Remember VE Day in COVID-19 days

There will be no massive gatherings and no great public outpourings of joy in Canada to mark the 75th anniversary of VE Day.

Our war cenotaphs will stand silent today, the bugles will not sound and, saddest of all, the surviving and aged victors of history’s most devastating conflict will have to stay self-isolating in their homes.

COVID-19 — a different kind of enemy than the sinister dictatorships this country faced in the Second World War — has ensured this regrettable, if necessary, outcome.

The need to defeat this terrible disease is greater even than the need for Canadians to come together to honour what the men and women of this country did three-quarters of a century ago. That doesn’t, however, mean we can’t remember them.

Whether marching side by side or working side by side, Canadians helped secure the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany on May 8, 1945. And that occasion, known ever after as Victory in Europe Day, paved the way to Japan’s defeat and the war’s end three months later.

Today, Canadians have endured nearly two, unprecedented months of lockdowns imposed to flatten the COVID-19 curve. The disease has already killed 4,404 people in this country out of 64,817 confirmed cases.

But look what the Canadians who went before us endured. By VE Day 1945, they had been defending freedom and fighting tyranny for nearly six years.

In those days Canada was, in population at least, a relatively small country of just 11 million people. Even so, over the course of that war, 1,086,342 Canadian men and women — nearly a tenth of the nation — joined Canada’s armed forces to serve on land, at sea or in the air.

And by May 8, 1945, more than 42,000 Canadians had given their lives in this struggle, while tens of thousands of others had suffered life-altering wounds.

It’s unquestionable that in this 2020 pandemic, millions of Canadians have lost greatly and given greatly. Jobs have disappeared, studies have been disrupted and futures blighted.

The Canadians who celebrated the first VE Day knew sacrifice, too — and not just the ones in uniform. Women had entered the factories as never before to manufacture the weapons and machines of war. In the farm fields, teenage girls and young women toiled to ensure there was enough for Canadians and their British allies to eat.

Yes, the current pandemic has taken away some of the pleasures we once enjoyed. Travel has been curtailed. We can’t even play in our parks. But during and after the Second World War, Canadians willingly accepted years of deprivation when meat, sugar, butter, tea, coffee, gasoline and even bicycles were rationed so the supplies needed for victory could be shipped overseas.

As many people are doing this spring, many of those Canadians dug up their yards to grow their own fruits and vegetables in Victory Gardens. That’s how they put the food they needed on their plates.

To be sure, comparing then to now is not meant to suggest the Canadians of 1945 were stronger, braver or better than the Canadians of today. The crisis of the Second World War was profoundly different in nature and impact than the crisis of this pandemic. We can’t shoot or bomb COVID-19 out of existence.

But the example shown by those Canadians of long ago can instruct, guide and inspire us now.

They prevailed over implacable, powerful, murderous human foes. We who inherited the world those Canadians saved can achieve a different kind of victory over a tiny, very dangerous virus.