Victory in Europe +80

 

80 years have passed since the original Victory-in-Europe Day celebrated Germany's "Unconditional Surrender" in 1945. As the actual events increasingly recede from living memory, the importance of remembering and commemorating them has correspondingly increased.

As on previous major anniversaries, London seems to be one of the main celebratory sites. Indeed, the UK seems to have devoted much of the week to commemorations, beginning with a military parade and a flypast over Buckingham Palace on Monday and concluding with a commemorative service in Westminster Abbey at noon London time today. That is fitting, since it is Victory in Europe that is being commemorated. For most of Europe (at least Western Europe) that also meant liberation. 

Symbolically at least, V-E Day also commemorates the beginning of the post-war European order - 80 years of relative peace and unprecedented prosperity in Western Europe. That the relationships and institutions which have historically contributed so much to maintaining that peace and producing that prosperity now seem to be in decline gives this anniversary an otherwise poignant note, as well as one of warning about what the uncertain future may hold.

V-E Day is also an appropriate occasion to remember the so-called "Greatest Generation" - those of my parents' generation (also the John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush generation) that made these 80 years of relative peace and prosperity possible. They were a unique generation, formed in Depression and tried in war, who were in many ways the last typical generation of humanity, before we Baby Boomers came along with our unprecedented experience of security, well-being, and almost unlimited possibilities. (The reality for many individuals was, of course, less unique, but the overall experience of our generation was unique and set the stage for the even less typical experiences of subsequent generations, who have inherited a world which would have been almost unrecognizable prior to V-E Day.)

So, today, we remember the greatest victory inhuman history, that concluded the most calamitous war in human history. We memorialize its many victims, both soldiers and so many more civilians. (Indeed, as Tony Judt memorably wrote in Postwar, in occupied Europe "World War Two was primarily a civilian experience.") And we especially salute the warriors who won the war, that "Greatest Generation," whom JFK in 1961 famously characterized as "a new generation of Americans--born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage--and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world."

Photo: My Father's Map of his Service in Europe from June 8, 1944 through V-E Day, May 8, 1945.