By 8 May 1945, the Americans had only taken a very small part of Japan — the 11.5 square miles of Iwo Jima island — a conquest very expensive in blood: 6,821 US troops were lost and three times as many were seriously injured. Japanese combat was very different from that of the Americans: they would fight to the death with no thought for their own survival, and their tactics were designed to circumvent the vast superiority of American firepower. Victory over the remaining 145,937 square miles of Japan, therefore, would inevitably come at the cost of far more lives than all the allies had worldwide.

The Japanese had no intention of surrendering. They were determined to continue to inflict such heavy casualties that the allies would give up their demand for unconditional surrender and instead accept a negotiated settlement that would assure the continuation of the imperial dynasty — a strategy they called Ketsugō (Operation Decisive). And, with more than three and a half million Japanese troops still on duty in the home islands, not counting those being evacuated from China and Korea, they had the manpower to make it happen. Beside combat forces, which would attack using aircraft and small arms, there was the Civilian Volunteer Corps — all able-bodied men and women armed with rifles and pistols taken from the British, Chinese and Dutch troops defeated earlier in the war. But what really made the Japanese so confident, what made them truly a force to be reckoned with, was their extraordinary stoicism. Uniquely, they really did prefer death to surrender.

But because Ketsugō was not studied properly by foreign historians for decades, a false narrative took hold — one that serves as useful propaganda for the Russians to this day. This asserts that when the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, Japan was already defeated. Cut off from oil supplies immobilizing aircraft and ships, surrender was only days away at most. The only reason the bomb was dropped, in this telling, was to frighten Stalin into accepting US supremacy in Europe in spite of the superiority of the Red Army. The deaths of the men and women of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the prolonged suffering of the survivors poisoned by radioactive fallout were most cruelly inflicted for cynical American political purposes.

Every part of this narrative is wrong. In reality, when Hiroshima was bombed, Japan could still count on as many as 10,000 aircraft for kamikaze suicide attacks. Second, nobody in the chain of command, from President Truman right down to Paul Tibbets, the 29-year-old pilot of the B-29 that dropped the “Little Boy” fission bomb, knew anything about immediate radiation or the subsequent radioactive fall-out — apart from the sheer size of the explosion, they had no idea of what they were about to unleash. The reason the bomb was dropped was that US military leaders and President Truman were terrified by the thought of all the Iwo Jima battles it would take to conquer the rest of Japan.

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Despite the desperate damage inflicted, the bomb did serve one enduring purpose. For decades after, all of us remembering VE day in May 1945, looking at those pictures of celebrating couples kissing enthusiastically, could be certain of one thing: there would be no more wars in Europe. That certainty was not because of the actions of the United Nations, utterly ineffectual even then, nor the result of some Great Power diplomacy in the Security Council, which only fails when it is most needed. Instead, the very long peace that Europe enjoyed — an unprecedented 77 years without a major war — was “the sturdy child of (nuclear) terror”, as Churchill said, a thing far more reliable than any human wisdom. And this only came when the bomb was dropped two months after the emotional celebrations of VE day.

That was still true on 24 February 2022, when Putin, who had been creeping into the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, dramatically escalated and invaded Ukraine outright, aiming straight for its capital, Kiev. For it wasn’t the protective arm of nuclear deterrence that failed on that fateful day and led the Russians to make their reckless move. It was the failure of NATO, and its attendant governments, to reaffirm deterrence in word and deed during the weeks and days of growing tension before the invasion.

In fact it can be argued that the Biden administration unwittingly triggered the Russian escalation when, at the behest of the always-wrong CIA, which was predicting the swift fall of the city, it evacuated the US diplomatic mission in Kiev. That, in turn, precipitated a mass flight of other Western (and Middle Eastern) diplomats. Even worse, the German government contrived to outdo Biden’s foolish move by declaring that it would not stop the Nord Stream II doubling of gas imports from Russia, even if there was “some incident” in Ukraine. For the German-speaking Putin it was a big green light to invade.

Russia’s “post-modern” invasion did not rely on firepower. It aimed to capture Kiev and conquer the country by giving the impression of strength: the image of that endless double column of armored vehicles was a powerful one. When that fashionable fantasy collided with the reality of stubborn Ukrainian defenders firing anti-tank rockets at very close range, Nato’s leaders had an opportunity to take immediate action. They could go into an emergency session to demand an end to the fighting, and a prompt return to pre-combat positions.

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But no such session happened because only the British and the new Nato members who had long lived under Soviet rule were willing to oppose the Kremlin head-on. The Biden administration was mostly focused on “avoiding escalation” and the French, Germans and Italians as usual loudly demanded a voice in Nato’s decisions while offering only platitudes when it was their turn to speak .

As a result, on VE day 2025, a war still rages while a fragmented alliance struggles to cobble together an effective defense strategy. So as flags are waved in celebration of that long-past victory, men are again dying, and European governments again hoping that the US will step in and do the heavy lifting. It was, after all, an approach that worked well enough in the past, when the US had far larger forces and Russia was everyone’s bad guy.

But today everything has changed. There is an enemy that the Americans are more worried about than Putin: Xi Jinping, the Mussolini of our time, who is determined to show that today’s Chinese are courageous and formidable fighters, unlike their defeated ancestors. And as China openly prepares for war, the US has no choice but to prioritize the “Indo-Pacific”. Perhaps, as Europe finds itself abandoned, or at least insufficiently protected, and unwilling to rearm in earnest, it is now the time to ask: for how long will the nuclear deterrent hold?

But for how much longer will we remember those ghosts? This week marks the 80th anniversary of VE Day — the moment the war ended in Europe. The youngest surviving veterans are now at least 98. And of the millions of British people who served in the war, only tens of thousands remain: perhaps 0.01% of Britain’s total population.

But perhaps the question should rather be: what will we remember? In theory, an event doesn’t need to be within living memory to be memorialized. In practice, though, as the generations change, the meaning of even the most notable historic moments will waver and mutate. We still mark the foiled attempt by Guy Fawkes to blow up the Houses of Parliament, for example, but few remember the details of what Fawkes was trying to achieve.

Similarly, when I was a child, there were still First World War veterans alive: I remember interviewing Bill, a local veteran of both wars, for a school homework assignment. He had lied about his age to volunteer in 1914 when just 14, and was in his nineties when I spoke to him. He would spend all day sitting on a pavement bench, in full uniform including medals, nodding and smiling at passers-by. He talked vividly about his war memories for my project, but seemed largely oblivious to the modern world. That long-ago war was, for him, still all of meaning and reality, along with most of his personality.

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What did that war mean, though? My school history lessons presented its origins as murky, and largely driven by longstanding European rivalries. More recently, though, now that the last of its veterans has died, I’ve noticed this war increasingly repurposed as a Goodies Versus Baddies fable about “freedom and democracy”. And so it may soon be with the Second World War, however many of its ghosts still haunt Britain’s woodlands.

This week, ceremonial officialdom creaked into gear for the four-day celebration of “VE 80”, complete with military parades, fly-bys and appearances by the Royal Family. But as I watched BBC coverage of dress-uniformed soldiers marching down the Mall past the King, two things struck me. Firstly: each group was neatly formed, beautifully trained — and teeny weeny, mere pocket-sized mini-units dwarfed by the scale of a thoroughfare designed for huge parading battalions. It felt like a vivid metaphor for a Britain that rattles around in architecture built for an entirely grander state. And second: that as living memory of the Second World War fades, much more is about to pass from us than the last of the Greatest Generation.

Who were they, that generation? And how do we remember them? Two days before the military mini-units marched down Pall Mall, the ghostly airmen of my local woodland seemed briefly as though they might see another modern-day echo, when a Spitfire crash-landed in a field in Kent. All on board were, mercifully, safe — but it felt like an omen. For there is something especially emblematic about these twin-engined fighter planes.

The excitement and admiration that has always clung to folk memory of Britain’s role in the Second World War also flew on twin engines: technical inventiveness, and manic bravery. While my step-grandfather was a POW in Colditz, for example, he hand-built a glider with which he planned to escape over the battlements — a staggeringly risky engineering project only interrupted by rescue when the war ended.

Perhaps more than any other symbol of the Second World War, the Spitfire stands as an emblem for this mix of can-do engineering and wild risk-taking that enabled Allied airmen, some still teenagers, to take to the skies in the legendary 1940 “Battle of Britain”. But though we won the Battle of Britain, and eventually VE Day too, all of Europe lost the war. It was civilization-destroying. With it ended industrial, imperial Europe, and in its aftermath arose a new civilization centered on America: one only superficially in continuity with what it succeeded, and whose explicit foreign policy it has been ever since to ensure the Old World never regained its pre-1945 bellicosity.

This policy was, of course, not simply imposed on Europe. For the most part it happened with the active support of at least the leadership class, among European peoples shattered and traumatized by the bloodshed. But its effects have been far-reaching. Under the new order, nationalism was decried, and the universal fraternity of all peoples extolled. A new aspiration to global peace and cooperation based on institutions and rules took shape, even as national borders and peoples were encouraged to become ever more porous, fluid, and intermingled.

We have lived within the resulting consensus ever since. These days we often refer casually to “the West”, as a collective; implicitly we mean by this the alliance within which the post-war consensus holds, underwritten by American hard power. The center of the world is now Washington. All that remains of imperial Europe is museums, architecture, and some carefully-preserved examples of the machines that enabled both that era’s manic bravery, and also the horrific war it produced. And those surviving machines which are not in museums or private collections have been repurposed for the central cultural activity of the successor civilization, “the West”: individual consumer experience. An hour-long “Battle of Britain” flight with Fly a Spitfire, the company whose plane crash-landed over the weekend, costs £6,750.

1945 was thus a rupture in more ways than one. Fully 95% of Britain’s population today comprises those who grew up in “the West” that succeeded it. Like shepherds grazing their flocks among the ruins of the Colosseum, this much-reduced successor Britain trots its dinky military along vast avenues, or turns its palaces and vintage machines into tourist spectacle, or simply builds over the traces of a bygone culture and worldview largely opaque to us.

Now, as the remaining Second World War veterans approach their own centuries, and even the lovingly maintained museum-piece Spitfires are struggling, it won’t be long before even those who remember how it ended will be gone. What will VE Day mean then? I don’t think it’s a coincidence, in this context, that we are once again witnessing land war at the edges of Europe itself. Nor do I think it’s a coincidence that Second World War and even Holocaust revisionism is on the rise, in the bowels of the internet. Such revisionism often involves a worryingly sketchy or actively malign twisting of historical fact; and its bedrock enabler is less ignorance as such, which is surely a human constant, than the events themselves passing from living memory.

As this proceeds, long-settled narratives are showing signs of increasingly volatile contestation — and not just in the more lurid corners of the online Right. The meaning of the Second World War, and its memorials, is a target for progressives as well: a fact signalled by the orange crash barriers surrounding the flag-draped Cenotaph, in a photo posted on Monday by the Ministry of Defense. This casual mix of pre-war grandeur and ugly, plastic safetyism epitomizes the dispiriting contrast between pre- and post-war British sensibilities. But it also points to the increasing politicization of war memorials in general. The Cenotaph in particular has become a popular target for protest, and sometimes vandalism, by (usually) far-Left protesters with grievances from Gaza to climate change. So frequent and provocative a focus for publicity-seeking political actions have war memorials become that there have even been nativist counter-protests. In 2024, the Government criminalized climbing on such structures during political actions.

By the time the Bank Holiday Monday VE Day ceremonies reached the Cenotaph, the crash barriers had been removed and serene solemnity reigned. But there was a time when no barriers would have been necessary.

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Some disgruntled Brits attribute this, and other purported signs of indifference to VE Day, to demographic change. Given that only 37% of London residents are white British, perhaps rather fewer of the city’s contemporary majority feel an emotional connection to sacrifices made almost a century ago, for a country to which their own ancestors sometimes had very different relationships. As a byproduct of the utopian softening of borders, this demographic change is, itself, an effect of the post-war internationalism that characterized “the West” as it has existed since 1945. And, as underlined by recent Gaza protests, the cultural pluralism that results is undoubtedly accelerating the loss of shared reverence for British war memorials.

But the fading of VE Day is not, or not only, a matter of multiculturalism. Were this the case, we might expect celebrations to be as enthusiastic as ever, in those parts of Britain where most inhabitants have ancestors who served. My Shires town is one such area. And yet there were, to my knowledge, no local events to coincide with the grand parades in London. To the extent that it accelerates the loss of shared reverence for the lessons of the Second World War, then, the post-war internationalism embraced by “the West” is indisputably hard at work dissolving its own legitimizing consensus. But demographic change is more an effect of this dissolution than its principal cause. This is, in the last count, simply a matter of time.

The Second World War itself was a cataclysm so immense that it obliterated almost everything Britain had previously been. Poor shattered Bill dressed in full military uniform every day into his nineties; and it’s as though Britain somehow did the same, at the scale of a whole country. So as we salute the last of the Greatest Generation, perhaps we can also feel a sense of relief at the prospect of letting those memories fade a little, in time. We should not forget the effort, the sacrifices, or the courage. But letting that era pass beyond living memory may also, in time, grant us more room to take stock of the kind of place Britain is now.

What will we conclude? It need not be defeatist. I dare say some of those ghostly airmen long to rest; if we could only grant this, perhaps those of us alive now might feel more able to do away with the figurative crash barriers and take up their legacy of inventiveness and daring. Then, perhaps, in holding our past just a little more lightly, Britain might one day be free to have a future again.

My secondary school years, 1994-2001, seemed to be a busy period for such obituaries. Perhaps this was just my impression, but it was the age when men who had been in the prime of life during the war years were entering their eighties.

Over the course of my life the generation of people who actually fought in the Second World War has been gradually leaving us. I entered the world shortly before Mrs Thatcher’s stonking general election victory in 1983, and VJ Day, the end of the war, was not so very long ago. Factories and officers and schools still contained plenty of people who had served, some of them relatively young and vigorous.

Anyone in their late forties or older was likely to have some clear recollection of the war years. We were still living in a decidedly post-war world; there were four British armoured divisions permanently stationed in Germany, and Rudolf Hess remained a prisoner in Spandau, 42 years after his flight to Scotland.

Public life in 1983 was full of people who had been in uniform between 1939 and 1945. This included two of the previous three Prime Ministers, Ted Heath and James Callaghan, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie. Runcie, indeed, had won the Military Cross during the advance to the Rhine, a distinction he shared with the popular cricket commentator and broadcaster Brian Johnston and the former Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, who had honourably resigned the previous year after the Foreign Office failed to foresee the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands. The Chief of the Defence Staff during the Falklands War, Terence Lewin, served with great distinction in the Royal Navy during the Second World War.

Such links are now extremely rare. In 2020, anyone who saw active service against Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan is well over ninety. Almost the only prominent people in public life who served in the war are the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, who saw some lively service in the Mediterranean as a young naval officer.

This chronological distancing has been accompanied by a curious change in the way that we collectively remember the Second World War. It’s hard to describe this change precisely, or say exactly where it has come from. But if I had to try, I’d say that a folk memory of the Second World War as essentially a war fought for patriotic reasons against other countries to defend the British national interest, as part of a wider ongoing national story, has been substantially replaced by one that regards the war as an idealistic conflict fought in defence of universalist moral values, especially those that nowadays form the bedrock of high-status elite thinking — equality, diversity, non-discrimination, anti-nationalism and so on.

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Now of course there is some truth in this account, and some incompleteness in the older version. As the war went on it was framed increasingly by Allied leaders and populations as a fight for civilisation against barbarism, and of course this was a strong theme in British propaganda from the very early days of the war.

In Churchill’s famous speeches in 1940 he referred to the “odious apparatus of Nazi rule” and the “abyss of a new dark age”. The horrific revelations at the end of the war about the death camps and the atrocities throughout Occupied Europe made it very clear that the war had in some sense truly been a struggle against a diabolical evil.

But this is not the whole story. The Finest Hour speech appealed to a fundamentally patriotic understanding of the war, noting with regard to the Battle of Britain that “upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire”. The “Fight Them On The Beaches” speech explicitly situated the danger from Hitler in the context of a long series of threats to British independence from Continental tyrants, and declared the Anglo-French intention to “defend to the death their native soil”.

And Britain had entered the war for old-fashioned strategic reasons; not to defeat a country with a wicked government that was oppressing its population, but to stand up to a continental power that threatened to dominate Europe and so undermine the British national interest.

There is also, of course, the little matter of our alliance with the Soviet Union, a savage tyranny which had killed far more of its own citizens during the 1930s than Nazi Germany had managed. If the war was straightforwardly a crusade against barbarism, it is hard to account for our forging a jewel-covered ceremonial longsword as a present to Joseph Stalin, who had carved up Poland with Hitler in 1939, and whose armies raped and murdered their way across Eastern Europe in 1944-45, shadowed everywhere by battalions of secret policemen ready to shoot local dissidents, and indeed terrified peasant boys who fled the front line.

The Soviet alliance is intelligible and defensible in the context of a war for national survival and the national interest; less so if we conceive of the conflict as a grand battle of good versus evil.

A useful concept here, I think, is the neologism “retcon”, a portmanteau of the words “retroactive” and “continuity”. Retconning is a term originally coined by comic book readers, and it refers to the retrospective revision of completed fictional works, typically with the addition of new information to make us understand previous events in a different way.

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Something similar has been happening to the Second World War over the last few decades. Not only are the events of the war itself being repurposed to tell a simplistic tale about an idealistic war, but additionally the war is treated as an origin story for all that is considered good in the post-war world, from the NHS and the welfare state to our ability to rise above primitive notions like patriotism and national interest to the sunlit uplands of universal benevolence.

This retooling of the popular imagination is necessary partly because of sweeping demographic change complicating conceptions of national history and popular memory, but also because what you might call “old-fashioned” wars, entered into and fought for reasons of national self-interest, are seen as increasingly problematic.

To celebrate a hero because he fought or died for Britain, for King and Country, for the land from which he sprung, makes people uneasy; to celebrate him because he fought for “freedom” or “against Fascism” is much more acceptable. Ironically, this suspicion of national feeling is a result of the terrible events of the war, which have forever tainted patriotic energy with the horrible shadow of genocide and racial bigotry.

The semi-conscious move to the story of the war as a morality tale has surely also contributed to the curious transformation in our attitude to veterans of conflict, and not just the world wars. Across great swathes of public conversation, we seem to have only two cultural templates for those who have served in war; hero, an appellation now applied freely and therefore uselessly to anyone who has spent time in uniform, and victim, the man left emotionally and psychologically scarred by the experience of battle, grappling with addiction or PTSD and unable to function effectively in civilian life.

While it is very good indeed that we now take more seriously the mental health of service personnel, there is little evidence that veterans have worse mental health than the general population, once you have controlled for possible confounding factors.

Thus surviving Second World War veterans — such as Captain Tom Moore, NHS fundraiser extraordinaire — are held in the most exaggerated reverence, treated almost like holy objects rather than normal people who lived through an incredible chapter in our history and have had the good luck to live to a grand old age.

This is in line with the reimagining of the war as a high moral endeavour and the catalyst for the dawning of a new Britain freed from the shackles of an unenlightened past. It doesn’t help that there is no-one left alive who had any kind of senior or strategic role in the conflict, to temper the impressionistic, partial and fragmented recollection of the poor bloody infantry with a wider perspective that makes clear the difficult choices constantly faced by military commanders.

I am fairly sure that this exaggerated reverence is something new. I don’t recall it from the big wave of Second World War remembrance in the early 1990s. Then veterans were still treated with great respect, of course, and their recollections listened to with attention, but the very fact that there were so many of them, and that so many of them were still of an age to be actively engaged in normal life, arguably meant that we had more of a sense of them as normal people, for good or ill, rather than enormously aged relics of another world.

There is another reason for this pivot to extreme deference to Second World War veterans, and it was neatly summed up by an astute Twitter correspondent of mine, who noted that the wartime generation have become less culturally threatening as they have aged. Discussing the recently-discovered footage of Captain Tom Moore on the TV show Blankety Blank in 1983, he suggested that at that time he was the right age (63) to be a resented authority figure, liable to tell you to get a haircut and turn that bloody racket down, rather than in the category of enormously ancient and hence admirable sage from times long past.

This seems like a very plausible dynamic to me. The generations who have grown up since the war have complicated psychological attitudes to those who fought in it. They are compelled to admire their sacrifice and their resilience, especially if the cause for which they fought can be reconfigured as a war for modern liberal shibboleths, but also keenly convinced of the moral backwardness of the world which the wartime generations stood for, and which they still to some extent represent. It is entirely plausible, then, that the younger generations’ attitude to the few remaining survivors of the old world, should become more indulgent when any meaningful political and social threat from them has entirely passed (as it had not done in 1983).

The effect of the various phenomena noted above is to make it increasingly difficult for people to have a nuanced, realistic understanding both of our military history in general, and of how we should think about particular soldiers’ experiences. It’s always a delight, therefore, to see pushback against the sentimentalist or simplistic presentation of such experiences.

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For example, one of the great strengths of Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, released in autumn 2018 to coincide with the centenary of the end of the First World War, was that it avoided a clichéd over-emphasis on what you might call the “muddy futility and tragic poetry” view of that war.

Over the end credits we heard not the usual sad piano music, or a famous actor reading Dulce Et Decorum Est in their special Shakespeare voice, but a jaunty and – it must be said – filthy British Army marching song, Mademoiselle From Armentieres. Jackson, if I remember correctly, included voices noting that we did actually win the Great War. Not alone, certainly; the immortal French heroics at Verdun and the arrival of the Americans in the last year or so cannot be ignored. But the British Army and its imperial allies — and the Royal Navy’s blockade of Germany — played a decisive role in actually defeating the Germans in the field.

Also featured were testaments to an under-discussed aspect of the modern presentation of remembrance and popular history: i.e., that a large proportion of soldiers actually rather enjoy the experience of battle. This insight is fascinatingly explored in Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War, among other works. However, it struggles to get much discussion time in the modern media environment because it runs so strongly against the grain of our conception of human nature.

It will be intriguing to see how the remembrance of the Second World War develops over the next two decades, as the conflict passes out of living memory altogether. I fear that the trend towards an ahistorical and politicised folk memory will only intensify, and that our collective endeavours to memorialise that great struggle will become ever stranger, as we try ever harder to cling to the mythologised version of the war, one of our few remaining collective reference points for the vanished past.