Editorial: VE Day - remembering those who served or were killed in the fight against Hitler

​It is 80 years today since the worst war in human history came to end – or its key European theatre of conflict did.

​The Second World War in fact continued until August, when Japan surrendered, but victory in the west was an immense moment.

On our front page we show Winston Churchill – the hero of the hour – addressing a crowd, when he said: “In all our long history we have never seen a greater day than this.”

That might in 2025, 80 years later, sound like hyperbole, but it isn’t. It is hard to think of a threat greater to Britain than that in 1939 and 40, particularly the latter of those two years when the UK was alone and on the brink of defeat – and when Churchill was being urged by some colleagues to surrender.

There have been terrible wars and conflicts and tragedies around the world since 1945, including our own Troubles, but nothing on remotely the same scale as World War Two. The First World war, which had got under way more than 30 years earlier, was utterly disastrous but in a crucial way less dangerous to mankind – the then weapons were not capable of ending human existence.

The defeat of Hitler’s Nazis changed the world irrevocably. While a cold war between the western democracies and the communist Soviet Union was ushered in, the memory of WW2 has in a way helped to maintain a rough peace since then. That the war is now fading from the memories of people who actually lived through it might be one reason the world now seems so perilous.

Northern Ireland helped ensure victory, given its geographical location and also by providing thousands of volunteers to the war effort. Today we celebrate that success and remember the people who died around the globe, and at home we particularly commemorate the UK servicemen who gave their lives for the cause of a freedom and democracy that has prevailed until now.