THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, August 15, 1995 TAG: 9508150017
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 56 lines
Fifty years ago, World War II came to an end. It was the most brutal conflict in history - mechanized war, total war.
It was the war that was not supposed to take place. The Great War of 1914-18 was meant to be the war to end all wars, to make the world safe for democracy. But by the early 1930s an ideology that was anything but safe or democratic was on the march.
Fascist regimes came to power in Italy, Germany and Japan that believed in nothing but power. And when they pushed, no one shoved back. They were given an inch and then a mile and then whole countries to keep them from taking more. Not surprisingly, this only whetted their appetites for conquest.
World War II began with power grabs in the Far East, in Ethiopia, in Spain, in the Rhineland and Czechoslovakia. Finally, after Hitler got Stalin to agree to the dismemberment of Poland, the Nazis invaded on September 1, 1939 and Western Europe was plunged into the abyss. If the aggressors had stopped they might have consolidated their hold on continental Europe and most of Asia. Instead, they overreached. Hitler turned on his erstwhile ally Stalin and the Japanese attacked America.
As soon as Churchill heard about Pearl Harbor, he exulted that the war was lost for the Axis powers. He was right. But it took another three years and nine months and tens of millions of lives to subdue the beasts.
The war ended as it began. Piecemeal. With one bloody liberation after another. With one hard-fought victory after another. Italy fell, then Germany and finally Imperial Japan - burned and beaten flat and at last seared by the power of the sun unleashed.
The fascists made war because all they believed in was brute force and their own superiority. Brute force was what it took to stop them. For 50 years we have tried to build a world where brute force would no longer be used.
It hasn't worked perfectly. There have been scores of vicious conflicts since World War II, but there hasn't been another worldwide conflagration. In part because security arrangements were created in the post-War era to deter and contain aggression. In part because the weapons that ended World War II have the power to make any third World War history's last.
The old soldiers of World War II are now fading away. When they were young, the world stood at a crossroads. Down one path were darkness and death, the secret police, the coerced salute, the gas chamber. Down the other path was no paradise, but a chance for a normal life lived in peace, in which it would be possible to dwell safely, ``every man under his vine and under his fig tree,'' as the Bible puts it.
Millions of men and women chose the second path. They streamed into defense plants. They fought from North Africa to the North Atlantic, from Salerno to Saipan. What do later generations owe them? Everything. by CNB