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- [00:00]
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- [00:47]
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- [02:22]
Dan Snow
It is one of the most iconic photos of the 20th century. It's shot from behind and above. It shows Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, in the foreground flanked by Clement Attlee, his Labour Party deputy in their very effective wartime coalition government. He's got a cigar in his mouth and his right arm is raised, his two fingers making the V sign down below them, the street Whitehall in the heart of London is simply a mass of upright, turned faces. There are people standing on statues and walls and even climbing lamp posts. Churchill is addressing the crowds. He addressed the British people on VE Day, 8th May, 1945. It is said that before he went out on that balcony and talked to the people, he made sure there was enough beer in London for the rush, the torrent that would ensue. We can be more certain of what he said that day, and it is one of the Churchill classics, delivered not in a moment of great crisis like those speeches of 1940, but given at the very end, an end which he had foreseen and promised in those dark days, a time when Britain and its European neighbours would once again be at peace. He said, my dear friends, this is your hour. This is not a victory of a party or any class. It's a victory of the great British nation as a whole. We were the first in this ancient island to draw the sword against tyranny. After a while, we were left all alone against the most tremendous military power that has been seen. We were alone for a whole year there. We stood alone. Did anyone want to give in? And the crowd shouted, no. Were we downhearted? Again? They shouted, no. The lights went out and the bombs came down, but every man, woman and child in this country had no thought of quitting the struggle. London can take it. And he went on to explain what he felt this moment would mean. And that, I think, is particularly poignant. All these years later, he said, in the long years to come, not only will the people of this island, but of the world, wherever the bird of freedom chirps in human hearts, look back to what we've done and they will say, do not despair. Do not yield to violence and tyranny. March straight forward and die, if need be, unconquered. Well, that was the spirit in Whitehall. And indeed, a giant rush to the pubs and bars followed that speech. And there was a night of wild partying, a partying that saw even the future Queen Elizabeth, the Princess Elizabeth as she was then, with her sister Margaret, head out onto the streets and join the crowds. But the wider story of V E Day is more nuanced. It's more complicated than that. There were people celebrating. There were people just trying to rebuild. There were people trying to forget the trauma they'd suffered. There were people trying to mourn loved ones who have fallen or still missing or were still engaged in active combat duties fighting the Japanese in asia. On this 80th anniversary of V Day. This is a chance for us to look back and try and get a sense of what the nation was feeling. And I'm lucky to have Lucy Noakes. She's a professor at the University of Essex. She specializes in the social and cultural history of mid 20th century Britain and she's got a book out, the People's VE Day through the Eyes of those who Were There. And she's gone into all sorts of remarkable archives to give us a really impressive sense of the variety, the galaxy of different responses to V E Day and how quickly people shook off that sense of jubilation, if they'd ever experienced it, and started to get to work shaping the future, rebuilding, charting a very different path for Britain. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. This is part of our D Day to Berlin series. We've now gone past Berlin. In fact, Berlin has fallen, so we should rename this series. But we're going to keep going, marking some of the big anniversaries 80 years ago, and they don't come much bigger than this. The end of the war in Europe. VE Day, 80 years on. Enjoy.
- [07:01]
Lucy Noakes
T minus 10. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the King. No black white unity till there is first some black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off and the shuttle has cleared the tower.
- [07:19]
Dan Snow
Lucy, great to see you, thanks for coming on.
- [07:22]
Lucy Noakes
Thanks for having me, Dan, nice to see you.
- [07:24]
Dan Snow
First of all, how did everyone know? If you're waking up, if you're walking the streets, how do you hear the news?
- [07:31]
Lucy Noakes
Well, I want to go back a little bit before that. People have been expecting this news for some time and certainly for about a week. So it was eventually announced in a fairly kind of flat, almost bureaucratic way on the BBC early evening on the 7th of May. It was finally announced then. So people knew. Most people knew. Most people heard it on the wireless, as they called it then. Then, or if they didn't hear themselves, their neighbors or friends, people came out to talk about it. A few people picked it up later on in the evening. But most people would have known by the time they woke up on the 8th of May, they knew that this was going to be VE Day and that the 8th and the 9th were both going to be public holidays.
- [08:13]
Dan Snow
The wireless is hugely important. Is it?
- [08:15]
Lucy Noakes
It's hugely important. And people have been hearing drips and drabs of news throughout the week. You'd had in the days preceding and weeks preceding you'd had, of course, you'd had the surrender of Italy. And then, most importantly, you'd had the final surrender of. It came in bits and pieces, but then the final surrender of Germany. And once the German military leaders up in the northwest of Germany had surrendered to Montgomery on a bit of heathland up there, most people were expecting that it would be any moment after that, that victory would be announced, but they had to wait. People were quite skeptical because they'd been waiting quite a long time. There's quite a lot of people that were writing that actually by Friday of the preceding week. So what would that be about? The 4th of May, they were expecting. There's a lot of people writing going, oh, well, it's all a swiz. They're going to announce it today, so we don't get any time off. It'll all be over the weekend and we'll just be back at work on the Monday. What it actually was a lot of this was just the kind of like dotting the I's and crossing the T's. And then, of course, Stalin in the Soviet Union, once the surrender was to the Western Allies had been signed in Amiens in France, where the German leaders surrendered to the US military, Stalin insisted, understandably, actually, that VE Day not be announced, not be formally celebrated, until the German leaders in Berlin had formally surrendered to the Soviet troops who'd occupied Berlin by that point. So there was a lot of negotiation behind the scenes that people, you know, obviously weren't aware of.
- [09:54]
Dan Snow
You raise an important point there. Did the Brits get a day off then? So what's the mechanism for that?
- [09:58]
Lucy Noakes
They got two days off. So the 8th and the 9th were both declared to be bank holidays, to be public holidays, to allow people to take some time off and to celebrate, to mark the end of this sort of five and a half years of really grueling warfare in Europe.
- [10:15]
Dan Snow
And in that moment, Lucy, we'll get onto some of the more sophisticated responses or perhaps some of the more considered responses. But in that moment, do you think there was euphoria that day, those two public holidays?
- [10:25]
Lucy Noakes
I mean, it's a real mixture, Dan, and this is one of the beauties of the archive that I was using of mass observation. It's a real mixture. There absolutely is celebration, there absolutely is relief and some excitement. But alongside that, there's a sense from some people that, you know, some people might be familiar with this themselves, that when there's a big event you've been building up to and building up to, and then it happens, and then you're like, oh, okay, well, that's happened. So there's quite a lot of people saying that they felt surprisingly flat as well afterwards. They'd kind of. They'd waited for this for so long and now it was finally here. Some people felt it had been mismanaged, some people. There's the usual grumbles. The usual kind of. We do quite like to grumble, I think, as. As a nation. The usual kind of moans and complaints about how badly the government or the BBC or the local authorities or whatever are managing this. So there's all kinds of different responses. There are definitely the people who want to go out and celebrate. There are people who want to go out and party. But alongside that, there's an awful lot of people who don't quite understand. They write about why. They don't quite understand why they're not feeling as happy and as excited as they expected that they would.
- [11:36]
Dan Snow
And so many people are, well, traumatized directly or have lost loved ones. I remember Robert Graves in 1918, when he hears about the illnesses, he just walks in the Welsh hills and just weeps. He just breaks down. So I'm sure that there were many people doing the same thing in 1945.
- [11:50]
Lucy Noakes
There's a fair bit of that, definitely. There's a lot of the diarist that I used are very aware of, not necessarily themselves having personal losses, but neighbors and friends and people in the street who either have people dead or missing or prisoners of war or are still fighting in Asia. So they really temper their responses. They don't want to upset people. They don't want people to feel kind of left out or overlooked or forgotten, which I found really, really interesting. But there's a really lovely piece by a woman. She described herself as a chicken farmer from out in Berkshire and the evening before. So, as I said earlier, people here early in the evening on 7th of May, that the next two days will be public holidays and will be known as Ve Victory in Europe Day. And she finds herself out in her garden kind of late at night in tears. And she doesn't quite know why, but she kind of. She writes, I think, really movingly about why this might be. Is it relief? Because this is all over. And of course, you know, people can cry with relief and feel that kind of release at the end of something, but she doesn't really know why she's feeling. So she hasn't lost anybody. She didn't have an especially traumatic woe, though, of course, lots and lots of people did. But nonetheless, her response is to cry at the end of the war, which I found really interesting. Something that we tend to forget.
- [13:12]
Dan Snow
For those people that did want the more, maybe it's mean to call it, but more jingoistic, more celebratory atmosphere. They could go into Whitehall and Winston Churchill addressed the crowds. You gave a radio address first, and I can't remember which way around it was.
- [13:25]
Lucy Noakes
It was radio first. And then he went. I think he went and repeated that formal radio address in the Houses of Parliament. Well, actually, I think it was in the church next to the House of Parliament. He also went and had lunch with the King and Queen and then he came back and he addressed the crowds from the balcony of. I think it was a Ministry of Health in Whitehall. By then, though, people had been there all day. They were getting a bit fed up with waiting. You get lots of people like, well, do we stay or do we go? If we go, are we going to miss something? You know, people start singing, why are we waiting? It also got quite hot in London by that time, and kind of standing for hours in a big crowd, quite a few people are fainting and having to be literally kind of passed back over the heads of the crowd to the back of the crowd with a bit more space and hopefully some first aid. Yeah, it's late afternoon by the time he comes out and makes his famous speech.
- [14:13]
Dan Snow
Now, in your research, there's an old story that he checked first before he made the national address, that there was enough beer in the British capital, London. He checked with the Ministry of Food because he didn't want the pubs running empty.
- [14:25]
Lucy Noakes
I mean, there may well have been enough beer. It wasn't, according to mass observers. It clearly wasn't evenly distributed because some pubs do run out of beer. There are also some lovely stories, both from London and really striking, actually, Chepstow, because I think we tend to forget all the kind of smaller towns and places where people have still experienced the war and still wanted to go out and celebrate. There's a beautiful piece by a woman, a teacher, who lived in Chepstow, and she's out celebrating part of the evening. They go to their local pub where they're asked to keep the noise down by the publican because he doesn't want anybody kind of passing by outside to realize that he's still got some beer and still got some alcohol. He wants to keep it for his regulars. So they're all sitting there wanting to kind of party and celebrate, but having to keep it really, really quiet. So when people don't come in and realize that there's alcohol on tap there.
- [15:16]
Dan Snow
Still and Then obviously, another famous moment after Churchill is the Buckingham Palace. They're all cheering. They want to see the King Emperor and his daughters come out on the balcony with them. And then do they go into the crowd or is that just Hollywood?
- [15:27]
Lucy Noakes
Yes, they do. There was an interview with the late Queen, then Princess Elizabeth a few years ago where she talks about this. They did. They went out into the crowds. They had a couple of, I suppose, kind of escorts with them, a couple of young men who were picked to carefully keep an eye on the two princesses, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. And they walk down the Mall. I think they go to the Ritz at one point, but they have a couple of hours of walking around with their hats on kind of incognito around London, which is great, isn't it, that they got to do that. Again, that sense of people coming together. One of the things I really noticed as well, not about that specific issue incident, but some mass observers were outside Buckingham palace and people were not chanting or cheering, we want the King or we want the King Emperor. They're saying, we want Georgie. So there that real sense of, you're kind of one of us, you've stayed. You didn't head off to Canada, you stayed in London and Windsor. And of course the King and the Queen do lots of touring of glitz cities and are very present. But there's that sense of community, for want of a better word, that comes across. And I think that we want Georgie, not we want the King.
- [16:31]
Dan Snow
And we got this. Listeners overseas might be confused with the great British tradition of the street party with red and white flags and blue and bunting and everything. Is that something we've made up? Is that a modern consumer innovation? Or were there sort of spontaneous street parties?
- [16:46]
Lucy Noakes
Back in May 1945, there were street parties. Not as many as I'd expected to find. Because again, you know, like you, that would be my picture of VE Day, because those are the visual pictures often that we have of it are those street parties with lots of children sitting at long trestle tables outside often terraced houses with the neighbors were coming out. But these tended not always, but these were more often on the 9th of May than on the 8th. And they did happen, just not as much as I had expected. But they were times when people did come together. People had been saving, of course, you know, the rations, butter, sugar, eggs, all these things that you need to make cakes and things for a party have been rationed. People had been saving these up because they knew this was coming. So neighbors kind of come Together to make cakes, to make sandwiches. People pull their rations for a street party for the children. So they do happen. There are plenty of them, but not as many and not as kind of. They don't kind of as thickly populate the British Isles as we expect. They do. What? There are lots and lots and lots of. Particularly on 8 May and some on the evening of 7 May, as well as bonfires. There's lots of bonfires, some organized by local authorities and some just spontaneous. And people have been building those for a few days beforehand.
- [18:00]
Dan Snow
Yes. And bonfires is something we've almost lost connection with now, but was part of the great tradition of celebrating British military victories and endless talk of bonfires. In the 18th century they had bonfires all the time whenever Nelson or Wolff or anyone won a victory. So that's interesting. That endured to 1945 and then of.
- [18:15]
Lucy Noakes
Course, as well then something that we don't do as much today as we did perhaps, when I was growing up with the bonfires around the 5th of November and Guy Fawkes Night. In the tradition of burning a guy burning a figure on top of the bonfire, there's lots and lots and lots of effigies of Hitler being burnt on top of bonfires on the 7th and 8th of May. Yeah.
- [18:35]
Dan Snow
Oh, that's very interesting. And then small things, people have talked to me, people have interviewed about street lights going on and being able to see where you're going at night and cinemas and things were there, practical things that changed in those days?
- [18:47]
Lucy Noakes
There were, there were, and it depended where you were in the country. So of course, lots of people will know that there was a blackout from the very first days of the war. I mean, it was very, very strict to begin with. You couldn't have any kind of light on in the street, really, apart from a very, very small torch. But the idea was that you would make British towns and cities invisible from the air for bombers that might be coming over. And the blackout goes on throughout the war, even right at the end when the threat of bombers has really receded. It's London and southeast that are being hit by unmanned V1 and V2 rockets. But the blackout continues. But in the last month or so of the war it starts to lift and they have instead what's called a gray out, where more and more lights are allowed, but not all lights. Further north, away from London, it's already been lifted. They're well out of the danger zone by the last months of the war. But for people around London and southeast it is still really noticeable that the lights go on. There's a really beautiful piece by a woman cycling around Slough on the evening of the 7th of May, and she's really struck by how municipal buildings are lit up in different colours. In Hull on the 8th of May, we've got diarists who go into Hull city centre kind of looking for a party and they don't find the kind of party that they're hoping for. But one of the things that's really attracting the crowds is that the fountains are on again and they're lit up in different colors. And then lots of people as well. Particularly, you notice in Essex and on the edge of London, southeast London, moving into Kent, there are searchlights which have been used to try to pick out planes and what have you. As they come over. These are being shone in the sky, often in the shape of a V, like V for victory. And they really struck by this and really struck that. They've been so used to seeing lights over London that were from fires after bombing raids and searchlights. But now the lights over London are coming from bonfires, from people celebrating, and the searchlights are lighting up in a V sign, V for Victory in the sky. So I think light is really, really important.
- [20:57]
Dan Snow
You listen to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about VE Day coming up. Hi, folks. This episode of Dan Stow's History is sponsored by Policy Genius. Between raising kids, paying off the mortgage and trying to plan for retirement, the future's always on our minds. And the past, too. On this podcast, there's lots of juggler. Not much room for surprises. So you might find yourself asking, if something happened to me, could my partner cover all this alone? That's where Policygenius comes in. With Policygenius, you can find life insurance policies starting at just $276 a year for $1 million in coverage coverage. It's an easy way to protect the people you love and feel good about the future. Policygenius helps you to compare quotes from top insurers for free to find coverage that works for you. Everything's laid out clearly. What you get, what it costs and how it works. No guesswork, just peace of mind. So check life insurance off your to do list in no time with Policygenius. Head to Policygenius.com or click the link in the description to compare free life insurance quotes from top companies to see how much you could save. That's policygenius.com.
- [22:11]
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- [23:03]
Lucy Noakes
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- [23:50]
Dan Snow
What about the hangover? What about the reality the next day, the days after that? You wake up, you're still at war with Japan. Europe is utterly destroyed. The Soviet Red army is halfway to the Channel. I suppose your loved ones are still overseas, they're still rationing. Your communities are destroyed. My town, Southampton, a charred wasteland. Did the euphoria, well, as you say, there wasn't just euphoria, but even in those quarters that were euphoric. Did it evaporate pretty quickly or did the feel good sensation last long?
- [24:21]
Lucy Noakes
I think it evaporated pretty quickly, Dan, to be honest. As I said, there's an awful lot of people who either still have family who are prisoners of war or loved ones who are prisoners of war who are in Japan. And although the war in Asia, I think it's fair to say in Britain, always takes second place in people's minds to the war in Europe for kind of obvious and understandable reasons. You know, the 14th army is not called the Forgotten army for nothing. People are aware that the war is still going on sort of over there, so that tempers it. So it's a Real mixture. There is an optimism, there's a real sense of hope. And of course, early. I think it's early July, you have the snap election and Kevin Attlee's Labour government is returned with a landslide and with a remit to create the welfare state, the idea of which has been so popular during the war. So there isn't a lot of optimism about what's going to happen, if you like, on the home front. Among mass observers, there is a real understanding that things are grim on the continent. There's a lot of discussion about what you do, about the problem of Germany. How do we stop this happening again? How do we help Germans in a way that will help to prevent the rise of fascism again? There's an understanding that although the fighting might be over, there's still an awful lot to get done. But then a year later, mass observation, they come back and they ask their writers, like, how do you feel a year on? They send out a directive in the early summer of 1946 asking how people feel a year on. And again, it's a real mixture. There's a lot of people who are feeling like, well, it's not quite what we expected. Rationing has got worse. A lot of people haven't been released from the military kind of as quickly or from industry as quickly as they expected that they would do. A lot of women who've been working in jobs that they wouldn't normally have been able to work in, at least in the pre war years, and have been earning a kind of income that they wouldn't have been able to earn as women in the pre war years have lost their jobs and lost the childcare that went along with those jobs. So there's quite a lot of kind of discontent there. So it's a real mixture. And, of course, housing. I think the really big problem that Britain is facing is housing. There's a real loss of housing, a real lack of housing. Lots of people are sharing with families, terrorist housing is being divided into. So there's a kind of an impatience for things to get better. But that is, among lots of the diarists who write, is tempered by an understanding that the new government has got an awful lot to do and a sense that, well, they will get on with it and people should stop moaning because it's not going to be instant. There's a lot to recover from.
- [26:57]
Dan Snow
There was a stoicism as well, after the war, from your research?
- [27:01]
Lucy Noakes
Yeah, I think so. I think so. There's also, interestingly, given how nostalgic Britain is, About the war today, I would argue you see an emerging nostalgia for the war years. Even then, in the months after the war, you get people looking back and they're not quite using the kind of it was our finest hour language, but they're kind of intimating that there are people that say they miss the sense of purpose that they had. There may miss a sense of kind of collectivity that they had in the war, and they wish that this could somehow be repurposed to rebuilding Britain. They feel that that sense of. It's never entirely true, but for a large part, a sense of unity, a sense of common purpose. They want that to come back. They miss that, that sense of being something larger than themselves. So there is a stoicism, there is a sense like, well, we've just got to get on and do this. But there is also a hope because of the new government, because of their commitment to the National Health Service, which of course opens, you know, founded in 1948, because of their commitment to building a, I guess, a more egalitarian nation than Britain had been before the war. There is a sense of muted optimism. I guess that's what I would call it.
- [28:18]
Dan Snow
I mean, we mentioned the lights and stuff. Does Britain demilitarize quite quickly? Because, I mean, never before had Britain been as mobilized for war in terms of uniforms. Everyone's walking around, including Princess Elizabeth, the heir to the throne. Would it have been quite rapidly noticeable that Britain was sort of demilitarizing itself?
- [28:35]
Lucy Noakes
I suppose so. But then we should also remember that Britain moves fairly seamlessly from the Second World War international service for the first time. So that's the first time that we have had a form of conscription in peacetime. But of course, that effects immediately affects a far smaller proportionate population. It's young men, usually in their late teens, early 20s, who are subject to national service. And there's also the fairly rapid, if not disappearance, but a kind of shrinkage. You know, Britain's been a kind of like an offshore base for Allied troops, not just from Britain, but from the Commonwealth, from occupied countries in Europe, and of course, from the United States. And a lot of those people go. They either go home, they are sent over to occupied Europe, or they're compressed into smaller areas like the US air bases. Of course, you know, we still have in East Anglia. I would say that the presence of uniforms on the street does become less fairly quickly, but we should temper that with the reminder that the US presence remains smaller, but it remains. And also that national service is autumn.
- [29:44]
Dan Snow
Since we got you, we Might as well take it up to that election, because that really is an astonishing post victory election. Winston Churchill suffers one of the greatest electoral defeats in British history, having been cheered hoarse by large crowds only weeks before. Really? What is your sense of why that was such a crushing change of direction by the British electorate?
- [30:07]
Lucy Noakes
Okay, well, I think I'd highlight two things in response to that. So one is Churchill himself. And people are really fond of Churchill, but they see him as a war leader, not a peace leader. There's lots of people saying he was the right person for the war, he's not the right person for the peace. He doesn't have a great election campaign. He seems being tired. Lots of people remark on how tired he seems now, how old he seems now. He does a disastrous election broadcast on the wireless, again, where he is called Churchill's crazy Gestapo, broadcast where he claims that the Labour Party, if they're elected, will be like the Gestapo in Germany. And people look at Clement Attlee and they think, nah, nah, they won't be. So he personally has a very bad election campaign. But I would say the key reason I think that people vote in such large numbers for a new government goes back to the middle years of the war. And it goes back to the commissioning of what's often known as the Beveridge Report, a report by William Beveridge, who was a civil servant, he was an economist, he was a big meddler, right? He liked to kind of have his finger in lots and lots of pies. He had lots of ideas about what the government could be doing differently in the middle of the war. So to keep him busy, they gave him the job of looking at how we could reconstitute national insurance. And they thought this would keep him busy for a good few years and keep him out of the way. He turns in his report on national insurance within months. And it is incredibly popular, right? It sells out in shops. Everybody's talking about it. Because what he does is he sets out the foundations of the welfare state. He sets out the five giants of want that have to be demolished. He outlines plans for a system of national insurance that will give people pensions, that will give people sick pay, that will give women paid maternity leave. He outlines ideas for national health service. And people read really, really like this. There is a sense that people want to feel that they're fighting for something other than simply the defeat of fascism on the continent. They want to be fighting for a new or a different kind of society after the war. And it's the Labour Party who are the most trusted with delivering this. And this is in part because of the historical origins of the Labour Party, but it's also because of the way that during the war, it's an alliance government, representatives in the Cabinet of both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. But in general, the way that those rules are broken down are that the ministers in charge of military policy and foreign policy, as well as the Prime Minister, come from the Conservative part of the Cabinet. The ministers who have charge of the Home Office, of other domestic elements, like labor, come from the Labour Party. So it's the Labour Party that is seen as having the expertise and the knowledge and the will to enact Beveridge's proposed reforms. Mass observation were one of the few places actually predicted a Labour win based on where they're going out in not just asking the people that write for them, but they're going out, they're going to hustings, they're interviewing people, they're asking people, who do you think you'll vote for? And there's an awful lot of people writing back and saying, the Labour Party. We don't know that everything that Beveridge has recommended will be bought in, but we think that they'll give it the best goal. They look Back to the 1930s, the conservative dominated national government and the hardship, the economic hardship and the social divisions of the 1930s. And the conservatives, fairly or not, are associated with that. Labor are seen as the party that will bring in these changes that people want from 1942, at least onwards.
- [33:52]
Dan Snow
I thought one of the most effective posters, campaign posters, I've ever seen in my life was that big one in 1945. Just said, simply, cheer Churchill, vote Labour.
- [34:00]
Lucy Noakes
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
- [34:03]
Dan Snow
That just brilliantly sums up what you've just been talking about. And so, quite rapidly, I mean, that's the nature of celebrating success quite rapidly. Your thoughts turn to tomorrow, don't they? Thoughts to the British public, where. Well, we, as you say, we now like looking backwards and like to inhabit a world of spitfires and street parties and sort of national unity. In some ways, I think we think it symbolizes. And yet, actually, at the time, they were all thinking about housing and repatriation and getting on and rebuilding and kids and communities.
- [34:32]
Lucy Noakes
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, there was nostalgia, as I said, there was nostalgia and emerging nostalgia for the war years really, really early on. But most people just want to look forward. They don't want to go back. They might be nostalgic for some elements of the war, but for the most part, it's relief. Not just the bits that we remember. You know, the kind of, if you like, the kind of exciting bits of the war that we tend to pull out. You know, the SP fires, the retreat from Dunkirk in 1940, the Blitz evacuation, all these kind of huge moments. But for a lot of people, it's endless years of worry, of shortages. It's just kind of very gray and very tiring for most people. They want to be able to move forward out of this. They want to be able to look forward to something new. Whereas now we spend an awful lot of time looking back, but just at kind of key moments, selected moments, I think, of war.
- [35:26]
Dan Snow
We've sort of gone there a little bit already, but we're marking VE Day this year. It's something that's popular. British politicians, like. The British public to be celebrating, is commemorating this for obvious reasons, but also for, I guess, political reasons. What does VE Day mean, do you think, going forward?
- [35:41]
Lucy Noakes
For Britain, I think it means. For Britain, I think it means a moment of unity. I think we look back on it as, and quite rightly in lots of ways, as something to mark, as something to remember. Because I think the defeat of fascism in Europe and then the defeat of Imperial Japan are good things, right? And Britain, among many, many other countries, and of course, Britain at the head of one enormous empire, is one of the key players in that. It is Britain, that Britain and its empire, I should say, that kind of stands alone for those key moments in 1940. And I do think that that is worth remembering. I would like it, I mean, if people read the book, I would really like it if people kind of take away from that, that it is slightly more complex. It's not just street parties. It's not everybody celebrating. It's not just one moment and kind of one shared endeavor. And one thing, it's like all history. It's a really complex, almost six years of warfare, and we tend to just remember moments of that. I would, as a historian, I would really like our. If you like our kind of shared cultural memory to be a bit more complex and to have room for a bit more in it.
- [36:56]
Dan Snow
Well, thank you very much for coming on the podcast and adds a bit to that shared cultural memory. So thank you. Tell everyone what the book is called.
- [37:01]
Lucy Noakes
Thank you, Dan. The book is called the People's VE Day through the Eyes of those who there, and it is published by Atlantic.
- [37:10]
Dan Snow
Very nice. Thank you for coming on.
- [37:11]
Aura Sponsor
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- [37:14]
Dan Snow
Well, there you have it, folks. Eighty years ago, the war in Europe was finally over. Across the shattered continent Many people celebrated, some people wept, some people just breathed a sigh of relief. I think all knew, certainly when the partying was over, all knew that recovery would take a long time. This was our final episode in our D Day to Berlin series. The hint was in the title that we traced all the key milestones from the start of the D Day landings with our real time D Day. That was a great experience all the way to the fall of Berlin and the end of the war in Europe. We covered the Normandy landings. We covered the Battle of Normandy, the massive summer 1944 offensives in the Soviet Union, Bagration. We also looked at Arnhem and the Bulge and the liberation of Auschwitz. We visited auschwitz on the 80th anniversary of that liberation. We've been so lucky to have the best historians and authors in the field join us. So do please scroll back through the feed and go and check out some of those D Day to Berlin episodes if you haven't already. Now, the Second World War, of course, did not end because the Third Reich was defeated in the Pacific. It would continue to rage for months. So we're going to keep covering those 80th anniversaries of the Pacific theater and we're going to follow the course of the Second World War until it is well and truly over. Make sure you hit like and subscribe to the pod. Then they will drop into your feed. Thanks for listening folks.
- [38:56]
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