It is 80 years since Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allied powers. In his speech broadcast from Downing Street on 8 May 1945 – otherwise known as Victory in Europe Day – Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, struck a suitably triumphant note. ‘My dear friends, this is your hour’, he declared. ‘This is not victory of a party or of any class. It’s a victory of the great British nation as a whole.’

Since VE Day, Britain’s role in the greatest and most lethal war in human history has changed and grown in stature. It has become key to our sense of national identity. It has given us the metaphors we reach for to give shape to our national character, our supposed Blitz Spirit, our ‘Keep calm and carry on’ stoicism. It has provided the heroic reference points, from ‘our finest hour’ in the skies above Britain to the collective pluck of the evacuation of Dunkirk. And, in the fight against fascism, it has gifted Britain a moral legacy and future purpose. Invoking the war has become the last semi-acceptable form of patriotism.

There is, of course, a strong element of elite myth-making around Britain’s role in the Second World War. We really were not ‘all in it together’ during the Blitz, as the urban working classes huddled in makeshift shelters and Tube stations, while the establishment retreated to the comfort and safety of their country houses. Britain was also guilty of many brutal acts during the war, from the bombing of Dresden to the Bengal famine, in which three million were allowed to starve to death, in order to sell vital rice supplies to the US and feed British forces stationed in Burma.

Yet, for all the wartime and later peacetime propaganda about a conflict that cost the lives of some 75million, especially on the Eastern Front, Britain’s war effort really was marked by courage, fortitude and purpose. The heroism of the millions mobilised across the empire should never be in doubt. In Britain and beyond, people really were fighting for something that mattered. For their communities, for their ways of life and, ultimately, for their nation. A nation (and, in the case of the colonies, nations-to-be) that was often very different to that of Britain’s ruling classes. Without this, without Britain’s determined resistance to Nazi Germany during the first couple of years of the conflict, the Allies would not have been in a position to push for victory after the Axis powers dragged the US and USSR into the war in 1941.