81 Years After V-E Day: Defend the Great Victors—but Don’t Let Their Triumph Become Our Replacement Religion

The 81st anniversary of Victory in Europe (V-E) Day dawns with precious few left who still remember it. My grandparents lived through the Occupation of the Netherlands; two are gone, one can no longer find her memories, and the last remembers it like it was yesterday—a neighbor knocking on the window to tell them that they were free, the prayers of thanksgiving, the joyful village celebration that followed. 

Veteran journalist Ted Byfield told me that on V-E Day in Toronto, the conductors stopped the street cars and handed out beers. He died in 2021. Bud Anderson, the American fighter pilot and triple ace, informed me that V-E Day was “a big let-down” because he was stateside in Texas with his friend Chuck Yeager; the two flyers took their wives out to celebrate. Yeager died in 2020; Anderson in 2024. 

The Great War produced 20 million dead, the collapse of four empires, a score of throneless monarchs, the Armenian Genocide, and a continental powder keg with the Treaty of Versailles as a twenty-year wick. The Second World War produced 80 million dead, the Holocaust, and put half the continent behind Stalin’s Iron Curtain. The great standoff between the two victorious empires—America and the Soviet Union—began. V-E Day was the first day of the Cold War.

Having heard stories about “the war” firsthand all my life, it has been surreal to see commentators attack the so-called official narrative about World War II. This is usually shorthand for Holocaust denial of some sort but also a larger iconoclastic project that is a near-perfect microcosm of horseshoe theory. It isn’t just crackpot progressives claiming Churchill was a villain; you can hear that on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, too. 

Some of the new revisionism isn’t about the official story so much as the epilogue. The “post-war consensus” is viewed as the primary cudgel of international institutions that rule the West under the rainbow flag and lead a never-ending flood of migrants, legal and illegal. To oppose repopulation by the citizens of foreign lands is to be called a Nazi; the term itself, predictably, has become largely meaningless and voided of historical potency.

It isn’t just the revisionists who are unhappy. 100-year-old British Royal Navy veteran Alec Penstone went viral last year after he told “Good Morning Britain” that the post-Christian UK wasn’t worth the blood. “Hundreds of my friends died, for what?” he asked the shocked hosts. “The country of today? No. I’m sorry. The sacrifice wasn’t worth the result that it is now. We fought for our freedom and it’s a darn sight worse now than when I fought for it.”

U.S. Marine Carl Spurlin Dekle, who lived for the “love of his God, love for his family, and love for his country,” said that fighting in World War II was the greatest thing he’d ever done—but that “the things we did and the things we fought for and the boys that died for it, it’s all gone down the drain. We haven’t got the country we had when I was raised, not at all.” D-Day veteran Rondo Scharfe said in 2024 that the “real truth” was that “I feel like a foreigner in my own country lots of times and I don’t like it. It makes my heart real heavy.”

The men of World War II fought and died for a self-consciously Christian civilization. Days of prayer were held for the Dunkirk evacuation and D-Day. Franklin Roosevelt’s radio broadcast included a prayer to “Almighty God” for the struggle to preserve “our religion, and our civilization”—and everybody knew which religion he referred to. Churchill’s speeches framed the war as one between the dark forces of Nazism and Christian civilization. Where is that civilization now?

The story of World War II—the Allies were good; the Axis powers were bad; the Holocaust is one of history’s great tragedies; and the defeat of Hitler is a great triumph—is true. The myth of World War II, however, has replaced Christianity as our founding story. Now, Hitler is Satan; the Nazis are devils; there are no longer any “sins” (at least, few that aren’t endorsed and funded by the state), and thus to be “Nazi” is now code for “wicked” in a culture that no longer has a metaphysical framework for good and evil. 

We no longer know what evil is, but because we know the Nazis were evil—one of the last things we used to collectively agree on—they became our reference point and our founding myth. As Peter Hitchens put it in his 2018 book The Phoney Victory, the myth of World War II has become Sacred Writ:

This war is the dominant theme of serious conversation, a source of metaphors and a frame of thought. It is also our moral guide, the origin of modern scripture about good and evil, courage and self-sacrifice…It is at Dunkirk and D-Day, or in the forests of Burma, or in the prisoner-of-war camps of Silesia or the Far East, where brave Britons of all classes defy their captors or in the freezing midnight clashes between escort ship and U-boat, that we find our lessons about how to be good and live well. The stories of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son cannot compare with this. Even the Crucifixion grows pale and faint in the lurid light of air raids and great columns of burning oil at Dunkirk, a pillar of fire by night, a pillar of cloud by day.

It is in part because this myth has been used against conservatives for so long—often by advocates of Nazi-style eugenic abortion and euthanasia regimes that would have made Karl Brandt green with envy—that some are now attacking the story of World War II. That is a mistake. To attack the myth—as Hitchens and other thoughtful conservatives have done—is well and good. To attack the great heroes of the war—or, worse, to nihilistically play the heel and embrace Nazi larping—is something else entirely.

To join the revolutionaries in tearing down the heroes of World War II is to attack some of the greatest men and women that the twentieth century produced. We cannot blame Churchill because he was the last of the British Empire’s great leaders; we cannot blame the Greatest Generation because their descendants traded their Christian civilization for the sexual revolution. They faced the evils of their day as flawed human beings with great courage. Their story holds. We should not grant victory to those who use that story to push an agenda that leaves heroes like Alec Penstone feeling homeless. 

For me, V-E Day is the day that my grandparents—scattered across the Netherlands, years before any of them had met and fallen in love and started families—found out that their long nightmare was over and that they were free. All of that blood and sacrifice was, in part, for them—and so, for me and for my children, too. I will be forever grateful.