Messages on defence need reinforcing

LAST week's VE day commemorations were moving on several levels, chief among them the fact that the number of individuals particularly combatants who played a part in World War II is now tiny and VE Day 80 is probably the last significant wartime anniversary for which any of them will still be with us.

- PHILIP BOWERN

That made the stories they told, their courage, modesty and good humour, so touching and so important. There is nothing like first hand stories from the people who witnessed great historical events to underline their significance. We are lucky, in the 21st century digital world, that we have a detailed record of so many of those memories that will live on, long after the individuals have passed away.

It is particularly poignant for those of us who have recently lost elderly relatives who lived through VE Day, to witness the occasion without those loved ones around to engage with.

My Dad, who died in January this year, would have been 10 in May 1945. Beyond a few brief conversations during earlier anniversaries, I cannot really remember talking to him about his memories of those days at the end of the war in Europe.

My Mum, who died just a few weeks before him, at the end of 2024, was coming up for 12 when Britain celebrated VE Day. She often told a dramatic wartime story about being strafed in the street by a Luftwaffe fighter flying low over her home town a little earlier in the war.

The way she told it she narrowly avoided death by Nazi cannon fire from a Messerschmitt 109, presumably on its way back from a raid somewhere over the South Coast.