VE Day celebrations
What did you do? What did you watch? What did you see when out on your walk?
We played (recorder and oboe) for the people in our street to sing along to wartime favourites. A neighbour baked cakes and passed them around. Then we came indoors to watch what was a very excellent programme by the BBC, from 8-9.10, with Katharine Jenkins, The Queen, historic footage, interviews of our heroes - the sort of thing the BBC does best.
How about you?
We played (recorder and oboe) for the people in our street to sing along to wartime favourites. A neighbour baked cakes and passed them around. Then we came indoors to watch what was a very excellent programme by the BBC, from 8-9.10, with Katharine Jenkins, The Queen, historic footage, interviews of our heroes - the sort of thing the BBC does best.
How about you?

Comments
Mr RoS didn't see anything unusual while he was out for his walk, but I wouldn't expect him to unless someone actually tied him up with a length of bunting.
I caught a few of the many VE day items on the television news programmes, but didn't watch the BBC's evening-long celebrations.
Feeling a bit cynical about the coverage. It seems a bit forced now, not being able to have the mass crowd-centred jollifications as the event we are remembering. And I think they have wrung just about as much footage from Captain Tom as they possibly could, and then some. Poor man must be exhausted from all the attention!
I forgot about the Queen's speech at 9pm, so watched that online about an a hour ago.
I gather from the Local Facebook page that there was a ceremony from the British Legion local president with bugler, much bunting, street parties in various front gardens, and a fair bit of singing.
On the one hand it seemed good for community spirit, but maybe we should have waited till VJ Day in August.
My walk this afternoon took me through the local cemetery where the Commonwealth War Graves are nearly half for Polish air crew and the graves in the next door village churchyard over are notable for the number of European Commonwealth War Graves. There's a nearby old airfield was where the Norwegian pilots lived and flew from, as did Polish and Czech pilots. It felt like an opportunity missed, but this area had a high Brexit vote.
Rather touching and easily the most un-Glastonbury thing I've heard in the eighteen months I've been here.
*At least, I think it was a French horn.
Who exactly is "we" in that sentence? The portions of Europe that were "handed over" to Stalin were liberated by the Red Army.
On another note, there is now only one surviving veteran of the Battle of Britain.
And that feels wrong. For sure, it was better that the allies won the war: the half a loaf of a Europe (and a world) divided between capitalism/democracy led by the USA and communism/authoritarianism led by the USSR and China was surely better than a wholly authoritarian and dictatorial world led by Germany and Japan. And let's overlook the many British (as well as allied) troops who fought on and suffered until VJ Day. But the whole thing was about past glories, not about building a better future.
If the UK has no future then it makes sense to glory in our past. But if we are to have a future, then we need to get everyone on board in building it. And we don't do that by spending all day looking at the past, somehow assuming that it was better then and we just need to head back to it.
The Covid-19 outbreak has a very few benefits: it has led to some new pieces in the Guardian by Nancy Banks-Smith for example. For me, being excused from having to go and ring the bells for the phony VE Day events was another.
I got off to a flying start - I found an excellent photo of a piper from the village in Normandy in 1944, ironing the pleats of his kilt. It was an official photograph for newspaper release. I forwarded it to the Pipe Band, who put it on their facebook page. 68 likes so far. Exactly what I was aiming for.
Then I found a "letter to the editor" from someone whose house I can see as I sit here, complaining about the trashy dance music played on the radio on VE Day. She complained that the "Government -controlled" BBC's "idea of rousing victory music" made her melancholy. Not what I was looking for for church / community content, but I thought it was funny so I put it on my own Facebook page.
This produced a response from the son of the second-oldest member of our congregation saying that his father "doesn't buy into the VE Day fuss" as his recollection of VE Day as a member of the forces was the expectation that they would be redeployed to the bloodbath of fighting Japan.
I ploughed on looking for cheerful content. I found a newspaper piece from 12 May 1945, praising VE Day in my village, which involved "decorous jollity, no drunkeness and a service of thanksgiving in the church" There was also a comment that, as the Polish servicemen stationed here sang their national anthem every day during drill, the Polish anthem was sung better than "God Save the King" By the time the day was out, a "Welcome Home" fund had been started for returning servicemen.
I had found my content for the church FB page. No tale of wild celebration, but a church service and singing in Polish.
It's not what I had expected, but here in the North East Household we will raise a glass with the toast "Na Zdrowie"!
The thing I like, and wish we did more is The Big Lunch, which is a street party intended to build community without adding any other accretions. Having found it still exists, I might suggest my little street does it as a street party, individual picnics, socially distanced chat and all.
There was some sort of online service from the Cathedral, but I gave it a miss. I'm afraid I'm with others on this thread who find the jingoism all rather OTT and phony.
Our Place's oldest member (born 1924) was asked if he would like to share reminiscences of VE Day, with FatherInCharge, but he firmly declined.
(BTW, my late Father never liked to talk about The War, and neither did my late Father-in-law...but he had been a PoW in Burma...).
However, there was a very good commemoration service at the war memorial, I think organised by the local British Legion, with the playing of the Last Post. I think prayers were also said at the local cemetery where there are graves of German and Italian prisoners of war, who died of illnesses before they could be sent home.
I went up to another local churchyard to find the grave of "Johnny the Pilot", a Polish airman who settled locally after the war. His real name was Waclaw Janek Moszczynski.
My grandad died in 1940, just after he had joined up, so I put the telegram from the King in my front window.
They certainly turned their back on all that Germany had stood for and in many ways became very British; however they did not disdain their essential Germanness and had no compunction about visiting. However my mother to her dying day was dismissive of German people from her own age group who said, "We never realised what was going on". She didn't mind people who said, "We saw what was going on but were too frightened to speak out".
It's worth noting that our big spectacle of military pomp is on the National Holiday (14 July / storming of the Bastille) rather than any war-related date.
I wonder what the celebrations will be like this July?
It could be argued that Britain actually lost the Second World War. The immediate strategic aim of the war, from the British perspective of September 1939, was the restoration of Polish independence. The larger goal, from the viewpoint of grand strategy, was to preserve the British Empire by checking the rise of revisionist states like Nazi Germany. Judged by the outcome (Poland a client state, Empire dissolved) the war failed to achieve Britain's desired ends.
It could be so argued. But given the countries that lost rather more absolutely, it seems rather perverse to do so.
In hindsight, there had been an over-estimation of Nazi war capabilities (especially of the Luftwaffe and bombers) and Germany might have been defeated much earlier had Britain gone to war in, say, 1937/38.
Though you could also argue that Germany lost the war through its catastrophically misjudged invasion of Russia.
I wonder who will remember VJ Day? No doubt Captain Tom will, if he makes it that far, but I can't help feeling that once again the armies in the far East (drawn from five continents) who were still fihting an implacable enemy on May 8th will be forgotten.
I had planned to stand on the pub doorstep my father stood on on VE day, and have the pint he couldn't have because he was only 14, as much in memory of him as the occasion, but it wasn't to be.
AG
It was very different in the not-too-distant past, where older people were seen as a nuisance, ruining the lives of the young, spending their money and *shock horror* daring to live too long. And always going on about the blasted war.
Fortunately, our society has turned out to be more caring.
AG
Britain didn't win. The Allies won.
But the FB ones did seem a bit in dire need of variation (my post celebrated people from across the commonwealth and beyond, America slightly lost out till VJ day, but was still there, I'm not sure if others noticed and how they reacted)
If one was wishing to fly flags commemorating VE, the flags of the Allied nations seem like a reasonable choice. The flags of a subset of those nations whose citizens are actually present at a particular celebration also seem reasonable.
The EU flag - representing as it does some victorious countries, some liberated countries, and some defeated countries, would be an odd choice. As a "war is shit, let's not do that again" political statement, it works. As a celebration of VE, not so much.
You need to read The Audit of War by Corelli Barnett and Churchill's The Gathering Storm. The RAF was still relying on bi-planes until the end of 1938, the Hurricane only entering service at Christmas 1937 and the Spitfire in August 1938. Due to cuts in personnel the RAF had fewer trained pilots at the end of 1937 than the Hitler Youth. The army wasn't much better, with troops in 1937 being issued with weapons that were being superseded in 1918.
The only reason why the BEF stayed in France until May/June 1940 was because Germany had been concentrating on Poland and then Norway and Denmark. We, and our French and Belgian allies, were ill-equipped to fight a war based on the trench warfare of WWI: we were wholly unprepared to fight the Blitzkrieg pattern of warfare offered by the Third Reich in 1940. The idea that an earlier attempt to take on the thoroughly modernised German army in 1937 or 38 might have been anything other than a catastrophe is laughable.
point taken
There were natives of the American South who fought on the side of the Union in the US civil war. They are not commemorated by waving the banner of the Confederacy.
And of course, the EU did not exist in 1945. To have flown the flags of all the Allied countries would have been suitable though.
MMM
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I went on a very windy* walk around the local cemetery looking for all the Commonwealth War Graves. I knew about the little row of 12, including the 7 Polish, relatively new gravestones, as it's near the back gate we enter through (on a circular walk), but when I looked it up to post, there are 19 listed. I found 18, including 3 WW1 graves, a Commonwealth stone added to a family plot and two other much older stones, but I am still missing one.
* avoiding trees as we were expecting a few more to come down and preferred not to be near.
Ireland was neutral in World War II, not one of the Allies.