It seems remarkable how much of the great drama of history is so often reduced to binary simplicities that then subtly ignore the real truth of things. We are especially prone to this in our politically conscious, morally activist age. Victory over Japan Day is no different. We have forgotten how VJ Day came about, and why it is worth celebrating. For many today, VJ Day seems solely to remember – and apologise for – the scores of thousands of Japanese men, women and children lost in the two atomic bomb strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the awful dawn of the nuclear age.

We need to remember the dead, certainly, but this is not why we should celebrate VJ Day.

Death is a horrible consequence of war, as many in the West seem unable to comprehend in the light of levelled towns in Gaza and Ukraine. The vortex of war is a whirlwind, but it is not always one of revenge. In 1945 it was one of justice. VJ Day happened because the world came together to defeat the tsunami of blood that threatened to engulf it. The innocent didn’t invite their slaughter, which is why we need to remember those who defeated the perpetrators of horror, and brought the slaughter of innocents to an end.

The late Charles Carrington used to rail against those who refused to celebrate victory on Armistice Day following the end of the Great War, instead of wasting their tears over the dead. He considered the tears to be performative, and selfish. His view, and mine, was that victory had been achieved in November 1918, at a great price. It was the sacrifice of the brave men and women who had given their all in the fight against an egregious militarism, and so rightly demanded adulation, even worship, on Armistice Day. For the first few years after the war he tripped up, bottles of beer in hand, to celebrate victory with his friends.

Instead, he watched in disbelief as his generation began to weep for the lives of the lost. He abhorred this indulgence. He had fought the war, and knew the Allied armies had won a great victory. He wished to honour this success and his friends, the living and the dead, who had made this victory possible. His response was that of Pericles, who in 430 BC urged his people to remember that their security was won for them by ‘dauntless men who knew their duty, and who did it… Take these men for your example. Like them, remember that prosperity and true happiness can only be for the free, and that freedom is the possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it’.

This VJ Day, I have a few suggestions for things we should remember.

We should remember the victory of Allied armies triumphing over the evil of Japanese imperialism, a malevolence that had laid waste much of Asia in an orgy of war that had begun in Manchuria in 1931. This terrible war was to cost the lives of perhaps 20 million people before the Allies, at enormous cost of blood and treasure, forced it to a bloody and shocking end in August 1945. When you consider the awful dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, dwell first on the total number of war dead in Asia, caused by Japan’s attempts to build its overseas empire. The human cost, however terrible, of bringing the world’s worst ever war to an end was a drop in the ocean compared to the many millions who had died because of an outrageous, murderous imperialism that had  subjugated Asia under its terror. Remember – and celebrate – the lives of those from around the world who fought gallantly and selflessly, at sea, in the air and on land, to bring this evil to an end.

Second, we should remember that until the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese government was determined to drive the country into the ash of self-immolation. The demand made at the Potsdam Conference on 26 July 1945 that Japan unconditionally surrender was opposed by a majority in the Japanese government and military who wanted to continue fighting, even to the enforced sacrifice of the entire Japanese race. Weep for the innocent Japanese dead, certainly, but delight, too, in the arrest of the murderers who took the world to war. Remember that the A-bombs, though terrible, were a necessary instrument to bring the war to an end, and to enforce a peace on an arrogant and unwilling enemy. War is sometimes the necessary instrument of justice. In the Second World War, this was certainly the case.

In all this we should remember the travails of China, who had fought Japan alone for a decade until the world was sucked into the Asian war in December 1941. We should remember especially the 300,000 murdered, raped and despoiled at Nanjing in 1937, the 50,000 (or more) Chinese who were slaughtered in the Sook-Ching massacre in Singapore in February 1942, and the 100,000 Filipinos egregiously killed in Manila in 1945. And with a BBC adaptation of Richard Flanaghan’s brilliant The Narrow Road to the Deep North now on television screens, we should likewise remember the perhaps 150,000 Indians – Tamils and Malayali – who died unremarked and unreported on the Burma-Thai railway, both horrific exemplars of the moral catastrophe that was Japan’s South East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Over 12,000 Australian, British, Dutch and Americans prisoners died on the railway, a death rate of 30 per cent of those sent to undertake this bitter slavery, killed on the altar of Japanese military hubris. More than ten times as many Indians died. In the three decades or more in which I have studied this war, I have searched in vain for a memorial to the Indian dead of this unnecessary battlefield. We have forgotten them, if we ever knew. They do not deserve our ignorance.

We should remember with pride, too, the millions of men, and some women, in India who joined with their comrades across the Empire and Commonwealth and who stood against the threat of Japanese militarism washing against their shores, and who created the largest ever all-volunteer army in history. They didn’t fight for Britain, but for India, for its security and for its future. As an Indian veteran once told me, ‘We were terrified of Japan. We knew all about Nanjing, and would do anything to prevent her entering India.’ We should remember likewise those who went to Burma to fight from Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, The Gambia, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. History has passed these African veterans and their stories by. We owe it to them that their memory is not lost to history, and the gallant role they played in support of the great crusade against fascism was not in vain.

Remember, too, that victory in Burma in 1945 was largely an Indian one. Ninety per cent of the troops fighting in Burma in 1944 and 1945 were Indian and African.

And on this subject, we should remember that the war was a triumph for an undivided India, hastening independence. The creation of a war-winning army was one of the great national triumphs of wartime India, long forgotten today. The strengthening of India’s armed forces, which increased from 194,373 in October 1939 to a total of 2,499,909 million in 1945, recruited from across the entirety of India, served to strengthen the idea of a capable and effective India, independent of British rule. As the army increased dramatically in size after 1940, there were many in India, of all political stripes, who saw in the building and expansion of the army the most practical steps towards the building of a new, free India. It is for this – the future, not the past, nor even the present – that they fought. The Indian journalist D.F. Karaka perfectly captured the transformation that had taken place during the Second World War, when he observed, visiting an Indian Air Force fighter squadron in Arakan in February 1944:

If they were proud that they belonged to an Air Force, they were even prouder that it was an Indian Air Force. This was not an Air Force of mercenaries. It was an Air Force of Indians conscious of their country, their heritage and all the things that go to make up this land of ours.

The young Indians fighting in Burma, he concluded, were laying the ‘foundation of a new India. This India… is on the march – a disciplined India of that newer generation which is growing up from a conglomeration of communities into a nation’. By defeating the Japanese invasion of India in 1944, and destroying them in Burma in 1945, this army demonstrated not merely India’s military prowess, but its political and civic maturity, a counter to the (British) lie that India was incapable of self-government, and the (Indian) lie that the Indian Army was a mere tool of the Raj. In a very real sense, Britain’s failure to defend its Empire in 1942 was assuaged by India’s ability to win it back, not for Britain, but for India, in 1945.

The same can be said for the other Commonwealth countries still under colonial rule in 1945. By standing alongside the free people of the world against fascism and militarism, they had inherited the right to independence. There could be no thought otherwise.

Now, these are all worth remembering. Save your tears. Celebrate, instead, the victory.