After the Celebrations

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 822, 29 April 1955, Page 4

After the Celebrations

cast next week (see page 22) will take listeners back to VE Day. Many people will be surprised to: find that they must look across a decade. Ten years is a long time in the lives of the young; but for those who are cut on the wide plain which slopes imperceptibly from the sun there are fewer landmarks. The end of the war in Europe can still seem very close; and yet, if an attempt is made to return to that sharp moment in history, we may find again that memory is deceptive. . When the news came through there was an outbreak of rejoicing -a little delayed, but unrestrained when at last the whistles sounded, a great thankfulness that the strain was over, and an underlying weariness, Yet events that have been longed for are never quite what they promised to be. The war in the Pacific was still to be finished; and on May 8, 1945, few of us could have guessed that VJ Day would be announced in August. In the meantime the celebration was shared in different ways, depending on age and circumstance. For some people it was dulled by sorrow; others found in it an emotional release; and for many it was the curious mixture of thoughts and feelings, with joy and sadness in swift alternation, which is closest to the nature of a common, heightened experience. Did, the promise of peace have any deep significance in those early days after the celebrations? Were people caught up again too swiftly in their networks of private interest? Or was there a tendency, more general than in 1918, to be cautious about the future? The war that was to end all wars had by no means become a distant memory when gunfire was heard again in Europe. In the intervening years, too, the signs had been ominous. The League of Nations, which was to preserve the peace among peoples who retained full sovereignty, was openly PROGRAMME to be broad-

flouted by Japan and Italy. Collective security turned out to be little more than a web of words. Talks Sn disarmament made no-head-way, and were seen to be unrealistic while Hitler, supported by a new and powerful army, elbowed his way across the frontiers of Central Europe. The aggressors were finally stopped, though at great cost in suffering. At the end of World War Two, Hitler and | Mussolini were dead, their armies defeated and _ their countries ruined. It seemed possible that, if the mistakes of Versailles were avoided, and if the United Nations could be more effective than the League (in spite of the Veto and, once again, the retention of full sovereignty by member States) the world could have something better than a 20-years truce. The story since then is not a happy one. It shows that history does not repeat itself: the repetition is to be found, not in the same mistakes, but in | mankind’s capacity for being mistaken. The great aim, this time, was to be wiser in the treatment of defeated enemies, and thereby to avoid situations which might foster nationalist and _ revolutionary movements. Very few people suspected that our worst troubles would come from the dissensions of former allies. The postwar years have been shadowed by the immense extension of Russian power in Europe, by the rise of Communist China, and by a widespread and vigorous nationalism in South-East Asia. There has been war in Korea and _ IndoChina, jungle warfare in Malaya; and at the moment the powder kegs are in a few small islands off the Chinese coast. Ten years after VE Day the statesmen of western countries, looking around them at a doubtful. prospect, feel obliged to tell us that we are insured against a third world war by the possession of that great deterrent, the H-bomb. We have come a long way since 1945, but it seems to have been in the wrong direction.