VJ Day marked at White Horse Military Show

The White Horse Military Show marked the 80th anniversary of VJ Day with a vehicle parade

A local living history festival has marked the 80th anniversary of VJ Day, with a parade of military vehicles the main event among three days of re-enactments.

The White Horse Military Show (WHMS) concluded on Sunday near Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire, with 1,200 reenactors and historians taking part.

The brainchild of film production designer Richard Dalton, the festival included battle recreations, a 1940s-style pub, a vintage barbers, a frontier saloon and a cinema.

Despite the focus on VJ Day - or Victory over Japan Day - the timeline of re-enactors ran from the Napoleonic era all the way up to the Gulf Wars.

Learning experience: Founder Richard Dalton described the show as "like an open air museum". He said he hoped to inspire the younger generation by allowing them to engage with "history and creativity" in person, rather than through a screen.

A nice brew: Over a thousand re-enactors were on site over the three days, including a large number of people dressed as WW2 characters, who also supplied their vehicles for the anniversary parade. This included British troops who fought in North Africa, as seen above.

History In Motion: Fittingly for such a warm weekend, the American West was represented in the form of a frontier town with the requisite cowboys on horseback and a saloon to tempt weary travellers.

Constructing history: Re-enactor Simon Broughton said that his group had been offered the use of a "massive pile of sets" from previous film and tv productions that had been saved from landfill.

He said they spent two hours "digging through bits of brick wall and castle" before finding the right parts to erect a mock-up of a partly-destroyed French building.