Simon H wrote:
...a great many around the World will be thinking of that first day towards peace 65 years ago.
What a washed up phrase.How many millions were klled the last 65 years in the name you call "piece".
Just by the good friends and Allied buddies of WWII,the Communists, alone.
Paddy Keating hit it best with this:
Some historians and other pundits opine that had the British and French governments left Hitler to his devices in 1939, the latter would have implemented his neo-imperialist plans to create a new German Empire eventually stretching across "Russia" to the Pacific Ocean. The history of the World from 1940 onwards would have been very different, with the European empires remaining intact, no USSR and no Israel. Of course, given the nature of Man in all his states, it is probable that reasons for war and strife would have been found, and quite possible that our Cold War would have been with the German Reich after an initial period of cooperation, but doubtful that the World would be in quite the mess in which we find it today.
A lot of veterans of the 1939-1945 conflict with whom I have spoken have developed views reflecting some or all of this loose hypothesis. The perceived need to scupper the ambitions of any European country seeking to expand in any way, like France and Germany, has long been an obsession of London governments. The men of the British armed forces and the people of Great Britain did not want to go to war again with Germany in 1939. They were led into this fratricidal war by people with various agendas, as is so often the case. Hitler was much-admired and envied by a great many people and politicians in the 1930s as the necessary strongman who cleaned up Germany, sent the home-grown Bolsheviks packing and got six million Germans back to work.
National Socialism was actually a better socio-political model than the other "isms" of the 20th century, which is why it was always viewed with fear and loathing by the moneymen of the Anglo-American Axis, who prefer to operate in environments in which the peoples off whom they leech are divided by social problems, the spectre of unemployment and fear in general. One only has to look at the sabotage of Perón's Argentina in the late 1940s, the attacks upon Nasser's Egypt in the 1950s and, latterly, the removal of Saddam Hussein and his Ba'athist regime a few years ago. Hitler and his administration ended up giving it a worse name than Communism, which killed far more people, and he was not perhaps the ideal man to carry the idea forwards. In fact, his administration comprised very few men of the qualities required not so much to build but to manage any kind of empire, as their mismanagement of their new dominions quickly demonstrated.
Had there been no war in 1939, Hitler might have been replaced by the early 1940s, because of his state of health, apart from anything else. Britain was, of course, obliged to help Poland but it is quite revealing that neither Britain nor France reacted to the Soviet invasion of Poland at the same time as Hitler's invasion. The men of North-Western Europe who fought in WW2 are not, in the main, stupid or ignorant, and they only have to look around them to understand the exponential effect of that war upon the 'topography' of the countries for which they thought they were fighting. Maybe you get yourself down to your local British Legion and engage a few veterans in conversation. Some of them have, of course, defined that war in terms of a struggle against good and evil, which is the accepted or approved perception of WW2. But even they wonder what happened to their countries as they look around
War does not determine who is right,war determens who is left.