America Doesn't Need a WWII Victory Day

We've got better ways to commemorate the defeat of Fascism

It’s bait I probably shouldn’t take. But as someone who often teaches and writes about history’s bloodiest war, I can’t let this May 8th go by without responding to Donald Trump’s stated plan to declare today Victory Day for World War II.

It’s been eighty years now since Nazi Germany surrendered, and Trump is right that many once allied or liberated countries in Europe officially or unofficially recognize May 8th as Victory or VE Day. (Or on May 9th, in Russia.) So as these things go, it’s not the worst idea Trump has ever had.

But beyond the obvious fact that the United States has got along perfectly well for eight decades without a Victory Day (or two¹) on its official calendar, the idea of Donald Trump belatedly inaugurating a WWII Victory Day should rub us wrong for at least two important reasons.

First, it’s inconsistent with how the actual American victors of WWII approached commemoration.

U.S. Army Military History Institute/Wikimedia

Beyond the initial spasm of ticker tape parades and Times Square kisses, members of the Greatest Generation simply didn’t feel the need to keep patting themselves on the back for having defeated the genuine evil that was Nazism. Within a year of V-E (and V-J) Day, they had moved on. Try searching Chronicling America, the Library of Congress’ remarkable database of digitized American newspapers, for articles published May 8-9, 1946 with “victory” and “war” within a few words of each other, and you’ll get just four results from around the entire country.

It’s only recently that Americans started building grand structures in honor of the G.I.’s who fought against U-boats, V-2s, and the SS. There was no national WWII memorial in Washington until 2004, four years after a National WWII museum was finally built in New Orleans. Apart from notable exceptions like the Marine Corps Memorial in Arlington, VA (1954), WWII commemoration in the years after V-E Day featured “living memorials” that were quietly victorious, eminently practical, and profoundly democratic.