Volume 42, Number 16 · October 19, 1995
The Best Years of Their Lives
By Noel Annan
Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign Against American 'Neutrality' in World War II
by Nicholas John Cull
Oxford University Press, 276 pp., $29.95
London at War
by Philip Ziegler
Knopf, 372 pp., $30.00
Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain 1942–1945
by David Reynolds
Random House, 555 pp., $30.00
For You, Lili Marlene: A Memoir of World War II
by Robert Peters
University of Wisconsin Press,to be published in December, 122 pp., $19.95
The spring this year was bitterly cold in Britain. But for the first week in May the north wind relented, and VE day was celebrated in baking sunshine. The nation wallowed in nostalgia. Nostalgia for past glory and for a war that, apart from a few revisionist historians, people remembered as a just war and a war for our survival. In Moscow there was the familiar parade of tanks and weaponry, comprehensible in present circumstances to remind the world that it was the Red Army that smashed the finest professional army in history. But in London on Wednesday May 8 there was no triumphalism, not a tank in sight. Veterans marched and, when both Houses in Parliament presented loyal addresses to the Queen in Westminster Hall, the only martial forces present were the Beefeaters and Yeomen of the Guard. The Royal Family reverted to their true role: they became iconic figures. On Sunday the Queen yielded precedence to her mother, now in her ninety-sixth year, and followed her out onto the balcony at Buckingham Palace with Princess Margaret, the three of them re-enacting the day fifty years ago when they had stood there with King George VI and Winston Churchill. An enormous crowd stretching all the way along the Mall to Trafalgar Square cheered good-heartedly.
Review, 4573 words
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