Editorial

It is a salutary thought that anybody over 70 barely remembers, if at all, the outbreak of World War 11. Ironically, that titanic struggle between good and evil was mankind's first experience of globalisation. More sensibly, it led to the formation of the European Union.

One looks back on the sheer scale of that war with awe. France had fallen to Germany in 1940. The Balkans and Crete had been overrun in 1941. That year, too, Hitler turned on Russia. In 1942, the tide of war turned with the defeat of Rommel at El Alamein. In 1943, Allied forces began their conquest of Italy.

In 1944, on June 6, they embarked upon the liberation of Paris and this, together with Russian successes in the east, led to the end of the war.

The plan that launched six armies across the Channel had taken everything possible into account: the element of surprise, the vital importance of the weather and the tide on the morning of the invasion if it were not to end in utter failure. There were also the Russian urgings for the opening of a second front and the psychological effect on the defenders of ill-gotten lands of a combined airborne and seaborne operation and enjoying massive and overwhelming air superiority. One thing only could not be avoided and that was the ultimate sacrifice of those who gave their life.

It is a humbling thought.

As a consequence of Normandy, the Nazi tyranny over Europe reached its final chapter. However, the end of the war did not bring an end to conflict on the continent. Greece would enter into a civil war and after being freed of the Nazi yolk it would not be long before eastern Europe succumbed to another tyranny, a communist one. It would take another 40 years before the Iron Curtain that had separated east and west crumbled with hardly a shot being fired.

Democracy had finally triumphed.

The price had been high, the alternative unthinkable. Good men had seen the evil that had to be overcome.Unfortunately, a period of appeasement during the 1930s allowed Hitler to cock a snook at international opinion and to tear up, syllable by syllable, the Treaty of Versailles.

Tragically, the master of appeasement, Neville Chamberlain, remarked at the time: "You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to win the peace has failed. Yet, I cannot believe that there is anything more or anything differently that I could have done and that would have been more successful". The task of war, when it came in 1939, was far harder than it would have been in 1935. Millions more died as a result.

The capricious glorification of war is never an acceptable option; nor is its denunciation at all cost. In the grisly what-if game, any other alternative is abhorrent. What if Hitler had been allowed to continue with his piecemeal conquest of Europe and Russia? What if the oilfields of the Middle East had fallen to his armies? What if, instead of the European Union we now form part of we were living in a Europe controlled by a regime with values the very antithesis of ours?

On the anniversary of the freeing of Europe, we can only bow our heads in gratitude.