Victory in war means one thing to adults, something quite different to children. Adults know that victory is always partial, often no more than the prelude to more conflict. Adults on the winning side may dance in the streets when the enemy surrenders but they never completely forget that the future likely holds other enemies, other battles. Adults, even the least reflective among them, have acquired a tragic sense of life.

They also know that propaganda can never be more than partially true. But children have no access to this wisdom. Responsive, credulous and eager to believe, children are the natural targets of propaganda. They are glad to embrace the conventional wisdom. They actually believe official promises. Think of the nonsense about the environment that they accept from their teachers.

In the golden spring of 1945, as Nazi Germany collapsed, I was 13 years old, on the cusp between childhood and maturity. Old enough to read the papers and listen to the radio yet not old enough to notice the falsehoods the media sold. I lacked the intellectual defence of ordinary cynicism. After six years of war, I was a true believer.

You could say my view of geopolitics was age-appropriate. I knew that the great sources of evil in the world were concentrated in Berlin, Rome and Tokyo. The dictators controlling Germany, Italy and Japan were fanatics. When they were beaten, peace and happiness would be achieved.

Over one amazing week, good news poured in. Benito Mussolini was killed on April 28 by Italian partisans, who had captured him as he tried to escape from Italy with the help of German soldiers, then hanged his body by his feet in a Milan square. On April 30, while the Battle of Berlin raged in the streets above him, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker along with Eva Braun, his long-term companion, whom he had married hours before in a typically addled fit of last-minute respectability. German armies began surrendering to the Western allies on May 2. That same day Berlin surrendered to the Russians. On May 5, the German commander in the Netherlands surrendered to Charles Foulkes, the ranking Canadian general, in the town of Wageningen, with Prince Bernhard representing the Dutch.

On May 7 at the Allied headquarters in Reims, the German chief of staff signed an unconditional surrender. News broke everywhere on May 8, since called VE Day.

Most Canadians had given their closest attention to the war in Europe, where our Forces did most of their fighting and many Canadians had personal connections. The Japanese surrender was still four months in the future but May 8 was our pivotal moment. It was the real beginning of the post-war era. Also, for people my age, the beginning of disappointment.

I put the blame squarely on Franklin Roosevelt. On Jan. 6, 1941, a year before the U.S. entered the war, Roosevelt set forth, in a State of the Union address, the goals of democracy, the four freedoms that people "everywhere in the world" should enjoy: "Freedom of speech and expression; freedom of religion; freedom from want; freedom from fear."

It was one of many attempts Roosevelt made to explain in advance why America should go to war. This propaganda was necessary to support a decision he knew was crucial for the future of civilization. And from 1941 to 1945, the Four Freedoms were part of the American religion, absorbed through the media in Canada.

"That is no vision of a distant millennium," Roosevelt said when defining freedom. "It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation." This was his way of justifying the inevitable sacrifices of war. Was there ever a more mistaken prophecy?

As Canada fought a fundamentally just war, no one guessed (in public, at least) that our allies, the Russians, would soon be our sworn enemies, leading a vast empire. Or that hundreds of millions of people would never experience freedom from want, much less freedom of speech or religion. That they would live and die throughout the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st without seeing even a glimpse of the Four Freedoms.

Since I now believe memory is the first and most crucial requirement of civilization, I sometimes recall my misguided youth and the part of my mind once occupied by rhetoric like Roosevelt's. There must have been many contemporaries of mine who believed as I did. We stumbled toward maturity through a shattered landscape of defeated dreams.

robert.fulford@utoronto.ca