THE LONGEST SUMMER

The celebrations in the UK for Victory in Europe (VE) Day on 8 May 1945 may have been passionate and heartfelt, but they were also, in one vital sense, incomplete. The fighting was not over. Many of the people who celebrated that day still had loved ones waging war in the dense forests of Burma, where the Japanese forces were losing ground but not giving up. VE Day then also marked the start of a strange and desperate three months in which hopes of peace and prosperity competed with fears of division, further warfare and widespread poverty.

During the summer of 1945 the Allied forces harried the Japanese through Burma; Churchill, Stalin and Truman got together to decide the future of Europe; the British electorate voted Churchill out and Attlee in; and two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. There was immeasurable joy and terrible sadness in those months. Demobbed servicemen returned home to be reunited with their families. But in many instances