It was the 'biggest and noisiest crowd' that London ever saw. On August 15, 1945, tens of thousands of people flooded the streets of the British capital and elsewhere to celebrate the end of the Second World War. As had been expected for days up to that joyous moment, the rulers of Japan had finally surrendered after the United States' use of the horrifying atom bomb on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These acts of mass slaughter had helped bring an end to a conflict which had left more than 380,000 British troops dead in combat. Although the bulk...