Thursday marks 80 years after the Allied powers won the European front of World War II.
V-E Day.
The history of World War II is well-known to most, but let’s take a deep dive into the causes of the war and, later, its conclusion in the European theater in honor of V-E Day.
Historical Background
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Germany was in a bad state. Not only had the Great Depression in the United States profoundly impacted a significant percentage of the global economy, particularly as a product of the 1929 Stock Market Crash on Black Tuesday, but the impacts of the Treaty of Versailles had left Germany destitute.
The Treaty of Versailles called for the creation of the Weimar Republic to replace the formerly Kaiser-led government of Germany. However, the Weimar Republic faced a mounting economic crisis as a product of the extreme reparations that they needed to pay to the British and French for World War I. This situation was only exacerbated by the fact that much of Germany’s formerly expansive territory was forcibly ceded to France (among other nations), territory that contained Germany’s rich coal mines, cutting them off from one of their most profitable industries.
Germany’s declining economic situation came to a head when the leadership of the Weimar Republic made the decision to severely ramp up the printing of currency to inject money into the failing economy. But rather than boost the financial situation of the nation by increasing the amount of money in circulation, the effort instead promoted skyrocketing inflation, cementing the economic destruction wrought over the course of two decades in Germany.
The fragments of this economy, combined with the still raw emotional wounds from the thorough defeat Germany suffered at the hands of the Allies in World War I, provided the perfect landscape for Adolf Hitler, a disgruntled World War I soldier and failed artist, to rise to power in the Nazi party, which was similarly growing popular among the angry and dissatisfied German people.
Hitler’s expansion of Germany went largely unchallenged by the French, British, and Americans, who thought that it would be better to adopt a policy of appeasement, rather than further worsen the situation in Germany. When they finally decided to step in and take a firm stand, however, it seemed to be too little, too late. Hitler had already acquired the military strength and territory across Europe necessary to provide a strong opposition to the efforts of the Allies.
The commonly acknowledged turning point for the European theater of World War II is the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944. The D-Day invasion allowed for the Allies to take France and liberate the nation from Nazi Germany’s control. Paris was fully liberated in August of the same year, and the Allies pushed forward, taking Berlin and much of Germany in September.
Although there was a brief German counterattack with the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium in December, the Allies made a swift victory with the Nazis finally surrendering on May 7, 1945, giving us V-E Day on May 8, 1945… exactly 80 years ago from Thursday.
European Celebrations
The 80th anniversary of V-E Day was marked by celebrations across Europe. Among these celebrations were air shows with fighter pilots and military parades.
In London, specifically, the royal family, veterans, and prominent politicians all gathered for the day’s celebrations with the Royal Air Force conducting an airshow with red, white, and blue smoke.
Unique to this year’s military procession in London, however, was a small group of Ukrainian soldiers, marching while carrying the yellow and blue Ukrainian flag.
The events also included recognition of veterans, a rapidly aging group with many approaching or marking well past 100 years, as well as the reading of an excerpt from then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s famous victory speech on V-E Day 80 years ago.
The official celebrations are set to continue well through Thursday, the actual commemoration event of the holiday itself, in London.
Conclusion –
In a time of growing polarization and geopolitical crises, it can be extremely easy to forget that humanity has faced conflict before and that humanity has grown from that conflict.
World War II ravaged countries all across Europe and many beyond. The Holocaust left millions of Jewish people dead. The Cold War fostered decades of panic over the potential for an all-out nuclear war and, quite literally, the end of the world as we know it today.
Humanity survived it all. In peace and unscathed.
But on the other side of that coin, we must continue to acknowledge the human faces behind these events. Wars are not fought by monolithic nations and empires; they’re fought by real-life men and women, soldiers who sacrifice their lives on the battlefields and medics who work to restore them.
Humanity has survived in peace for this long… but the human consequences, the real-life impacts of failing to maintain that peace cannot be ignored, especially in an era of increasingly advanced military technology.
Let’s let the 80th anniversary of V-E Day be a reminder for us, as a world: peace is not an unsustainable goal, but one that must be sustained.
