They won the war but lost the peace

Over the next few days we shall see countless images, in photographs and on film, of the men who won the second world war. The D-Day generation can claim to have been the last that had a genuine measure of greatness. These were not, for the most part, professional warriors, for whom the services had been a vocation. They had been plucked from civilian life, in many cases straight from school, to defend their country and win the bloodiest war in history. Such an achievement required beliefs, values and attitudes that few young people today can begin to imagine.

We shall also, over the next few days, see modern images of the same men, or at least of those who survived. Now in their eighties, many will be making their last visit to Normandy and the scene of their claim to immortality. For those of us who benefited from their courage and sacrifice, they are a living monument to a spirit that now seems antique. Yet we are conscious that, one by one, they too are dying; and soon their only monuments will be of stone.

It is a suitable moment, therefore, to try to evaluate the Britons who won the war. It was not just the men who invaded France on 6 June 1944, of course, or the Few, or the Desert Rats, or the crews on the Arctic convoys, or those who fought the Japs in the Burmese jungle in horrific conditions. There were WAAFs and Wrens and WRACs, the Women’s Land Army, the nurses and factory girls and typists who kept the machinery of war, in all its incarnations, functioning. What united them, in whatever they did, was a sense of patriotism and a belief in the principle of duty. We can still see it, scarcely idealised, in moving films like The Way Ahead, Millions Like Us or Went the Day Well? They were, famously, ‘all in it together’.