MY father fought in WWII with the 48th Royal Marine Commandos. He took part in D-Day and many other military operations in Europe and North Africa and had the medals to prove it.

Yet he never reminisced very much about his own exploits. He never talked about the shooting, the killing and the dying, although he must have seen plenty of all three.

He preferred wartime stories in which rank-and-file soldiers put one over upper-class officers, or peasant girls brought the troops chickens to cook as they helped liberate France.

Never loud nor aggressive, he was a humorous man who could talk to anybody with ease.  

A printworker and trade unionist before the war, his politics were understated. He tended to vote Labour and, occasionally in later years, Plaid Cymru.  

These conflicting loyalties reflected a Welsh patriotism inherited from his Welsh-speaking mother who brought him up in an enclave of anti-WWI Independent Labour Party supporters in the same terraced street in Cardiff where the future miners’ leader and socialist MP SO Davies once lived.

He attended military reunions in London and Normandy, where the Union Jack was flown with pride — although his preferred flag was the Welsh Red Dragon and he was more of a quiet republican than a monarchist.

But he came back from one meeting with his old comrades appalled that some of them were now supporting the National Front.

As far as he was concerned, he and they had fought in the early 1940s to defend the countries of Britain and Europe against fascism. Central to that was the defence of democratic freedoms — including free trade unionism.

To attack ethnic minorities and seek to abolish those freedoms with spurious appeals to race and nation — as fascist groups like the National Front did — struck my father as something profoundly “unpatriotic” and even “un-British.” It was behaviour to be associated with German Nazis or Italian and Spanish fascists.

In that respect, he regarded Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts as merely apeing their foreign mentors.  

For his part, my father recalled the visits to Cardiff when Mosley would recite the names of high street shops and warehouses in the city as evidence of “Jewish domination.” His elder brother, my uncle Eric, went down there with his mates to disrupt the meetings (and later went on to become a senior district official of the Electrical Trades Union).

Of course, we should not forget that powerful elements in the British ruling class had their own reasons for belatedly joining the struggle against fascism, after years of ignoring or even praising it in Italy, Germany and Spain.  

They feared for the future of the British empire as the Nazi regime expanded its dominion. Theirs was the patriotism of the wallet, of their shareholdings in the United Kingdom Ltd.

They tried and failed in the late 1930s to engineer a conflict between the fascist regimes and the Soviet Union, in the hope that this would weaken or destroy one or both powers as Britain watched.

Prime Minister Churchill tasked Britain’s military chiefs to plan an unprovoked military attack on Soviet forces in Germany on July 1, 1945, in league with captured German troops who were to be re-issued with their weapons.

The Joint Planning Staff reported that neither their own troops nor Britain’s American allies would be able or willing to fight such a new war to victory.  

But there was and is another type of patriotism. It’s the kind outlined by Soviet revolutionary leader Lenin in his article on “On the National Pride of the Great Russians” (1914) and echoed by Georgi Dimitrov, head of the pre-war Communist International and post-war prime minister of socialist Bulgaria.

It is the patriotism which celebrates the struggles and achievements of the common people of one’s own nation against the forces of exploitation and oppression. It’s the patriotism harnessed by the Soviet Union in its “Great Patriotic War” against Nazi occupation.

It’s the patriotism expressed in the liberation struggles of armed partisans across Europe against foreign occupation, home-grown Quislings and anti-Jewish genocide.

It’s also the British, Welsh and Scottish patriotism which motivated and sustained my father and our own armed forces in their heroic contribution to Victory in Europe.

It did not obliterate class consciousness then and should not be permitted to do so today. Again, another story my father told was of heading for the shores of North Africa and Italy when the posters on the landing craft warned against careless talk because communists may be listening.

“We were on our way to fight fascists — I thought they were supposed to be the enemy, not the communists or Russia!” he would exclaim.

But for the ruling capitalist class in Britain as elsewhere, socialism and the communists have always been the main enemy.  

That is why they largely ignore the anti-fascist character of that war, preferring to play up its “British patriotism” and link it to imperialist, reactionary wars that should be denounced, not celebrated.

That is why they constantly seek to ignore, downplay or distort the unequalled role of the Soviet Union in the second world war. Likewise, too, the Communist-led partisan movements across Europe are rarely if ever mentioned in official ceremonies or the mainstream media.

Most shamefully of all in recent decades, there is the campaign to rewrite the history and pre-history of WWII. This plunged to new depths with the EU Parliament’s resolution of September 18, 2019, on “The importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe.”

Then, the majority of fascist, conservative, liberal and social-democratic MEPs voted to find the Soviet Union equally guilty with Nazi Germany of causing the war. They equated the “crimes of communism” with those of Europe’s Nazi and fascist regimes.

The Soviet armed forces who liberated most of the extermination camps of central and eastern Europe — and who lost more than eight million members fighting four-fifths of the Nazi military machine — were therefore placed on the same level as those who planned and carried out the Holocaust.

This resolution with its “education programme” makes it all the more important for the socialist and communist left to fight the battle of ideas over WWII, VE Day and questions of patriotism.  

We should honour the humanity, internationalism and patriotism of all those who fought fascism in the 1920s, 1930s, WWII and ever since. The Victory in Europe Days on May 8 and 9 belong to the political left as much if not more than to the right.

They are the days on which the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes represent anti-fascism, alongside the flags of the Soviet Union, socialism and communism.