Victory in Europe and Victory over Japan: 80th Anniversary

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Tuesday 6th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

What an excellent speech to have the privilege of following.

It is always so impressive when people do their duty right up to the very end, and so I ask the House to salute the passing of Normandy veteran Cecil Newton, who as recently as last year came back to Lepe beach in New Forest East and read out the names of more than a hundred of his comrades in the Royal Dragoon Guards who were killed in the D-day landings and beyond. He was one of 6,000 troops who landed on Gold beach, having departed from Lepe beach. He was in an amphibious Sherman tank that made it to shore—not all of them did—and he survived being wounded in combat too, passing at the great age of 101.

We have heard from many speakers about the connections between their constituencies and the military history of the second world war. That was a theme on which I expatiated back in May 1997 in my very first speech in this House. I will repeat just one reference from that oration, about when I discovered a small plot of RAF graves in Fawley churchyard in my constituency. I could not help but be moved by the inscription on the headstone of a young airman, John Burrow, whose parents had written the following:

“Into the mosaic of victory we lay this priceless piece—our son”.

I thought that that was such a wonderful thing to do in the depths of their loss: to say, nevertheless, that this is what we are doing for the victory of our country over Nazi Germany. I salute them and their memory too.

How does one do justice to the second world war in a few minutes? I will pick out one key factor without which everything else would have been different: the existence of the English channel. There can be no doubt that if we had been contiguous with the continent of Europe, we would have suffered the same fate as all our allies there. There is no way in which we could have resisted being overrun. When we think about how difficult it was to reinvade and retake the continent for democracy in 1944, even with Britain as the launch area for that invasion, we realise how virtually impossible it would have been without the United Kingdom remaining outside Nazi German control.

We can also look at the areas covered by a simple listing of the campaign stars that were awarded: the Atlantic Star, the Africa Star, the Italy Star, the Burma Star, the Pacific Star, the France and Germany Star and, much belatedly, the Arctic Star for the brave men of the merchant navy and the Royal Navy, who risked everything to get supplies to Russia.

Let us not forget one last thing. When the war ended, the country for which we went to war, Poland, remained under occupation by the Soviet Union, and it took another 44 years of determined deterrence, coupled with the nuclear balance of terror, to ensure the eventual emergence of democracy in that country too.