Grandma70s
I watched it, though I am uneasy about these military parades.. WW2 was a necessary evil - something had to be done about Hitler - but it was still an evil, as is all war. Thousands if not millions of ordinary innocent people died, on both sides. We should lament, not have these military commemorations which, however much they deny it, always seem to me a bit self-congratulary (is that a word?).
That said, I like seeing London looking so splendid, and I love the horses! It was nice to see the royal children, too. Prince George always looks worried, poor child, but Louis is a tonic.
I haven't watched the VE Day celebrations so maybe I shouldn't comment. My thoughts in recalling what I've been told of my own parents' war years have often focused my mind as to what it would have been like to live through those times. My father spent most of that time in Libya where there was much fierce fighting and he rarely talked about his experiences other than he had an enduring hatred of sand, he was one for moving on. My mother, who commuted up to central London from Bromley to work as a GPO telephonist during the war was more effusive when I became interested as I did in her later life. She told me VE Day was one of utter jubilation, a day she would always remember, she was in central London with countless others just basking in the relief that they didn't have to come home and find they'd lost their nearest and dearest or their home was no longer standing. Both my parents were 19 when the war started, I often said to my sons, "imagine that 6 years out of the best years of your life lost to the constant terror of wondering whether you were going to survive such awful times or be gone in a nano second".
How can any such celebrations be self congratulatory in the defeating one of the worst meglomaniacs the world has ever encountered, a monstrously evil regime that murdered millions of its own citizens, who wanted world domination. Germany left Europe in ruins, it occupied umpteen countries, murdered many of their citizens, plundered their wealth, paid paltry reparations. Japan, ignored The Geneva Convention, their cruelty towards POWs was utterly barbaric. My friend who hails from Penang has often talked about her parents experiences during the war, the horrors of what the Japanese inflicted on much of the Far East never left them. That doesn't mean we have to hold the Japanese or German people responsible for those awful regimes. My mother told me she was horrified when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, she felt, as I expect many others did at the time, the ordinary Japanese person never deserved that. My German friend told me her mother, as a young teenager was one of the victims of the mass rapes carried out by the Red Army when they swept through Germany, and those women and children didn't deserve that either.
I think we, and our allies should massively be proud of our respective countries for defeating evil and those sacrifices should be imparted to younger generations. Imagine a parallel universe where either of those countries had been victorious what sort of world would that have been.
