Soldiers are capable of evil things, but Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were evil regimes

Victory in Europe Day should remind us to restrain the dogs of war inside

As we commemorate Victory Day, I have immense respect, of course, for the Allied forces of Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the USA and take pride in their achievements. However, soldiers on all sides do evil things. But Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were evil regimes that had to be defeated. With war still raging in Ukraine, we should remember that it’s always the poor and innocent who suffer most.

When a small group of Ukrainian troops paraded through London on Tuesday as part of the VE Day celebrations, it occurred to me how quickly we forget the lessons of World War II, having said never again. As we commemorate, today, the end of World War II, there is a political consensus here in Britain that the killing should continue in Europe, even though Ukraine cannot win.

Shakespeare’s line to ‘let slip the dogs of war’ represents a cry for vengeance by Marc Antony after Caesar’s murder. War requires the putting aside of compassion to kill the hated enemy. To release the baying dog inside of our warriors.

During World War II, or the Great Patriotic War as it’s called in Russia, the allied effort, led by forces of Great Britain, America, and the Soviet Union, faced the monumental task of defeating the evil of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

On VE Day, or Victory Day as it is known in Russia, we commemorate, or should, the end of killing and the slow reestablishment of civilised relations. We also remember our own heroes, like my great uncles, one of whom was killed in a sinking prisoner of war ship off the coast of China, and the other, who survived being shot down over France, escaping back to Britain with the help of the Resistance.

Victory marks the moment the dogs of war are put back on the chain and the broken service personnel can piece together civilian lives and confront the demons of their experience. We remember with pride, today, our glorious victories, at El Alamein, Stalingrad or Iwo Jima, and mourn the loss of our troops who died in the fight.

Taken together, around 7,5 million German and Japanese troops and their wider conscripts were killed to deliver Victory, not counting the enormous civilian death toll across Europe and the Asia Pacific.

Despite the best efforts to regulate the conduct of war, atrocities were committed on all sides. War is a terrible thing, and while I believe most troops conducted themselves with the appropriate military discipline, none of the allies armies emerge completely blameless. Armies represent a cross section of society, with their fair share of criminals, murders and psychopaths.

Mass rape of women and girls is a stain on several allied armed forces, including the British, American and Soviet armies. There are recorded incidents of the summary execution of prisoners of war. The French, while they were in the war, and the resistance, were not free from blame, for example, massacring 21 prisoners in Abbeville on 20 May 1940, after Germany invaded. The wanton destruction of communities was all too frequent. Even the Canadians were accused of razing the town of Friesoythe on 14 April 1945, killing 20 civilians, in reprisal for the killing of their commanding officer.

It wasn’t uncommon for American service personnel to mutilate dead Japanese soldiers to keep their skulls as trophies. President Franklin Roosevelt was given the gift of a letter opener made by a Japanese soldier’s arm bone and reportedly said, ‘this is the sort of gift I like to get’. Many have questioned the British strategic bombing campaign, including the Dresden night raid, that killed 25,000 people, most of them civilians. And even though the nuclear bombings were justified on the basis of the greater number of lives lost had war with Japan continued, they still killed over 210,000 completely innocent people.

That’s what happens when you slip the dogs of war. That’s all the more reason not to allow wars to start in the first place and, indeed, to stop them as quickly as possible. Wars are breeding grounds for hatred and the dehumanisation of our fellow men and women.

But World War II was a war that had to be won, because while soldiers can do evil things, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were evil regimes. Driven by a core racialism and supremacism they industrialised killing and cruelty as an end in itself, rather than as a means of war.

Nazi Germany was driven by an ethno-nationalist ideology and sought to subjugate the whole of Europe including Britain. Nothing typified this more than the Holocaust whose aim was the eradication of an entire religious group of people from Europe. The rounding up of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, political dissidents and homosexuals was undertaken on an industrial scale.

This required the establishment of an entire supply chain of cruelty, from the informers who ratted on hiding Jews, to the Nazis and their collaborators who gathered them up, to the railway system that transported them to concentration camps, to the predecessor of German company Bayer that manufactured the Zyklon B gas, even the Sonderkommando prisoners who loaded the bodies into the ovens.

The process had been carefully deliberated as a Final Solution at the genteel mansion in Wansee, Berlin, all the Nazis in their smart uniforms planning how it might all be achieved. Joseph Mengele’s disgusting experiments were conducted as if they had an academic purpose, working with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Genetics, and Eugenics in Berlin. Everything was deliberate with the Nazis, the orders to kills commando troops even if they showed their identification documents. The famous mass murder of 50 escaped prisoners of war from Stalag Luft III POW camp in May 1944 was considered and cold blooded

And the Japanese were the same in many respects. Between 1937 and 1938, the Imperial Japanese Army killed over 200,000 people in what has become known as the rape of Nanking, with levels of depravity unseen in modern warfare. Japanese soldiers had competitions to see which could kill one hundred civilians with their swords quickest. Innocent people were buried alive. Tens of thousands of innocent women and girls were gang raped. The Imperial Japanese Army used female prisoners to work in military brothels throughout the war. 100,000 Asian civilians and allied prisoners of war were starved, tortured and worked to death in Thailand to build the famous death railways to Burma between 1940 and 1943. And, the Imperial Japanese were just as deliberate, driven by racial superiority, as the Nazis. Cruelty was the creed.

Had we not resisted Nazi and Imperial Japanese aggression, Europe and Asia would look very different today. Yet what a price in depravity and human cruelty we had to pay to defeat them.

Russia is not and has never been an expansionist threat to Europe since the downfall of the Soviet Union, and to claim otherwise lays us open to using the same racialised logic that drove Nazi and Imperial Japanese expansion. Feeding the European and Ukrainian dogs of war will only prolong the needless suffering for the poor innocent people caught in the crossfire and all the depravity and human wickedness that comes with it.

That’s why, as we remember Victory, we should also remind ourselves how, in the end, it’s always the innocent who lose the most in war. And how we all, somewhere, have a war dog inside that must be restrained.