All nations that helped to defeat the Nazis have reason to feel proud on this 75th anniversary of VE Day

Victory in Europe Day marked all but the end of the Second World War.

While it was only Germany that put down its arms that day, May 8 1945, the other main protagonist on the Axis side in the conflict, Japan, was from that moment alone against much more powerful allies, and ultimately doomed.

The joy that erupted in Great Britain and Northern Ireland was echoed around the world, but at its most intense in the United Kingdom, and for good reason.

Britain stood alone against the Nazis from the start of the war, in September 1945, until Russia was invaded in 1941 by Hitler and America was attacked by Japan later that year.

Poland and Czechoslovakia had been invaded in 1938 and 39. Denmark, Belgium and Netherlands had been overrun. France fell in May 1940. Norway was invaded. Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Ireland were neutral in face of Nazi terror. Italy sided with Hitler.

There were four existential threats to Britain. The first that the bulk of its army would be trapped in France in 1940. It scraped home from Dunkirk. Then, later that year, that it would lose an air battle with Germans. Next that it would be destroyed by the blitz (which reached as far as Belfast) in 1941. And throughout that the Nazis would invade.

Yet we held out and regrouped.

There is no doubt that the war would have been lost without the late but much bigger American and Russian participation, yet even so Britain’s specific record against Nazism has no parallel. And Winston Churchill’s input was utterly crucial, given that most of his establishment peers wanted to reach terms with that barbarian, Adolf Hitler.

All the nations that fought and defeated Germany and Japan have reason to feel pride on this date, and to give thanks and to honour the millions who sacrificed their lives in that horrifying but unavoidable war against a great evil.

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