A Son of the Rock

Today is the anniversary of the main triggering of the calamity that overshadowed the second half of the Twentieth Century and hence loomed large in the childhoods of people, like me, born years after the events it precipitated.

Germany attacked Poland.

Though the war in Asia had been going on for some time following Japan’s invasion of Manchuria it was this European outbreak that signalled catastrophe would be a global affair.

Chou En-Lai (Zhou Enlai) is reported to have said when he was asked what he thought were the implications of the French revolution that, “It is too early to say.”

The same is true of World War 2.