I'm 48 years old. When I first became aware of World War Two, it was something that had begun about 30 years ago. Today it's officially something that began 70 years ago.
That's significant. I might not be much of a Bible person, but I still recognize that we can expect to live our 3 score and 10. If this is the case, most of the people who were alive when WWII began are now departed. My own Dad, who celebrates his 80th birthday later this month, was too young to serve in The War, although only by a year or so. The last few veterans of WWI are leaving us, as is regularly reported, and that war ended only 21 years earlier.
70 years, in other words, is perhaps the line that divides the history of the living from the history of those who went before. Certainly all of those who were major figures in WWII are deceased. The witnesses we have left are the foot-soldiers, the sailors and the airmen who survived and have been blessed enough to live to a ripe old age.
And yet, that war is still so much a part of us. I grew up in Halifax, a navy town, where the worst insult we could offer at the age of 8 or so, was "you German". I suppose we got that from our folks.
And the shape of war changed in those few September weeks 70 years ago. Hitler needed a pretext to justify his invasion, so he staged a "Polish" attack on the German border town of Gleiwitz. The bodies found after the "attack" turned out to be concentration camp inmates dressed in captured Polish uniforms.
Of course, faking a causus belli is nothing new; it's been done many times before and since.
A few days into the invasion, a reporter for TIME magazine called this attack a "blitzkrieg", a "lightning war". In fact, it was an encirclement attack, the classic strategy favored by the German general staff since the 1860s. The Germans did have some superior tanks and airplanes, and they sometimes made a big difference, but the campaign was mainly an infantry campaign.
The news media, however, focused on those new technologies, and since then military men around most of the world have been trying to duplicate the "cheap" and quick victories won by the German Army's "blitzkrieg" in 1939-42. Why anyone would try to copy the tactics of the eventual losers is a mystery to me.
In any case, to my mind it's worth observing the 70th anniversary of the first to fight against Nazism. Their fight may have ended in defeat, but they showed our forefathers the way.