To every war hero, thank you for your sacrifice
NO CEREMONY at the Cenotaph or veterans’ parade. No crowds to watch the Red Arrows fly-past. No camera crews inside the Royal Hospital Chelsea, where red-coated pensioners share their wartime memories.
The 75th anniversary of VE Day – declaring victory in Europe and triumph over Nazi Germany – has been, by necessity, a more muted affair than previously planned. Friday’s bank holiday seemed a particular anachronism, as what is a bank holiday when most of the country isn’t allowed to go to work anyway?
Television crews did their best – seeking out some of those who served and broadcasting their thoughts in a suitably socially distanced manner.
Newspapers showed pictures of care homes decked out in bunting and residents with their hair styled in victory rolls, working hard to mark the achievements of our most remarkable generation – one that secured the freedoms of all of us.
I remember the commemorations 25 years ago for the 50th anniversary, and thinking that the fluttering flags and hoopla told only half the story.
As Winston Churchill declared in his address to the nation in May 1945: ‘We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing, but let us not forget for a moment the toils and efforts that lie ahead. Japan, with all her treachery and greed, remains unsubdued.’
But while the black and white footage showing scenes of jubilation depicts the joy and relief of defeating Hitler’s forces, it is worth noting that VE Day was not the end of the fighting.
Thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen continued to engage a dangerous enemy thousands of miles from home.
Although not forgotten, the war in the Far East has never entered the public consciousness in the same way. The conflict has been recorded but, in some cases mythologised, by the West.
While Hollywood films record individual actions in France, the Netherlands, Poland and Germany – the evacuation of Dunkirk, Operation Market Garden, the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, the discovery and liberation of the concentration camps – far fewer minutes of celluloid have been devoted to a savage, gritty conflict fought across the jungles and islands of South East Asia.
Yet these are the wartime stories of my family. My grandfather, as a member of the Royal Artillery, was shipped off to the fronts at Java and Sumatra.
He spent more than three years in prisoner of war camps and was used as forced labour to build the Sumatran ‘death railway’, which claimed the lives of 80,000 men.
MY GRANDMOTHER, who upon receiving the telegram saying her husband was missing, presumed killed, refused to believe it. She knew, simply KNEW, that Bill Ritchie would be coming home. A faith she kept alive all through the war, even after VJ Day was declared and there was still no news.
In the event, his camp was one of the last ones found and the hospital ship bringing him home took the long way round to try to give its medics time to build up the severely malnourished frames of the passengers.
It would be 1946 before he returned to Glasgow, telling the War Office exactly where they could stick the rehabilitation centre they wanted to send him to; he was going home.
While so many PoWs toiled in the jungle in little more than loincloths, my grandfather managed to hang on to prized possessions, hiding them from the guards.
He returned with a tiny pocket Bible, dog-eared and underlined, the scriptures of which had helped sustain him, and a miniature 1942 diary, written over for each subsequent year.
The most poignant entry is the due date of his second child, expected not long after his regiment was shipped to the front. He spent his captivity not knowing whether he was father to a boy or girl.
On his return, my aunt Catherine, then three, was so frightened by the appearance of the stranger who appeared as her ‘Daddy’, she hid behind her mother’s skirts.
It is too easy and too glib to make comparisons between the restrictions of wartime Britain and those we now experience.
But the lockdown means that a full expression of thanks to that heroic, enduring generation and the sacrifices they made for our future have been curtailed.
I hope that come VJ Day on August 15, we are better able to honour those in every theatre of conflict in the Second World War.
I hope we can properly mark the real end of the war.