A MATTER OF ANNIVERSARIES

Friday 8th May 2020 will be the 75th Anniversary of Victory in Europe - an anniversary we should remember for a variety of reasons including the hard fought bloody victory of allied forces over fascism and the destruction of a great evil in the world. 

On the 75th anniversary of VE Day we should reflect on the bravery of so many men and women who fought the tyranny of fascism and came back home. We should also spare more than a few thoughts for those who made the ultimate sacrifice and never came back home.

Peace after war always comes with a price even for the victors. With the sense of relief would have been an awareness of those friends and neighbours who were not there, those who would have lost their lives and those who would have lost loved ones. 

At the time despite the no doubt profound and overwhelming sense of relief that many people would have felt and displayed, people would also have been conscious of the on going conflict in the Far East and the fact that relatives and friends would have been still serving in distant lands overseas in the war against Imperial Japan.

For a state so allegedly if somewhat selectively obsessed with elements of a rich history it is the things that are forgotten that occasionally should still have the power to surprise or shock us. 

I was talking a few years ago to a family friend, who had served in North Africa and Italy during the Second World War, he was shocked to discover that the Poles had been excluded from the Allied victory parade in held in June 1946.

Greek contingent marching in 1946 victory parade

The 4th June 2020 will be the 74th anniversary of the great victory parade, which was held in London to commemorate the victory over fascism. 

It was held on June 4th 1946 by the then Labour Government, who staged an elaborate victory parade in London. 

Representatives from over 30 Allied nations gathered to celebrate the Allies collective victory over fascism. 

Some 134 different nationalities actually took part in the victory parade:  Czechs, Dutch, Iranian, Indian, Sikh, Norwegian, Canadian, South African, Arab, Belgian and Australian and many others marched (or flew over) through the streets of London. 

Absent were the Poles, who in probably one of the most despicable (even with the benefit of hindsight) gutless acts of any Westminster government, were excluded due to indirect pressure from Stalin. 

The Poles, some 200,000 thousand of whom had served alongside the Western Allies, in the Mediterranean and Western Europe, and who had given so much for allied victory in almost every campaign and had done the ground work which broke the enigma codes (formally recognised on 12th July 2001), were perceived as a problem post war.  

The British Labour government initially invited the Soviet-backed government in Poland to send a flag party to represent Poland among the allied forces in the parade, but did not specifically invite representatives of the Polish forces that had fought in the West alongside Allied forces. 

Attlee's government had previously hindered, harassed and pressured the Poles to return to Soviet occupied Poland, before somewhat reluctantly granting them asylum. 

They were specifically and perhaps deliberately excluded - perhaps due to a combination of expediency and pressure from / fear of offending Stalin. 

To their everlasting credit, the RAF, consistently refused to harass the Poles to return to Soviet dominated Poland from the start, and they gave the Polish airman who had fought so valiantly in the Battle of Britain in 1940 the option to fly but they chose not to fly in the aerial victory parade in an act of solidarity with their excluded comrades on the ground.  

Poland itself would not finally be free and a democracy until 1989. The Poles finally marched in the National Commemoration Celebration Day of VE Day and VJ Day in London on 10 July 2005.