VE Day + 65

I remember it as if it were yesterday. The 1939-45 world war began for us on September 3, 1939, and from early 1940 - before the Nazi invasion of the Lowlands of Belgium and Holland, before Dunkirk and the fall of France - things had gone badly for us. Things kept getting worse and worse throughout 1941 and 1942, only slightly less awful in 1943; but by about the middle of 1944 with the D-Day landings in France on June 6, and the Russian steamroller beginning to push the Wehrmacht back towards Germany, it began to look as if we might prevail. By the beginning of 1945 it was fairly certain, unless Hitler's "secret weapon" that he kept boasting about turned out to be something truly terrible - as the atomic bomb proved to be later. By April of 1945 the Germans were fighting on several fronts on their own soil; clearly it was just a matter of time. When the great day, May 8 1945, dawned, we already knew in Australia because the peace treaty had been agreed the previous day and the great victory celebration and parade through the streets of Adelaide was already better than half-planned. We students at the University of Adelaide (who already included a sizeable contingent of ex-servicemen) planned our own celebration and eventually virtually took over the official celebrations, as I've described in my memoirs. The highlight was one of the ex-servicemen, a student in law if I remember well, wearing his uniform, the trademark beret and rows of medals some legitimate, some perhaps not, cleverly made up to produce a startlingly accurate resemblance to the hero of El Alamein, Field Marshall Sir Bernard Montgomery. He sat in an open touring car just like the one we had seen in innumerable newsreel shots, taking the salutes of the adoring crowds, many of whom seemed really to believe that "Monty" had come all the way to Adelaide to share in and preside over our victory celebrations.

The sense of relief we all felt on VE Day is impossible to convey to anyone who didn't experience it. That war was a dark, depressing, dangerous time. It touched us all directly, even remote from battle fields or risks of air raids as my family and I were in Adelaide. Early in the war my cousin "Bucky" Judell, the only son of my favourite uncle, had been killed. Several other cousins a few years older and close to me in interests and values, had horrendous experiences of combat, like my cousin Ross Ragless at the siege of Tobruk and the battle of El Alamein; another cousin was captured in an earlier battle in that same theatre of war, spent several years in a POW camp. I had turned 18 a few months before VE Day so I was eligible for call-up and intended to take leave from the medical course at the end of 1945 by which time I would know enough anatomy and physiology to be useful in uniform as a medical orderly. We all expected the war with Japan in the Pacific - our near north - to drag on for at least several more years. We knew nothing about the Atom Bombs that would bring an abrupt end to it in August of the same year.

It would have been a better world since the middle of the 20th century if that terrible world war had brought about a lasting worldwide peace. But of course it didn't. There were some just wars of liberation from colonial domination, some ideological wars, some proxy wars, some absolutely unnecessary, immoral wars. It almost seems that humans are hard-wired to be aggressive and quarrelsome. Yet we also seem to be hard-wired to come to the aid of those who need help, as pictures and newsreel shots from disaster zones like earthquakes demonstrate. So we aren't all bad, and I'm comforted by the thought that the good far outweighs the bad.