The first VE Day
This year sees the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, more commonly referred to today as VE Day. Although not quite commemorating the end of the Second World War, the celebrations on 8 May 1945 certainly marked a significant milestone on the way towards its eventual conclusion. VE Day was a chance for a battle-weary nation to draw breath, to put its feet up, to reflect upon its victories and to commemorate its losses, little knowing that the end of the recent military conflict in Europe was but the first act of a new struggle that would soon engage the whole continent in the form of a Cold War.
The path to VE Day
Following the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944, the Allied forces, including the British, had finally regained a foothold on the European continent, using the invasion as the spearhead from which they could progress the ultimate defeat of the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich.
By the start of 1945 the German war machine found itself fighting an impossible defence on two fronts. To the east, the Soviet Red Army had overrun East Prussia and Poland, whilst the Allies, primarily the British, Americans and Canadians, soon crossed the Rhine from the west and up through Italy to simultaneously advance into western Germany. The last major German offensive, the Battle of the Bulge at the Ardennes in Belgium, which was designed to split and then crush the Allied forces, had failed by the end of January. From this point Hitler then
