Victory in Europe sixty years on.

It has become a commonplace to say that wars do not settle anything. One of the prize-winning student essays mentioned during last year's Armistice Day ceremony in Ottawa began by setting down this contention as if it were an absolute fact. However, the war I was involved in, the war we remember on the sixtieth anniversary of its termination in May 2005, did have a purpose, and did achieve that purpose.

On Sept. 1, 1939,the German Army invaded Poland, and for the second time in a generation Europe was plunged into war. On Sept. 3, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. That same day a German submarine sank the passenger liner Athenia, killing more than a hundred civilians, of whom a dozen were Canadians. On Sept. 7, the Canadian Parliament met in an emergency session, and it approved the recommendation of the Mackenzie King government that Canada should take up arms against Germany, whose aggression threatened the liberty of many countries. But the winter of 1939-40 was the period of the "phony war": the western front was static, the air raids which were bound to come had not started, and a deceptive peace reigned.

It was to be shattered in the spring of 1940, when the German war machine sprang into action with overwhelming efficiency. It subdued Denmark in a few hours, and Norway after more of a struggle. The Dutch Army surrendered on May 15, the King of the Belgians asked for an armistice on May 27, and before that a German armoured column had reached the French coast at Abbeville. Through heroic efforts, most of the British Army escaped destruction at Dunkirk and sailed back to England in a flotilla of little boats . But England had now become a fortress, threatened with invasion whenever Hitler gave the word.

On June 18, the day after the French asked the Germans for an armistice, Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered one of his finest speeches in the British House of Commons. He said, " What General Weygand called the 'Battle of France' is over. I expect that the battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole Jury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all of Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age ...

Only when the end of the war approached could it be realized how accurate was Churchill's description of the Nazi regime as a new Dark Age. In fact it was possibly the worst tyranny the world has ever known. On January 27, 1945, the Soviet Army liberated Auschwitz; the stunned soldiers released some 7,000 emaciated prisoners left behind as the Germans withdrew. One Russian soldier said, "There were Jewish, Polish, French prisoners They were crying, they embraced us. Very weak, sick, skeletal. We couldn't even look at them." But the majority of the victims had been marched off to the gas chambers immediately after their arrival at the train station. Set up in 1940 as a labour camp for Polish prisoners, Auschwitz became a death factory for Jews shipped there from all over Europe.

There were other German death camps, but Auschwitz was the capital city of the Jewish holocaust, Hitler's insane campaign to rid Europe of the Jewish people once and for all. Probably more than a million of them were exterminated in the specially built gas chambers at Auschwitz, mostly Jews but also unknown numbers of Poles, Gypsies, and Russians. At the memorial ceremony last January 2005, Polish culture Minister Waldemar Dabrowski said, "Let us remember that we are on the site of the most gigantic cemetery in the world, a cemetery where there are no graves, no stones, but where the ashes of more than one million people lie."

Churchill was not exaggerating when he said that Britain (implying as well its allies, including Canada) was defending civilization against the barbarism of Nazi Germany. The many Canadian soldiers, sailors, and airmen who lost their lives during the long struggle from 1939 to 1945 deserve every word of praise, every token of gratitude which their compatriots will offer them during this year's anniversary celebrations.

The following poem was composed in 1970 by Lini Richarda Grol to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Liberation of Holland.

Because They Came

              Because they came
             all bells were ringing
              the flags furled out
         and children started singing
         our fears of years were gone
          because they had come.

              Because they came
         all lights sprang on, so bright
   for there was hope again, for you and me
         and because of those who died
           our children grew up free
        Thank God that they have come.

              Because they came
          we'll praise for ever their name
              but let us never forget
          those who died, let's for them
             sing a hearfelt requiem
          and thank God that they came.

Editor:

We gratefully acknowledge this author's contribution.

David Dooley is an associate editor of Catholic Insight. He is English Professor Emeritus of Saint Michael's College of the University of Toronto.

He served in the Canadian army during World War Two for three and a half years. He was a captain in the Perth Regiment, Fifth Canadian Division, and saw action in Italy and Holland.