VE Day, fifty years on - 5 May 1995

This weekend I suppose every nation that fought in the Second World War will be recalling the 7th and 8th of May 1945 and the general jubilation that greeted the end of the fighting in what an American navy commander I knew called the "European sector", a phrase I imagined that could never have occurred to the armies and the peoples of Europe – but it's an oddity worth mentioning because although it is a little stilted, it spoke volumes for the American view of V.E. Day here on the Pacific Coast as distinct from a European view.

That sailor friend was in San Francisco at the time, and so was I, and more to the point, so were thousands of soldiers, sailors and marines having a brief final fling before shipping out through the Golden Gate and into the huge Pacific towards the Japanese Islands where most of them expected to be fighting or dying throughout the summer and fall.

Indeed, given the Japanese's fanatical capacity for holding their ground till the last man, the expert guess was that we could not expect to invade the main islands before the spring of 1946. General Marshal debated with the secretary of war and with General Omar Bradley, whether the price to be exacted by that distant V.J. Day would be one or two million lives.

When the certainty of V.E. Day was reported here – they'd been a false alarm two days before in a despatch from Europe – when it really came, the whooping it up was muted but delayed here, because while Londoners were swarming along the Mall and New Yorkers – early risers anyway – were pouring into Time Square to watch the illuminated news ticker, we here in San Francisco – and we were the delegates of 51 nations and about 400 press and radio reporters in the second week of the cumbersome, the immensely tedious business of setting up the various bodies of a new League of Nations christened just before he died by Franklin Roosevelt the United Nations – we and the rest of the San Francisco population were in bed and snoozing at four in the morning. By the time we woke, there were small crowds out on Market Street, but by 9 o' clock the delegates to the founding conference of the U.N. were assembled in plenary session in the Opera House here, chatting animatedly, brought to order by the gavel of the temporary secretary general who made an announcement the Nazi's had surrendered.

There was a short wave of polite applause, the generals and the statesmen all sat down, and the business was resumed of writing the United Nations Charter to, as it says: "To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war," a great and noble aim. And in the brilliant spring of 1945, it was, believe me, thought to be an achievable aim. I sifted through the delegations and buttonholed many soldiers and politicians and civil servants from many countries and I don't remember any of them who made a wry face when that memorable phrase was recited or when we looked ahead to the prospect of a long peace. The most cynical delegate present, I don't believe, would ever have guessed or predicted that by the 50th anniversary of the United Nations, the world would have endured by the U.N.'s own count something like 240 wars. And in this anniversary year, a half dozen very active and murderous ones.

But even if idealism was rampant in San Francisco in 1945 – and it was – as I say, what was so markedly different about V.E. Day here and the rejoicings in the capitals of Europe, was the looming prospect over the Pacific horizon of worse to come. At the end of the celebratory week, I was sitting in a movie theatre with a marine officer, the European and New York news reels – of course, there was no telly then – had been flown out to the West Coast, so we saw the surging reverberating crowds around Buckingham Palace, the Royal Family there on the balcony and the squat rosy faced figure of Churchill making the V sign and my marine officer said – no resentment intended, just casually almost amused: "You'd think the war was over." And of course, to the peoples of Europe, so it was, but my marines offhand remark was one I would never forget. He shipped out within the week and was soon fighting on the Island of Okinawa, which was thought vital to take and hold as the first stepping stone, a launch pad for the mass bombing and invasion of Japan 800 miles away. One third of all the American marine casualties of the Second War were counted in the taking Okinawa. My marine officer was one of them.

We have only just now last month celebrated the victory on Okinawa – I suppose celebrated is the word – but the anniversary ceremony involved most conspicuously, the widows and family survivors of the dead. And this time, which marks the 50th anniversary of so many great events, I find that the urge towards hilarity and joy is rebuked by the uncomfortable fact that the victory, the successful battles, the liberating of the holocaust victims, coincided with so many other dreadful and humiliating anniversaries.

I have on top of a bookcase in my study, a postcard about three times the normal length. I bought it in 1931 after I'd walked along the street of many children in Germany, walking skeletons with bulging bellies. We hadn't heard in Britain about the actual famine and the deep despair of the famished, which was one plausible cause of Hitler. I walked along and came to a marble arch, a high wall and steps going up to the entrance to the most breathtaking horizon of architecture I had ever seen then or have ever seen since. It was a vast far reaching palace with four majestic sides, the masterpiece of northern baroque. I'm sorry I found that postcard just a few weeks ago, of that great spectacle of Dresden because we were just then remembering it was the 50th Anniversary of the fire bombing of Dresden, 120,000 mostly civilians burned alive or drowned in the river they plunged into. British and American bombers in two waves over a night and a day, possibly our most ignoble act of the war. Certainly nothing to celebrate.

And last weekend, there was no way for Americans to avoid the news of another mighty celebration in the city that we knew as Saigon, now the Ho Chi Minh City, capital of a United Communist Vietnam. What was being celebrated, not by us, was the 20th anniversary of the surrender of South Vietnam in the long war that America lost after President Kennedy's military advisors and technicians turned into President Johnson's American soldiers and sailors and airmen, and, in the end, in to half a million fighting men.

There's no need to go onto stress what we've been saying throughout those 20 years that Vietnam was a wound from which the United States has never wholly recovered. So this week's pictures and reports, all they did was to turn the knife in the wound and another twist of it was given by Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Defence Mr Robert McNamara, who throughout his service in that office was the super hawk, so much so it was by many people called McNamara's War. Now he's written a tearful memoir saying that he knew early on that the war was wrong, the war should never have been fought.

Mr Robert McNamara has lit up a fiery controversy by his agonised confessional challenged by the obvious question: why did he stay on, why didn't he resign if that's the way he felt after all. Anthony Eden resigned when he couldn't square the government's policy with being Secretary of State. Mr Cyrus Vance resigned as President Carter's Secretary of State when his conscience wouldn't let him cover up from the allies, Mr Carter's disastrous adventure in trying to rescue those hostages in the Iranian desert. Lord Carrington resigned as Foreign Secretary when Argentina invaded the Falklands, not because he was responsible, but he said it was his watch, he simply ought to have seen it coming.

Mr McNamara's excuse is his loyalty to President Johnson, which is exactly how Colonel Oliver North defended his running a secret underground foreign policy in the Iran contra affair. It's a strange excuse. No cabinet office and nobody serving the government takes an oath to the president, he/she takes an oath only to uphold the Constitution of the United States. So you see this 50th anniversary commemoration has more probably justified the American word for commemoration: memorialising. We are sorrier for more millions than we're happy for. And now the act of commemoration itself is being performed where, amazingly in Moscow, in the building where Stalin's man Molotov signed the treacherous pact with Hitler's man Ribbentrop that brought on this woe and the devastation of Europe.

There's one, only one anniversary I now look forward too – and one to celebrate and I hope I'm here for it – the 5th of June 1997, the 50th anniversary of another spring morning when General George Marshall, on the initiative of his successor Dean Acheson announced the breathtaking American plan to invest 17 billion dollars in Europe, to do what Dean Acheson said it was meant to do and which it did: to repair the fabric of European life.

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