70 Years On

I woke this morning, September 3rd 2009, rather earlier than hoped, to a violently windy atmosphere outside. September 3rd 1939 was also apparently a rather stormy night across Britain, the evening that Neville Chamberlain made his fateful speech. For Poland, it was already two days into a nightmare that lasted not just for the next six years but also through six decades.

In a sense, the Second World War was the Fifty Years war, inasmuch as its repercussions were to have a lasting effect until 1989, when Stalin's occupation of East Berlin (as reprisal for Hitler's invasion of Russia) came to an end with the breaking of the Berlin Wall, and all the subsequent oppressions of Communism and the Eastern Bloc.

Many wars have come and gone (and some are still very much ongoing), but across the globe we learnt most of our lessons the hard way from World War II. Please God, we may never have to learn them so grimly again.