“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. … We must now devote all our strength and resources to the completion of our tasks both at home and abroad. Long live the cause of freedom! God save the King!”
Offering those words 75 years ago today, Prime Minister Winston Churchill saluted his people. Nazi Germany had surrendered; Europe was finally to be at peace. Fortunately, an invasion wouldn’t be necessary to end imperial Japan. A few months later, a new weapon would bring a final end to the Axis powers.
Yet even if that eventual outcome could not be known on May 8, 1945, the momentousness of the day was commonly understood. For what happened on this day three-quarters of a century ago was the end of something despicable and the beginning of something glorious. Something very few Britons would have thought possible five years before had come to pass. For the victors then and us, their successors now, the truly monumental quality of this victory was and is hard to encapsulate with words.
This day, 75 years ago, Nazi Germany’s once vaunted Panzer divisions were at last rusting in wrecks. Its once vicious U-boats lay crippled in docks or submerged forever on ocean floors. Its once murderous and mighty air force no longer existed. Its death camps were liberated, and its leaders were dead, hiding, or captured. The empire that was supposed to rule for 1,000 years had been vanquished. It was humanity’s greatest victory.
The global scale of Nazism’s ambition, the skill and speed with which it had conquered Europe, and the fanaticism with which it adapted modern science for evil meant that the Third Reich was always a greater threat than imperial Japan. Midway through 1942, it was clear that Japan could, if necessary, be bottled up within an ever-narrowing segment of the Pacific. But that wasn’t the case with Nazi Germany — not until 1944, at least.
Even as Hitler’s army groups were smashed apart in the east, there was always a credible fear that the Nazis would somehow overcome the odds — that they might stumble upon a new technology, even the atomic bomb, and turn the tide of the war. At the same time, the Third Reich’s industrial murder machine was obliterating the Jewish people and other “subhuman” races from the Earth. The exigency of victory over Germany was all-encompassing.
So when victory in this total war came, it came as a deliverance of life itself.
Tens of millions of innocents and Allied soldiers had died to make it possible. Cities had been ruined and lives ripped apart. But on this day 75 years ago, victory was secured. And the measure of why this moment matters is marked not simply by the victory itself but by what would come next. For in the new U.S.-led international order of freedom that followed the war and defeated the Soviet Union, humanity has benefited from the near-perfect opposite of that which a Nazi victory promised. We have had great power, peace, unparalleled prosperity, and scientific advancements in the service of humanity rather than in the pursuit of a warped racial purity.
Had the Nazis won, 2020 would look very different. The coronavirus would be the least of our problems. The Jews, the Roma, and those with congenital illnesses would be long gone. Africans would probably be slaves again, and many others also would have been worked to death on various Nazi projects. Freedom would be a fiction.
So take gratitude today. And remember those who fought and won for all of us. I’ll remember my grandfather, who helped win Europe’s skies for freedom. Come August, I’ll remember my other grandfather, who came through Guam and Okinawa and, at 95 years old, remains with us still. But all of us should always remember that victory was no sure thing. And that for all our present anguish, things could easily be far, far, far worse.
Just watch the scene below from the TV show Man in the High Castle. And ask yourself: What if receiving a salute in the Volkshalle defined the apex of American honor rather than taking an oath to defend our democratic Constitution?
Victory matters.
