Ocasional Address VE Day 2026 - FOTOBAI Secretary, Greg Smith

 

VICTORY IN EUROPE DAY COMMEMORATION ADDRESS

Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance — 8 May 2026

Conducted by Friends of the Odd Bods Association Inc.

Speaker - Greg Smith, Secretary

 

Distinguished representatives of our veteran associations, honoured guests, and friends:

Eighty-one years ago today, the guns fell silent in Europe.

On the 8th of May, 1945, Germany’s unconditional surrender came into force, and the most destructive conflict in European history drew, at last, to its close. Six years of war. Tens of millions of lives lost. An entire world reshaped by sacrifice and, ultimately, by courage.

We gather here today, in the shadow of this sacred Shrine, to remember. And to give thanks.

 It is difficult now to fully comprehend what that moment of peace meant to those who had lived through the preceding years. Think of the young airman who had flown mission after mission knowing each one might be his last. Think of the nurse working through the nights of a field hospital, carrying her patients home with her in ways she could never quite explain. Think of the families across this nation — mothers sustained by morning prayers, fathers who had watched their sons and daughters board troopships and wondered, quietly, whether they would ever again sit across the table from them at Christmas.

For all of them, the 8th of May 1945 was not an abstraction. It was a moment of visceral, overwhelming relief. A weight lifted. A breath drawn freely, perhaps for the first time in years.

 Australia’s contribution to the victory in Europe is a story that risks being overshadowed by the campaigns fought closer to our own shores. But Australians fought and died in the skies over Germany, in the deserts of North Africa, in the waters of the Mediterranean. The men of the Royal Australian Air Force flew into darkness night after night over occupied Europe, knowing the odds against them. Thousands did not return. Those who did were changed — forged by an experience that no civilian life could quite prepare them, or their families, to understand.

For them, VE Day was the moment they first dared to believe they might actually go home.

Home ........ That word carried enormous weight in 1945.

The ships that had carried young Australians to war began the long voyage back. Men and women in uniform sat on deck in the evenings and allowed themselves, for the first time in years, to think concretely about the future. And on the wharves of Melbourne and Sydney and Fremantle, the families gathered. Mothers who had aged years in the space of months. Young women pushing prams, pointing at a troopship and saying to a child, “There he is — that’s your daddy.”

Those reunions were among the most profound human moments this country has ever known. Small, private, and irreplaceable.

Yet not all who went away came home. And not all who came home were whole. Every reunion was shadowed by the knowledge of an absence somewhere else — a family that would receive no homecoming, a name that would live on only in memory and, in time, on a memorial such as this.

We carry those names with us today. We carry them always.

Standing here, we might ask what obligation we carry forward. I believe it is this: that we refuse to allow their stories to become mere ceremony. That we remember them not only as figures of history, but as people — afraid and brave, homesick and dutiful, flawed and extraordinary.

As we observe a moment of silence, I ask you to hold in mind not the grand sweep of history, but one small human detail within it: a woman who closed her eyes on the night of the 8th of May 1945 and, perhaps for the first time since the war began, slept peacefully.

That is what victory meant. That is what we commemorate today.

Lest we forget.