World War II anniversary - Horrors that must never be repeated
On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and over the next six years 50 million people – some estimates put that figure as high as 70 million – lost their lives. Countries, civilisations, societies, cultures, ethnic and religious groups that had endured for millennia were all but destroyed. Millions were murdered because of their religious or ethnic background. Hardly a home or a family was untouched in the battle to preserve our civilisation. None survived unmarked.
Russia – and Poland – its armies and its peoples, suffered bestial cruelties and immense losses. Estimates vary here too but Russian losses are never recorded as less than 28 million and are often as high as 36 million.
The vast majority of German battlefield casualties – 80% – were on the Eastern front. Stalingrad suffered more deaths than Britain and America combined during the entire war. The statistics are startling and, as the war fades from living memory, they still move and disturb us. They make us cower in front of man’s capacity for savagery.
Thankfully, they allow us celebrate humanity’s resilience and inspire us through the knowledge that civilisation endured and a great evil was defeated.
Ireland remained neutral but, in an early Irish solution to an Irish problem, we were far less than neutral when it came to supporting the Allies. Indeed, some of the reports vital to the timing of D Day were relayed from a weather station on Mayo’s Blacksod Bay.
Some of the lengths we went to to preserve the impression that we were neutral were bizarre. Frank Aiken, then styled Minister for the Co-ordination of Defensive Measures and who had responsibility for censorship, told Irish newspapers to refer to the Battle of Britain as “the air battle over Southern England and the Channel in 1940”. A far cry from Churchill’s famous “never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”.
At this remove it is probably more difficult to understand Irish neutrality than it was in the 1930s and the 1940s. Today we have enjoyed the great benefits and generosity of a Europe at peace but 70 years ago this was not the case.
Ireland was impoverished and struggling. We had enjoyed independence for less than two decades and joining the Allied cause would have brought the very real risk of a renewed Civil War. If the physical wounds of the War of Independence had healed the emotional legacy remained powerful. Some might think we should have taken a different path but we did not and we can do little more than try to understand that decision.
Tens of thousands of Irish people, however, chose not remain neutral. They joined the Allied effort in armies, navies, air forces, factories, mines and hospitals. They made a significant contribution to victory.
They must not be forgotten, indeed they should be honoured by all of us who daily enjoy the stability their sacrifices made possible. They served at every level and often paid a heavy price when they returned to Ireland.
Victoria Cross recipient Harold Ervine-Andrews, returned to his hometown in Cavan only to be burned out by the IRA. A few miles up the road, in Belfast, another Victoria Cross winner, Able Seaman James Magennis, suffered discrimination because he was a Catholic. We may have been neutral but our capacity for bigotry, hatred and violence was never in doubt.
Today we all wish to believe that British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s famous but naive phrase, used in September 1938 on his return from talks allowing Germany to occupy parts of Czechoslovakia, “peace for our time” is truer than it was then.
It may be but who knows? Who can predict what may lie ahead and we can do no more than equip ourselves to make the right decisions if we are asked to face the same challenges as those faced by the generation confronted by Nazi aggression.
In a few weeks we will be asked to vote for a second time on the Lisbon Treaty, another step in the European chronology initiated through the Marshall Plan at the end of World War II. This process has allowed us live in peace and prosperity and we must recognise that when we come to vote in October.
We must also honour those who went before us by ensuring that those who come after us are aware of the dangers of political apathy. That they are aware of the dangers of a dysfunctional relationship between ethics, morality and governance. We must make that great phrase “lest we forget” proactive and ensure that each of us understands that the past is part of the map of the future, not a series of horrors to be repeated.
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