My dear friends, this is your hour... a victory of the great British nation

So Churchill told the happy crowds thronging Whitehall on May 8, 1945. But everyone knew that, without our greatest prime minister, there might have been nothing to celebrate

- Jonathan Dimbleby

A LITTLE after 3pm on May 8, 1945, an open-topped car nosed its way out of Downing Street as an exuberant mass of people surged back and forth along Whitehall. Mounted police tried all but in vain to clear a way for Winston Churchill who was due in the House of Commons to announce formally that the war in Europe was over.

Standing up, holding onto the windscreen for support, the Prime Minister held one arm aloft to acknowledge the swelling cheers with his V-for victory salute, a gesture that provoked such a cacophony of delight as almost to drown out the bells of Westminster Abbey that rang out across Parliament Square in celebration.

My father, Richard Dimbleby, already famous as the BBC’s first war correspondent, was in Whitehall to describe the scene for a worldwide audience, his voice as elated in peace as it had been intense in war.

He understood the feelings of that vast throng, aware that all of them would have powerful memories of the last five years in which their resilience against fear, anguish, sorrow, suffering and loss had been tested to the limit. His own memories were no less powerful. He had reported from the Maginot Line in the Phoney War, from Egypt as the ‘Desert Rats’ fought Rommel’s Panzers, from an RAF Lancaster at it unleashed its bombs over Berlin, from the skies over Normandy on D-Day, with Montgomery’s troops across France, from and a tow-plane over the Rhine as the 6th Airborne Division parachuted into Northern Germany, and few weeks later, from the concentration camp at Belsen-Bergen — a revelatory broadcast that was never to be forgotten. He understood Britain’s mood on VE Day.

The crowds in Whitehall had just heard Churchill’s prime ministerial broadcast to the nation, his familiar growling cadences booming among them through loudspeakers.