Victory in Europe Day in Ceylon

Operation Dracula, the airborne and amphibious assault on Rangoon, had gone in at the end of April 1945, operations extending into the early days of May. The Royal Navy’s East Indies Fleet ships involved, as well as those participating in the decoy operation in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Operation Bishop, were returning home to Trincomalee when Victory in Europe day, 8 May, dawned.

The destroyer Rotherham was one of the ships returning from the Nicobar Islands ‘when there was received a signal from the King: “To all ships and establishments: Splice the mainbrace”’. All ships did the same. 

VE Day found Cyril Battell at HMS Bambara, the Royal Naval Air Station at China Bay: 

The navy have spliced the main brace [sic] and most people seemed to be quite drunk. Celebrations go on until midnight when we are turned out of our hut and paraded at the navy Reg office and threatened with a mutiny charge. Celebrations continue next day with a combined church parade held in the bombed out hangars down on the airfield. Lunch is also special with turkey on the menu and the whole camp again spliced the main brace. 

The men of the East Indies Fleet listened to Winston Churchill broadcasting to the nation and then later, during the Middle Watch by Ceylon time on the 9th, to HM the King. As Midshipman John Robathan wrote, still tired from days at sea aboard HMS Venus, ‘all we could do was think of home and wish we were there to join in the celebrations and hear the church bells’. 

At Trincomalee there were few facilities for celebrations but the men of the destroyer flotillas, spurred on by an extra tot to splice the mainbrace and an extra pint of Australian beer to mark VE Day, did their best. When the radio in the Fleet Canteen announced that celebratory bonfires were being lit at home, some men of the 26th Destroyer Flotilla shouted, ‘There’s a bonfire here!’ and burned down part of the canteen and nearby basha huts. 

Meanwhile the 11th Flotilla had an unarmed combat with ratings from [the French battleship]  Richelieu. In Cumberland the celebrations included the throwing overboard of a mounted fragment of a French shell which had inflicted damage on the ship at Dakar in 1940. But for many of the fleet, it was a quiet evening on board, with a film on the fo’c’sle, reminiscences on the messdecks and in the wardroom. It was still a long war in the east, but just for this evening, there seemed to be time for a smoke and reflection. 

‘VE Day celebrations passed off quietly in Kandy’, wrote Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia, from his headquarters at Kandy in Ceylon’s central highlands. Not that he was there to witness them, as he was in bed with dysentery. Lieutenant General ‘Boy’ Browning, his Chief of Staff, deputized, the parade also marking the recapture of Rangoon. ‘There were considerable festivities that night, during which Gordon Lennox played the piano and Boy performed his Cossack dance’.  Browning also deputized at a big inter-Allied parade in Colombo. 

Alan Brundrett, the young sailor working in the Naval Secretariat, recalled the ‘great excitement’ that accompanied VE Day. ‘Flags and coloured lights were everywhere on buildings’. 

Crowds of people were talking in the street. There was plenty of celebrating going on in the bar of our hotel. Cinemas were open to men and women in the armed forces for free. The Governor’s House was bathed in floodlighting of pale rose and turquoise. Over the arch at the entrance were the letters ‘GR’ [George Regina] and the crown, formed by light bulbs … Many of the public buildings and the Galle Face Hotel displayed an illuminated ‘V’ sign. Crowds gathered here to watch a fireworks display. Bonfires were lit. Dancing, eating and drinking were going on everywhere. Even the snake-charmers were out in force. An altogether memorable sight; one we shall have etched in our minds for a long time. 

On 13 May Brundrett attended the Victory Parade on Galle Face Green. Service personnel marched past a saluting base where the governor, Sir Henry Monck-Mason Moore, and the Commander-in-Chief Ceylon, Admiral Layton, took the salute, while ‘ships of the Royal Navy steamed by close in shore, and planes flew over in formation’.

But VE Day meant little, from a working point of view, for the personnel of the East Indies Fleet and the airmen, soldiers, and sailors engaged in the ongoing war against Japan. They still had a job to do, and continued to face the prospect of potentially fatal encounters with the enemy. Indeed, even at this significant moment, celebrations had been cut short when it was learned that the heavy cruiser Haguro was loose in the Indian Ocean, escorting a convoy.

‘At 10pm that evening a general alarm was flashed around Trincomalee, ordering almost every ship there to raise steam and prepare to leave harbour at 6am the next morning’.11  A task force of sixteen ships left Ceylon on 8 May to intercept the convoy. There was still a war to be won.” 

Ashley Jackson is Professor of Imperial and Military History in the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London. He is the author of numerous books addressing the experiences of the British Empire during the two world wars.