Victory In Europe Day – a tribute

A Soviet poster from 1942

Felicity Dowling writes: We rightly remember the heroism and sacrifices of all the peoples, all the men and women who fought fascism, from the Civil War in Spain to the dark days when fascism appeared to have won across much of Europe. That generation has nearly all passed. Those with living memory of that war are very old, or were children at the time. The names of those who died are still recalled, as should be the horrors and the triumphs.

‘Don’t yet rejoice in his defeat, you men! Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.’ – Bertolt Brecht

The British jingoism of the right wing and establishment is made nonsense when we remember how many nations, how many peoples, were involved in the fight to defeat Fascism. In Europe the attempts to decry and minimise the role of the USSR are propaganda to destroy that memory. Sadly, imperialism and war did not die with the end of World War Two, but the working class globally came out of it more powerful, more political, more anti-imperialist, and more class conscious.

Through total war, the roles of women changed for ever, and their emancipation increased, particularly with the widespread availability of barrier contraception, and the greater availability of divorce. The era of uncontrolled conception ended and the large families never returned. The support given to families during the war continued in the early welfare state, although in Britain (but not the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe), women were pushed back into the home afterwards. But again, the memory of the war could not be erased, and should not be erased now when our rights are so much under threat.

The horrors of aerial bombardment have been passed own the generations across the world, and find an echo in the repulsion people feel seeing the slaughter in Palestine.

Britain’s armed forces, totalling around five million people, its merchant seafarers, themselves from many nations, and its organised civilian population, fought, suffered and endured for six long years. They were far from alone in this fight, an aspect the jingoists like to forget. They fought with help from more than a million African, and two and a half million Indian soldiers – Pakistan and Bangladesh had not yet been created as separate states, so this figure includes them as ‘Indian’. Despite recent colonial war with Britain, 80,000 Irish soldiers volunteered to join the fight.

The merchant marine, without whom Britain could not have been fed or supplied with arms and materials was truly international. My Uncle Bob died as a very young man in the Battle of the Atlantic, a battle fought largely out of Liverpool as the largest Atlantic port.

‘In 1938 The British Merchant Service employed over 190,000 seafarers. Of these, over 130,000 were British residents and 50,000 Indian and Chinese. …many ships and seamen from Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Greece, Holland, Poland, Russia, Yugoslavia and Free France placed themselves under British control after their countries had been invaded by the Germans.’

Polish personnel served in all RAF commands and across all operational theatres and were some of the most experienced Allied pilots, having already fought in the 1939 campaign in Poland and the 1940 Battle of France. Their contribution to the Battle of Britain was considered invaluable. 5% of the pilots involved in the Battle were Polish (145 in total), but were responsible for 12% of total victories, with 303 (Polish) Fighter Squadron recognised as the most successful of any Allied squadron. Twenty-nine Polish pilots lost their lives during the Battle of Britain. …Of the Polish contribution to the Battle of Britain, then Commander in Chief of Fighter Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, went on to comment later: ‘Had it not been for the magnificent work of the Polish squadrons and their unsurpassed gallantry, I hesitate to say that the outcome of battle would have been the same.’ Indeed, servicemen and women from 16 nations participated in the Battle of Britain.

A British poster celebrating the alliance with the Soviet Union

The heroism and suffering of all these young men and women, and civilian populations, was mirrored in other European countries suffering under occupation, and as the war continued the resistance forces grew in audacity and strength, with the French resistance estimated to have 400,000 active combatants. In Italy, Poland, Greece, the Netherlands and other countries, the resistance grew. The role of workers, communists, socialists and trade unionists across Europe was fundamental to the resistance. Even in Germany, there was resistance from those communists, socialists and trade unionists who had evaded the massacres at the start of the Nazi regime. Workers often passively resisted, or sabotaged production.

The war was an international war, and one that saw the end of the British Empire. The ‘empire’ troops fought fascism not blindly for the Empire. Neither did all British troops fight for empire, as those sent to India at the end of work war two mutinied in favour of getting the British out of India. A comrade recounted to me how as a soldier in India he worked clandestinely with the Indian Communist Party to organise British soldiers’ decision to mutiny. Another old comrade, now long passed, recounted his experiences of organisation of ‘soldiers committees’ and mutiny among British soldiers in North Africa and Italy, and resistance to orders to shell and bomb towns liberated by communist resistance fighters as the allied armies advanced. Workers did not necessarily lose their class consciousness with the donning of a uniform.

Britain was also assisted by over one million Canadians, just under one million Australians, and around 140,000 New Zealanders.

The USA, though slow to join the war was crucial in sustaining the war effort, and in feeding and equipping the war machine, as total war engulfed Britain and drained it of wealth accumulated through colonial exploitation. Britain was repaying war loans until 2006. Almost two and a half million US servicemen and women participated in the European theatre of the war.

The war on the ‘Eastern Front’, and the role of the USSR was fundamental to the success of the whole war – with 34 million under arms. I recall old seafarers in my mum’s front room, telling stories of the Arctic convoys to Murmansk and Archangel. The comprehensive defeat of the Nazis in the East, after a truly brutal war, was the decisive turning point of the war. An estimated 8.7 million Soviet service men and women, and 19 million civilians were killed in the ‘Great Patriotic War’, dwarfing the losses of the other allied nations.

The experience of this global conflict and the struggle against Fascism raised the consciousness of workers, who returned from the war determined not to return to the poverty and deprivation of the pre-war years, and to a civilian world with a vastly different balance of class forces than preceded the war. We are struggling now to preserve the last vestiges of the victories and gains they achieved – what little is left of the ‘welfare state’, the NHS.

We send greetings to all across the globe who value the monumental struggle against Fascism and hope to rebuild that movement in their honour and for generations still to come.