For me, VE Day is about a young RAF pilot who refused to kill, writes Andrew Marr

8 May 2025, 16:00

By Andrew Marr

@AndrewMarr9

I was lucky to be smack at the heart of the 80th anniversary of VE Day service at Westminster Abbey earlier today.

We heard a short, heart-stopping extract of Winston Churchill’s VE Day speech from 1945. After it, today’s service was everything you would hope for – glittering, moving and immaculately organized. Angel-faced choristers; military trumpeters; the King and Queen; William and Kate;  the Prime Minister; many other politicians past and present – David Cameron, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Sadiq Khan and Angela Rayner. Leaders of all the major faith groups; uniforms of all kinds - copes, robes, swords, feathers, clothing stitched with gold, soaring music, oompah-pomp. In short, the British State put on a jolly good show.  It didn’t miss the human touch – there were extracts from letters of the time, veterans in wheelchairs, probably for the last time at this kind of service. Children and teenagers were included and the religious heart of the service was not “didn’t we do well” self-glorification but Christ’s enthusiasm for the peacemakers.

But it was very grand. It shimmered and glittered in the ancient abbey; and that in a way, for me, was a problem. A national commemoration is big and general and abstract. But memory, which matters more, is personal. We were remembering our people – this was a “lest we forget“ date. Those who died were just as various and flawed and different as we are. They weren’t numbers or crosses or poppies but quirky, in your face, lively individuals.

When I’m thinking of the war I’m thinking of my chain-smoking grandpa who fought in Italy, my dad‘s oldest brother who was killed in the Navy, still a teenager, at Dunkirk and my mother’s cousin, a family hero, often talked about, Freddie Malcolm. Freddie was in the RAF, but he was also a young man of strong religious views who refused to be involved in operations that could kill women and children – so he declined to go into Bomber Command and for this insubordination he was sent to fly Spitfires in a little-known outfit, the Photographic Intelligence Unit.

Their missions deep over enemy lines were vital to the war effort, bringing far more up-to-date information than the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, for instance. But the missions were considered to be almost suicidal because, to accommodate the big heavy cameras of the time, the aircraft had the guns removed and were defenceless. Freddie’s job, flying out of Wick in Scotland, was to cross the North Sea, reach the Norwegian fjords, and try to photograph the German battleship Tirpitz. A sister ship to the Bismarck, if it had reached further north, it could have devastated the Arctic convoys bringing essential help to Russia.

With no guns and primitive navigation, Freddie flew repeatedly over Norway until, on May 10 1942 he was shot down and killed by the Luftwaffe. His body was carried down the hill by local Norwegians who built a memorial to him, which is still there. The military historian Tony Hoskins has written a book about the PRU and earlier this week the government confirmed there would be a monument put up in central London to this brave, vital and still not much remembered group of pilots.

I think about Freddie quite a lot. He was an excellent artist and I have one of his pictures of a Hurricane fighter. I don’t know what he would have thought about the world or the Britain he fought to save but I do know that I have spent my entire career as a journalist able to say whatever I like about the government in power. And never once, not for a moment, being scared or intimidated by the power of the state. And that, and Freddie, for me, is what today was really all about.

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