Marking VE Day 2025

Photo credit: Zafar Ali

BSAC member and former heritage adviser Jane Maddocks reflects on VE Day 2025.

Thursday 8^th May 2025 is the 80^th anniversary of Victory in Europe. On 15^th August we will be commemorating the 80^thanniversary of Victory over Japan, and the ending of World War Two.

Many of us have spent so much time diving shipwrecks from the Great War and the Second World War, maybe off the French coast thinking about ‘D-Day’, or round our coastline. Some of us may have recently returned from Chuuk or dive sites in the Philippines. Some with great tolerance of cold water may well have come back from Norway.

 Your focus may have been to dive these vessels because they have a story to tell, engineering to marvel at, or just the sheer gorgeousness of the marine life that is using them as a reef, giving you so many camera opportunities.

These ships have stories, some very sad, some miraculous. Whatever the story, during these months, knowing about the vessels we dive and what part they played in the 1939-1945 conflict, can only make the dive more meaningful.

 As this is a special time of commemoration, I would like to leave you with the Kohima Prayer/Exhortation:

“When You Go Home, Tell Them Of Us And Say,

For Your Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today”

(John Maxwell Edmonds 1875-1958).