Remembering VE Day

It is 70 years since Britain celebrated Germany’s unconditional surrender and the arrival of victory in Europe. Prime Minister Winston Churchill hailed ‘a victory of the great British nation as a whole… against the most tremendous military power that has been seen,’ and he asked ‘when shall the reputation and faith of this generation of English men and women fail?’ It has not yet; and today we remember the freedoms for which they fought and died, which we exercised yesterday. In its 11 May 1945 issue The Spectator‘s leading article was on at ‘The Challenge Ahead’ in the wake of Germany’s defeat:

GERMANIA fuit—Germany is a thing that was. The assertion rests for justification not on any vainglorying of the victors, but on the unprompted confessions of Germany’s latest leaders in their addresses to their prostrate people, the fallen and frustrated herrenvolk. They have no illusions about what unconditional surrender means. Two thousand years and more ago words were tamed which fit the German of today better perhaps than any at have found utterance since.

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning.