Editorial

Nobody under 70, in Malta or anywhere else, for that matter, remembers the outbreak of World War II, sometimes called "Hitler's War". Today, is the 70th anniversary of that war.

Britain and France, holding to their word to come to Poland's defence were it to be attacked by Germany, declared war. Even so, it took both countries more than 48 hours to make their declaration after Adolf Hitler launched his blitzkrieg on that country in the pre-dawn hours.

It would be another year after that declaration for that war to come to Malta too.

The war that should have ended all wars between 1914 and 1918 manifestly had not achieved its objective. On the contrary, that war, responsible for the death of roughly 33 million combatants and non-combatants, turned out to be the grisly harbinger of a conflict, 21 years later, that would place civilians in the frontline of battle.

It is estimated that during World War II almost 30 million civilians lost their life. More than half of these perished in the Soviet Union, which suffered twice as many civilian casualties as military ones. Nearly six million Jews were exterminated by the Nazi regime simply because they were Jews.

Here was mankind's first encounter with globalisation. From London to Pearl Harbour, Paris to Hiroshima, Moscow to Berlin, the entire world was involved in a slaughter on land, at sea and from the air. By the end of it, in May 1945, Europe lay in ruins, many of its cities razed. The end was more nightmarish than the beginning.

American diplomat George Kennan would write, of the Soviet thrust into central Europe and eastern Prussia as millions fled before the advancing army that, 'The Russians... swept the native population clean in a manner that had no parallel since the days of the Asiatic hordes". Revenge for the German murder and devastation in the east was theirs and they took it.

There followed the wholesale deportation of peoples to the east. In addition, population transfers took place across Europe in a bid to avert a repeat of what may be called the problem of the Sudeten German population.

And, let us not forget, the world entered the nuclear age; the Allies got there before the Germans.

Perhaps the worst feature that marked the end of the war was the forced repatriation of more than five million Soviet nationals, one in five of whom were either shot or sent to camps, later immortalised by Alexander Solzhenitsyn - an archipaelago of gulags. The pre-war Europe of nation states became the post-war Europe of nation states with a difference.

The Soviet Union occupied eastern Europe up to the Elbe, turned it into a Soviet satrap and brought down an iron curtain between its satellites and Western Europe. The Cold War had begun. It was to last until 1989 when communist regimes, including that of the Soviet Union, started to collapse.

One bright light in the darkness that enveloped post-war Europe was a plan worked out by General George C. Marshall, which became known as the Marshall Plan. Without this, it is safe to assume, recovery in a ravaged Western Europe would have taken many more years, if it would have happened at all.

And, yet, from that devastation and desolation came the slow, painful road to European unity, which made it possible for European nations never to go to war against one another again.