08-05-2025
Has national pride and celebration made us forget what war is really about?
Philip Jarman is a 101-year-old Second World War veteran, but he has little truck with the 'celebratory' clamour that accompanies our numerous wartime anniversaries: the bunting, the obligatory fly past, the royal gloss. Eighty years ago, he was still fighting a brutal war in Burma, and his reticence goes beyond mere end dates. 'We've got war all wrong,' he insists, disconsolately chasing crumbs around his plate. 'After 1945, we didn't have these repeated celebrations. We got on with building back Britain. In the years following VE Day, we were in no mood to celebrate.'
The outpouring of joy on that one May day in 1945 – according to Ruth Bourne, a 98-year-old Bletchley Park veteran, 'a feeling that was almost electric' – speaks to the grinding toil of war directly preceding it, a painstaking slog through privation and pain.
In the words of one former female soldier, 'wartime Britain was dull and difficult, spiked with occasional horrible bits of news'.
The country had earned its celebration on 8 May, but the euphoria was not protracted. News archive confirms that the 1950s, Sixties and Seventies slid by with minimal pomp and ceremonial recall – Britain was too busy facing down problems in a post-imperial world to get excited about a war which ended with two new superpowers calling the shots.
Even the fallen had to make do with scaled-down memorialisation. Jarman explains: 'We'd been badly bombed. And we knew war monuments did not work.'
After the First World War, Britain had witnessed an unprecedented public art campaign; in a country scorched by the loss of nearly one million young men, memorials, cenotaphs, and monuments sprang up in market squares and city centres nationwide, but they had not stopped a second war.
'Let's have no more stone crosses or war memorials in the 1918 sense of the word,' insisted one disconsolate soldier. In a country desperate to crack on with the peace after five-and-a-half long years of fighting, the Second World War's 380,000 military casualties were bunched up on pre-existing war memorials. Only outstanding services like the Commandos enjoyed their own iteration in stone.
The real sea change in Second World War commemoration came in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher, when a full-scale war in the Falkland Islands and an upscaling of the conflict in Northern Ireland ushered in a new era of jingoism and dewy-eyed pride.
Britain needed to remind itself, and the world, of our unequivocal fight for freedom in the 1940s, positing good versus evil in the context of British military encounters. Four decades after the end of the conflict, the nation doubled down on an outstanding victory narrative as, one by one, our great wartime leaders – Churchill, Alanbrooke, Montgomery – died, making way for an elderly rank and file to have their moment in the sun.
By the 1980s, crucial distance had been established; where once the Second World War's death toll had been dwarfed by the First, now in the modern era, few could believe the scale of the devastation and havoc wreaked by a conflict that quickly became a cornerstone of our national identity. Lest we forget, our entire nation bent its neck to an all-consuming war effort in the name of King and Country.
The record-breaking Overlord Embroidery was given its own museum and the gallant efforts of men who risked life and limb on D-Day and beyond were re-remembered. In 1984, the IRA detonated a bomb in Brighton's Grand Hotel during the Conservative Party Conference. Thatcher emerged from the rubble to channel her inner Churchill and face down her attackers. 'The government will not weaken. This nation will meet that challenge. Democracy will prevail.' The martial prime minister had already learnt the value of binary language and military prowess.
Since then, another 40 years have passed and remembering has gathered pace. Commemoration in stone and marble reveres the legions who fought from our former colonies, the millions of women who played their part, and even the animals and children caught up in the mindless wreckage. We live in a modern era when being seen is all-important and living a long life is taken for granted.
Philip Robinson, 99, was balloted (compelled) to serve underground, mining coal as a 'bevin boy'. The absence of a uniform, and later a memorial, burned deep; when finally four Kilkenny stones in the National Memorial Arboretum arrived to honour the bevin boys' war in 2013, he was delighted. But others, like Philip Jarman, are still equivocal about the role of commemoration. He is one of the few remaining survivors from the Second World War; today returning to memories of a war that killed his brother, his sister-in-law and his best friend, is challenging. And he insists we get the tone all wrong.
Reluctantly, Jarman tells me the story of Richard Combes, his childhood friend who joined the navy in 1939: 'I was looking forward to him coming home on leave. But his father said, 'I'm afraid you'll not be seeing Richard this weekend'. I joked, 'Has he been confined to barracks?' Mr Coombes' retort was quietly devastating. 'He was on HMS Hood.'
'That shook me so much that, although his parents lived nearby, I couldn't bear to go and see them for six months. He was their only child.' The quiet parlour, the ticking clock, the terrible pain, the accountant and his wife without their precious boy. Jarman never went back. 'Oh dear,' he says, 'you've made me dredge it all up.'
The Bismarck 's sinking of HMS Hood, the largest battleship of its kind, in May 1941 was felt nationwide. The aft magazine exploded and the ship sank within minutes. From a 1,418-strong crew, there were three survivors. Silently, I wonder how Mr and Ms Combes marked VE Day. Jarman concedes it might be touching after all this time to find his friend's name on a monument; Combes R. A. L. etched in perpetuity, so I plan a trip to the famous Portsmouth Naval Memorial. Apparently, Richard was listed there when they adjusted the monument to make space for thousands more deaths at sea in a devastating Second World War.
I arrived in late May 2024, a week before the 80th anniversary commemorations of D-Day. The whole area had been cordoned off for the King's arrival, so I couldn't access the naval memorial. 'How ridiculous,' said Jarman. It felt ridiculous. A buoyant sounding brass band practised on the shoreline; anticipation in Portsmouth was mounting. A high green metal wall blocked my way to the giant obelisk, and two security guards refused me access. They offered to take a picture of Richard's name instead. One shrugged apologetically. 'It's all a bit celebratory, isn't it? Like we've forgotten what war is about.'
I nodded, and felt strangely gutted. An engraved name isn't much, but it is better than nothing. The Commonwealth Graves Commission insist that the memorial is 'accessible at all times'. I can confirm this is not true.
Eighty years after the D-Day landings, it felt like commemoration had been sidestepped for celebration on an epic scale. I watched the ceremony on TV a week later and wondered if perhaps Jarman had a point. Has confected national pride and triumphalism engulfed our recall of what war is really all about?
Likewise, 80 years after VE Day, it is worth being mindful of what 'victory' meant. Yes, 8 May 1945 saw an extraordinary outpouring of joy: young surviving servicemen and women celebrating a free and peaceful life that now unfolded in front of them, but what of the impact of war not caught on the cameras, beyond the bombed-out houses, hidden in empty bedrooms, and silent sitting rooms? An aching hole that no amount of ticker tape or jitterbugging could bring back. The real cost of war.
