While drinking, dancing and laughter were the order of the day in Britain on the VE Day, things were not so hunky dory in Germany. At the liberated Belsen concentration camp situated 65 miles to the south of Hamburg, nurse Joan Rudman cut a depressed and lonely figure. She recalled: ‘One could hardly think of peace when there’s so much human misery here.’
Meanwhile for many Germans, there were mixed feelings. Relief that the war was ended combined with bitterness and a sense of humiliation. These were feelings that led to most Germans blotting out their memories of this period. In Germany is known as Tag der Befreiung (day of liberation), in other words liberation from Nazi rule. However, during the many years I spent in Germany I cannot recall anyone ever celebrating VE day, just as I never met a German who admitted to having been a Nazi or having a Nazi relative.
Claus Gunther, a 14-year-old member of Hitler Youth, who had been evacuated to a Bavaria recalled: ‘There was a weight off my heart because I would not have to do military service.’ Not all German soldiers were so lucky. In some areas fighting with the Soviets continued.
However most German soldiers were rushing to find British or American forces – not to fight them but to surrender. This was a better alternative to surrendering to the Russians. They were right; an estimated 36 per cent of the 3.2 million German prisoners of war held by the Russians died in captivity.
German civilians too were in flight towards the West. It was already understood that Red Army troops were pillaging their way across eastern Germany. An estimated two million German women were raped.
Neither were the inmates of ‘liberated’ concentration camps happy. At Sachsenshausen, the concentration camp to the north of Berlin which was opened in 1936 and was used as the archetype for 1,000 plus camps operated by the Nazis, many of the inmates simply swapped Nazi jailors for those of the NKVD (Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del: the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the forerunner of the KGB.) Not much liberation or celebration there then.
By contrast with Germany, Italy was already done with ‘liberation’ by 8 May. Festa della Liberazione is celebrated with a public holiday on 25 April. Defeat in World War II was taken much more lightly there than in Germany. As Churchill once said, ‘Italians lose wars as if they were football matches, and football matches as if they were wars.’
In fact, Festa della Liberazione is more a celebration of victory than defeat. It is a day of remembrance of national pride. The date marks the Italian National Liberation Committee’s proclamation of an insurrection against the fascists in all territories occupied by the Nazis. Somewhat exaggeratedly, Italy attributes to the partisans – a hotchpotch alliance of communists, liberals, anarchists, republicans and Catholics – a crucial role in the liberation of Italy. In Italian spring weather, 25 April is typically spent with a festive family lunch, often a grigliata (barbecue).
I am not sure that my father, who fought at the Battles of Anzio and Monte Cassino would have agreed with the hyping of Italy’s role in defeating Hitler. But thereafter he had a joyous role in the subjugation or rather, liberation of Italy. He won and lost a hotel in Naples in a game of poker, took control of Europe’s largest factory, the Fiat owned Lingotto factory complex in Turin which starred in the 1969 film, The Italian Job, was given lifetime membership of La Scala in Milan, and partied with Enzo Ferrari’s family at their house on Lake Como, before heading on to Venice at the beginning of May 1945.
Here he was met by Italian guerillas headed by a young women armed to the teeth with guns and grenades in her belt. Having accepted the surrender of Venice, he was taken to the fire station complex which was to serve as his headquarters. Not a palazzo, but at least he had the use of a beautiful launch. It may well have been while partying excessively on VE Day 1945 that he crashed and sank a vaporetto on the Grand Canal – at least that is the story written by a younger officer present, the novelist Michael Nelson.
This year, with particular focus on the 80th anniversary, Festa Della Liberazione has been a more than usual embarrassment for the government of prime minister Giorgia Meloni. As leader of Italy’s right-wing Fratelli d’Italia party (Brothers of Italy), whose origins can loosely be traced to Italy’s wartime dictator, Benito Mussolini, this day of celebration is awkward.
For the diehard fanatics in Japan there was bitter disappointment that Hitler’s successorhad not shown a bushido spirit by fighting to the bitter end
Meloni is clear that ‘the fundamental result of 25 April was, and undoubtedly remains, the affirmation of democratic values/’ However, she is haunted by her 19-year-old self who stated during a TV interview: ‘Mussolini was a good politician. Everything he did, he did for Italy’. Neither have her political associates been helpful. Palermo born Ignazio Benito Maria La Russa, a former defence minister to prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and founder of Fratelli d’Italia who now serves as Italy’s senatorial president, has a collection of fascist memorabilia. Recently he let go, one assumes reluctantly and for political reasons, his bust of Mussolini.
As for the third member of the Axis powers, Japan’s end of war legacy is even more embarrassing. Assassinated on 8 July 2022, prime minister Shinzo Abe, arguably the most consequential post war Japanese leader, was a supporter of the neo-fascist regime of Emperor Hirohito to the end of his life.
His grandfather Nobusuke Kishi, a former post war prime minister, had before the Pacific War been the de facto dictatorial ruler of the Japanese colony of Manchukuo (Manchuria) during the 1930s. Abe was also a member of Nippon Kaigi, a 70,000 strong ultra nationalist group which continues to deny a holocaust which killed between 20 million and 30 million Chinese civilians during world war two.
Today VE Day is not celebrated in Japan and is barely mentioned in the media. In Japanese schools it is even taught that Japan defeated Great Britain in world war two. Of course this was true at the beginning of the war, but as I once corrected a young female Japanese colleague, at the end of the war General Slim’s 14th Army handed out the two greatest land defeats ever inflicted on Japan; the Battle of Imphal and the Battle of the Irrawaddy River. My colleague ran out of the office in tears. Japan is country that remains largely in denial about most aspects of the war.
On VE Day in 1945, 38 divisions of the Japanese Army, which controlled Beijing, Nanking, Shanghai and most China’s eastern seaboard, were under assault from Chiang Kai Shek’s US-supplied Kuomintang forces. The Battle of West Hunan (or Battle of Xuefeng Mountains) which started on 9 April 1945 would continue until the beginning of June. In a particularly bloody contest, an estimated 15,000 Japanese and 36,000 Chinese troops were killed.
In Burma on VE Day, the British Army had just completed Operation Dracula, the combined airborne and amphibious operation to liberate Rangoon. Meanwhile, to the north of the city, Japanese forces were being driven back by elements of the 17th and 26th Indian divisions which had met up at Hiegu some 28 miles north of Rangoon on 6 May.
In Rangoon on VE Day, British prisoners of war were desperately hoping that their Japanese captors would not murder them. On the roofs of their prison, they wrote ‘BRITISH HERE’, and ‘EXTRACT DIGIT’ hoping that General Bill Slim’s armies would get a move on and liberate them.
However, it was too late to save Major Hugh Seagrim who had led the Karen tribesmen in their guerilla war against the Japanese invaders. He was taken out and murdered. Seagrim would earn a posthumous George Cross which completed a unique sibling set, as his brother had already won a posthumous Victoria Cross.
In Japan the news of VE Day drew a mixed response. Some may have looked forward to a similar peace in Asia. But for the diehard fanatics in the Japanese government there was bitter disappointment that, after Hitler’s suicide on 30 April, his successor Admiral Karl Donitz had not shown a bushido spirit by fighting to the bitter end. At army HQ in Tokyo, planning was in process for Operation Ketsugo; a defence plan involving thousands of kamikazes to greet the anticipated landing of US troops on Japan’s southern main island of Kyushu.
Further south on Okinawa, on VE Day Japanese soldiers of the 32nd Army under General Mitsuru Ushijima were falling back to the Shuri Line. It the last line of defence on the southern tip of the Okinawa in front of the capital Naha. The Battle of Maeda Escarpment, immortalised by the Mel Gibson directed film Hacksaw Ridge, had just finished. The film tracks the real-life story of Desmond Doss, a Seventh-day Adventist medic who became the first conscientious objector to win a Congressional Medal of Honor.
Under constant fire he had heroically carried 75 wounded men back from the precipitous frontline. On VE Day, Doss, was recovering in a field hospital from a fractured arm hit by a Japanese sniper’s bullet and from 17 shrapnel wounds from a grenade which he had kicked away from his colleagues.
Uniquely the respective American and Japanese commanders on Okinawa would both die. General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jnr. was struck in the chest by a piece of coral from an artillery shell explosion. Meanwhile, after a last supper which included libations of sake and captured Black & White whisky, General Mitsuru Ushijima stepped out ono a ledge overlooking the sea and plunged a wakizashi sword into his bared stomach. His assistant, a captain who was an expert swordsman, then decapitated him.
At sea on VE Day, Britain’s Far Eastern fleet, consisting of 11 aircraft carriers and two battleships, including HMS King George V, which served as the flagship for Cornishman, Admiral Sir Bernard Rawling was stationed off Okinawa. Their role was to destroy Japan’s airfields on Formosa (Taiwan). They were also batting off kamikaze attacks.
Originally hostile to British participation at the Battle of Okinawa, the US Navy came round to thinking of it as unlikely godsend. Unlike the teak flight decks of the US aircraft carriers, British carriers had steel decks. Japanese bombs bounced off them. Nevertheless 119 British sailor died from kamikaze attacks at Okinawa.
Another attribute of the British Navy lacking in their American counterparts was alcohol. The US Navy was dry. American naval officers enjoyed their visits to British ships. Indeed when, HMS George V asked a US destroyer if they would swap a radar spare part for a bottle of whisky, the instant reply was, ‘Man, for bottle of whisky you can have this whole goddamned ship.’
No doubt VE Day is an occasion worth celebrating in Britain. But for most of the rest of the world, particularly the Axis powers and the Allied troops who were battling them, VE Day was just another 24 hours of fear and hardship. It is a point worth remembering as we gather at street parties and hang out the flags and bunting.
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