Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

[brianw]

Almost all of our history books tell us that there were two major wars and a number of smaller wars during the twentieth century.

Prior to WW1, or the Great War, the war to end all wars, there were numerous smaller conflicts in the Balkans which resulted in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo and as a result of previous alliances and treaties everybody went to war with everyone else in 1914. Following the Armistice in 1918 and the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, Winston Churchill remarked that it wasn’t the end to war, merely a twenty year cease-fire.

That cease-fire didn’t even last twenty years, with the start of the Spanish Civil War in the early 1930s where the Nazis perfected their air bombardment and Blitzkrieg techniques. 1939 to 1945 as we know, everybody went to war with everyone else yet again. Churchill was proved right.

After the war, Churchill made another prophetic statement when he said “From Stettin in the north to Trieste in the south, an iron curtain has descended across the face of Europe”.
Berlin was, following the war well inside the Russian sector of Germany; later to be called East Germany and the allied air forces mounted a Herculean effort to relieve the suffering of the Berlin inhabitants during the amazing Berlin Airlift.

The atomic arms race between America, Russia and Britain soon descended into what’s now become known as “The Cold War” when nuclear armed American aircraft were circling the globe 24 hours a day and the RAF’s V-Bomber force was on a four minute warning. The Cold War didn’t really end until 1989 when we all remember the television pictures of wall being torn apart by Berlin residents themselves and the demise of the communist system in the USSR.

During the cold war, there was also the Korean War and the Vietnam War, both seen as a struggle against communism, and ironically the NATO action in Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia, where it all began.

The Falklands Conflict whilst being just as nasty as any other war was in reality just a sideshow where once again a dictator in another country needed to be given a bit of a smack to put him back in his place.

Another legacy of the second world war; the Jewish homeland question, has resulted in the Yom-Kippur war, the Six day war and the ongoing troubles in Israel with the wider Arab/Israeli problems. The Suez crisis, whilst not the result of open conflict, it was the result of France and Britain being a bit naughty and trying to influence some trouble between Egypt and Israel over the privatisation of the Suez Canal by Egyptian President Nasser. We had our fingers burned when the UN declined to back the action.

It seems to me that when people of the world finally lay down their weapons and the new history books are properly written the whole hellish “shooting match” should be recorded as the “Twentieth Century War” or even the second “Hundred Years War”.
The way things are going I can’t see it happening in my lifetime. All we can do is pray for peace and remember all those who have gone before.

[Stalin]

Nice post Sir, and well said.