Express & Star comment: Saluting the heroes of a selfless generation

Good had triumphed over evil. There were celebrations, singsongs, dancing in the streets, and pubs ran dry, in a mixture of great joy and relief that at last it was all over.

Victory came at a cost in lives and treasure. Hundreds of thousands of British lives, and many millions of lives worldwide.

If it had happened today, in our 24-hour news mass media world, television reporters would perhaps have mingled with those VE Day crowds and asked: Was it worth it?

And within that question would lie a misunderstanding of what it means to make sacrifices.

Because the wartime generation made extraordinary sacrifices to do what was right, and without any reward other than the satisfaction that the right and the good had triumphed.

Many families had made the supreme sacrifice. Financially the nation was in crippling debt. Rationing, a way of life during the war, was to continue until well into the 1950s. There were blitzed cities which needed rebuilding.

In any event, VE Day was not the end. The war against Japan still raged, and plans were being drawn up for an invasion which, based on the fanatical opposition the Americans faced when taking Japanese-held islands in the Pacific, threatened to be extraordinarily costly.

Today when we look at the post-VE Day fighting, our mindset is inevitably influenced by the knowledge that it all came to a sudden, atomic, stop. But the British soldiers, sailors, and airmen tasked with completing that particular job did not know that. They looked to their futures and saw further vicious fighting against an enemy who would rather die than yield.

Those who came through the maelstrom have had no defence against the enemy which will claim us all in the long run, the march of time. The number of veterans at memorials has dwindled year on year, and anybody who fought in the Second World War will have to be well into their 90s.

The now legendary Captain Tom (newly promoted Colonel) has just turned 100.

In the immediate post-war years, as in the period immediately after the Great War, there was no need for explanations. Everybody knew. Everybody understood. They had all been through it. It had been a communal experience.

Now that there are so few of them left, we do need explanations. People don't know, people don't understand. It is moving remorselessly from a massed lived experience to something in the history books and television documentaries with black and white images.

We can still though hear surviving veterans, like Captain Tom, speak, and we can marvel at what they did.

We call them heroes, but the greater heroism was that so many of those who fought were not steely-eyed professional warriors fearless in the face of death, but ordinary people who rose to the challenge of the hour to do their duty in fighting Fascism.

Like anyone else, their hope was to get the job done so they could return safely to their loved ones.

It is tempting to draw some comparisons with the very different challenge of today. Once more, Britons have come together in the face of a deadly enemy. We have a modern generation of heroes to honour who are putting themselves on the front line.

Nations which were foes of 75 years ago, at peace and bonded by friendship, are working together.

While ours is not a perfect world, today we salute that selfless generation for what they did in giving us a chance to build a better world.