlantic. Only by using the sea could we: feed our population; equip, deploy and supply our armies and air force; and apply the power of the United States to the enemy. American armies and a big air force crossed the Atlantic and used Britain as their base to steadily weaken the Germans, especially by air. Air power did not win the war, but the lack of a large modern bomber force was the key deficiency of the Germans.
What turned the tide of the war, and ultimately defeated Germany, was: the coordination of Allied strategy; British and American sea and air power; and the grinding attrition of the German army, mainly on the Russian Front. More German combat divisions were destroyed on the Russian Front than on all other Fronts put together .
Victory in Europe was an extraordinary achievement. Germany was a formidable enemy. For 18 months after the fall of France, Britain and its Commonwealth fought Germany alone, at sea, in the air and in the Mediterranean and North Africa. It took a further four years, from 1941, for the combined strength of Britain, its Commonwealth, the United States and the Soviet Union to beat Germany. German soldiers at divisional level and below, their U-boat crews and fighter pilots fought with great skill, courage and commitment in the face of ever-worsening odds, often to the death. Luckily for the Allies, German skill at the tactical level was undermined by weakness at the operational level, inefficient armaments production and bankruptcy at the strategic level.
In its defeat, Germany paid a terrible price. The total figure for German killed and missing ranges between 4.3 and 5.3 million men. Of those, about 80% died on the Russian Front or in Soviet Prisoner of War Camps . Between 350,000 and 500,000 German civilians were killed by Anglo-American bombing. Soviet soldiers raped an estimated 1.6 to 2 million German women.
From late 1942 the Soviet Union built a huge army that would go on to defeat four fifths of the German army. From mid-1944 a juggernaut of Soviet Armies , grouped in 12 Fronts, crashed their way through the German defence in Rumania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, heading for Berlin. By early 1945, many German cities and towns had been so utterly wrecked by British and American bombing that some Germans described 1945 as ‘Year Zero’.
After Germany surrendered on 8th May 1945, Germany was occupied by the Allies and the whole of Germany was split into Soviet, British, French and American zones.
We should remember that after Germany surrendered, Japan fought on for three more months and Britain was heavily engaged in the war in the Far East. 365,000 British, one and a half million Commonwealth troops and the Royal Navy’s biggest fleet were engaged in bitter fighting in the Pacific after VE Day. It took two atomic bombs to be dropped on Japan to persuade it to surrender on 15th August – the date that became Victory in Japan (VJ) Day.
For some veterans, the experience of the war overshadowed the rest of their lives. Nothing in peacetime could match the stimulus, comradeship and sense of purpose of wartime. Although this country demobilised after 1945, some veterans never demobilised psychologically.
One of the greatest achievements of the post-war world was the rehabilitation of first, West Germany, and after 1990, a unified Germany, in world society. From 1955, West Germany played a central role in a NATO alliance that maintained peace for 80 years. But it has been a peace in which there have been only two years when a member of the British Armed Forces has not been killed on operations – two years out of 80. Those years were 1968 and 2016.
We should certainly celebrate Victory in Europe in 1945. For Britain, the war had to be fought, and won. We should remember with gratitude what some people call ‘our Greatest Generation’ – the one that lived through, fought and won the Second World War.
