Eighty years ago today, Nazi Germany surrendered, and the guns of Europe fell silent. Crowds swarmed Times Square and Piccadilly Circus. The free world exhaled. May 8, 1945 — Victory in Europe (VE) Day — was more than the end of a war. It was a triumph of moral conviction, a signal that tyranny can be defeated, and a reminder of what America, at its best, represents.
For Americans, that victory came at a terrible cost. Over 400,000 of our countrymen perished in World War II. They were one of the rarest of occurrences in military history — an army of liberation. They were not conquerors chasing empire, but citizens answering a call of principle. Though many were drafted, millions more volunteered. The United States sent its sons across oceans not to occupy, but to liberate. Towns like Carentan, Bastogne, and Anzio are not remembered for American expansion but for American bloodshed to make others free.
A clash of ideologies, not just armies
The war in Europe was not merely a clash of armies but a clash of worldviews. At its heart, World War II was a fight against expansionist dictatorships that wielded the machinery of government to crush liberty and human dignity.
Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime sought not only territorial conquest, but the subjugation and extermination of entire peoples, driven by a racial ideology that dehumanized Jews, Slavs, and others as unworthy of life. Benito Mussolini’s fascism promised national revival but delivered militarism, censorship, and repression.
These regimes turned the tools of the state, such as law, propaganda, education, and even medicine, into weapons of control and cruelty. Their aggression engulfed a continent, and their doctrines led to genocide, enslavement, and the systematic annihilation of millions. Defeating them was not simply about restoring borders — it was about defending the idea that all men are created equal and that liberty is a birthright, not a privilege granted by the state.
The Nazis, like other fascist regimes, dismissed liberal democracy as weak, decadent, and doomed to collapse under its divisions. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, frequently mocked the United States as a nation paralyzed by racial diversity, capitalist greed, and competing interest groups. He doubted Americans would ever summon the unity or discipline required for war.
Early in the conflict, German officials underestimated the speed and scale at which the United States could mobilize its economy and armed forces. In 1939, with only a modest standing army and rising isolationist sentiment, Nazi leaders believed the US would either stay out of the war or arrive too late to matter. Their miscalculation was rooted in contempt for self-governing people. Hitler viewed parliamentary systems as chaotic and obsolete, and fascism as the inevitable future of governance. That worldview shaped the Nazi regime’s overconfidence, and, ultimately, its downfall.
The triumph of VE Day was not inevitable. It required not only military strategy and strength, but moral clarity. It required hard lessons and sacrifices in places like the Atlas Mountains of Africa, Italy’s Rapido River, and the beaches of northern France. American exceptionalism does not lie in superiority — it lies in character.
As General Dwight D. Eisenhower humbly reflected, “Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends.”
The men and women of the Greatest Generation embodied that ethic. They fought because freedom was under assault and because they believed that liberty, even oceans away, was worth defending. That belief endured after the guns fell silent.
In the war’s aftermath, the United States did something without precedent in world history: It helped rebuild its former enemies. Through the Marshall Plan, America poured resources into a devastated Europe, not to control it, but to restore it. That too is exceptionalism — not just power, but purpose. Winston Churchill observed, “The United States stands at this moment at the summit of the world.” What mattered most was how America used that summit. We stood atop the world and chose peace, not plunder.
The fading memory of freedom’s cost
Yet today, the legacy of VE Day risks fading into nostalgia or neglect. Too many young Americans know little of the Normandy landings or the Battle of the Bulge. Even fewer grasp the moral stakes of the war or the resolve it required. However, history lessons are not optional but essential to understanding today’s world. Totalitarianism, suppression, and militarism are not relics of the past. They are present dangers once again.
And so, VE Day must be more than a commemoration. It must be a call to conscience. Americans should ask: Are we still a people who believe freedom is worth sacrifice? Do we still see leadership as service, not dominion? Are we still a nation capable of moral resolve?
President Ronald Reagan warned, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”
If that is true, the spirit of VE Day is not just a memory. It is our mandate. American exceptionalism is not a guarantee. It is a responsibility earned by those who came before us and sustained only if we remember why they fought and chose to live accordingly.