Keegan on VE Day

Sir John Keegan writes about the end of the Second World War in Europe, VE day:

At the far end of Whitehall in Trafalgar Square and at Piccadilly Circus, the crowd was dancing and singing. American soldiers were exulting with British and Commonwealth servicemen, and the ordinary people of London, to celebrate what five years earlier had seemed an unattainable outcome. Then, with the German armies bursting into France and driving the defenders before them into rout, Churchill had stated his aim to the House of Commons, as: "Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be."

The road had been harder than even he had feared. Fifty million people had died, much of Europe had been destroyed, millions had been driven from their homes and were wandering the highways of Europe, displaced and starving.

Europe, the liberated portion that stayed liberated after 1945 did recover, although that recovery was already well started before the Marshall Plan got fully underway (the liberalization of the German economy under Adenauer was a huge change for the better). Even the nominally victorious nations were suffering:

In Britain the immediate post-war years were materially harsher than the war itself had been. Rationing remained and grew stricter. The country was bankrupt, surviving only on an American loan. The Army, still fighting the Japanese in the Far East, was to remain large even after VJ Day — Victory over Japan — in August, as it coped with post-imperial revolts in Burma and Palestine.

The Soviet Union, of course, was in even worse state, but took as much as it could of what the Nazis had left unlooted from the new satellite states of eastern Europe.

The country that was seen to have suffered worst as the war drew to a close was Germany. Its 50 largest cities lay in ruins, 600,000 of the inhabitants killed by Allied bombing, the majority women and children. Four million German men had died in battle, of whom 800,000 had been killed fighting the British and Americans in the battle for Germany. Seventeen million Germans had fled from the East, including places that had been German-inhabited for centuries.

German industry, once the powerhouse of the world's second-largest economy was at a standstill. The country's institutions had been destroyed and its government extinguished. Worst of all, Germany had become an outcast nation, held guilty of the worst crimes and excesses ever to have been committed by a civilised country.

VE Day was an occasion for rejoicing. But even among the victors there were many who wondered if such a victory deserved celebration.