(May 8) The 75th anniversary of Victory-in-Europe Day is a sobering commemoration, and somewhat sadly ironic.
When the free world (plus the despicable Soviet Empire) celebrated V-E Day on May 8, 1945, it memorialized the defeat of a human evil of unspeakable proportions. This spring, for the first time since then, the entire world again is ravaged by a massive and deadly convulsion all at once. This time, though, there is no human evil deliberately causing the convulsion and no well-defined idea of how and when victory can be achieved.
Lest we take the analogy too far, first let us give due and admiring weight to that World War II victory over Nazi Germany, achieved at the same time free peoples also fought the only slightly lesser evils perpetrated by Imperial Japan.
While an exhausted Western Europe (other than Great Britain) proved woefully weak and while isolationist sentiment overwhelmingly ruled the United States, the Nazis had used the 1930s to build a regimented society and a war machine whose destructive capabilities exceeded anything previously known on Earth. That the society and apparatus of war was accompanied by genocidal ideology and perverted science made it all the worse. And Germany’s alliance with Japan ensured that the free world’s efforts and logistics would be divided, unable to concentrate entirely on breaching Adolf Hitler’s new Fortress Europe.
That the United Kingdom held out for two years alone, not just on its island home but also in keeping Germany from seizing natural resources from far-flung parts of the British Empire, was a feat of stupendous courage and will. That the U.S. was able, once brought into the war, to ramp up industrial-military construction at a speed almost unimaginable, while providing some of the worthiest troops and most brilliant generalship the world could hope for, was a credit to the American spirit and to the capabilities of free peoples roused by a righteous cause….
[The full column is at this link.]
