Lest we forget history. Has the next world war already begun?

On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, and just over a week later on May 8, Germany surrendered. This year’s Anzac Day, therefore, marks almost exactly 80 years since of the end of WWII in Europe. This sad anniversary gives our commemoration added significance.

Adolf Hitler in about 1933.

The words we are taught to recite on Anzac Day are “lest we forget” – by which we typically mean: remember the fallen. This year, “lest we forget” must take on a new and more urgent meaning: to remember how WWII began so we can prevent it from repeating.

With every passing year, remembering the horrors and causes of that war becomes ever more difficult. Very few who fought in WWII are still with us. The 18-year-olds who enlisted in 1945 are now turning 98. Even those who were children at that time, with the haziest recollections of what it meant, are entering their twilight years. Soon all direct memory of that war will have disappeared completely.

Can deep understanding of the costs and causes of global war survive beyond the span of a human life? Are we doomed to re-fight those wars every 80 to 100 years? Or can historical understanding guide us to safety? Can we keep the lessons of 1939 to 1945 near the forefront of our minds? We have to hope so. More to the point, we have to ensure it is so.

This is now an urgent question because the portents are not good. In fact, should (God forbid) a third great war occur in our lifetimes, the historians of the future will likely argue that it has already begun.

History tells us that wars don’t just start when they are officially declared. They are the culmination of events and decisions usually long in the making. This means it could already be later than we think.

The generally accepted starting date for WWII is September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. But the fighting had actually begun much earlier. Some historians mark its start as far back as 1931 when the Japanese invaded Manchuria. Or in 1935 when Italy invaded Ethiopia. Or in 1936 when the Spanish Civil War brought the fighting to Europe. Over the three years that followed, Hitler remilitarised the Rhineland, staged a coup in Austria, convinced the European powers to hand over Czechoslovakia, and calculated he could get away with seizing Poland too.

This “low dishonest decade”, as the English poet W. H. Auden neatly put it, saw the consolidation of totalitarianism in Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union and elsewhere. Divisive trade wars had begun even earlier – in 1930. Before the first German soldiers crossed the frontiers of Poland, the sorts of horrors we associate with the years 1939 to 1945 – huge land battles, the bombing of cities, the mass murder of prisoners and civilians and the opening of concentration camps – had become commonplace.

By any measure, this sort of heavy skirmishing is already under way. Watch the news tonight and you will see intense trench warfare in Ukraine, ballistic missiles and drones smashing Kyiv, Kharkiv and maybe even Moscow, and Gaza resembling a pile of ruins. You will see dictators like Vladimir Putin being given a free hand. You are also likely to see powerful leaders such as President Donald Trump, who have the power to stop it if they really want to by standing up to the dictators, doing nothing.

Ukrainian servicemen hold candles during a memorial ceremony in Kyiv marking 1000 days of the Russia-Ukraine war, November 2024. Credit: AP

It’s impossible to be precise, but it appears that around 40,000 to 50,000 Ukrainian soldiers and 90,000 to 100,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since the February 2022 invasion. (Many consider these numbers to be massive underestimates.) Four to five times as many are likely to have been injured or taken prisoner. Thousands of civilians have also been killed. In Gaza, the tolls are around 1200 Israelis and 50,000 Palestinians. This scale of death, injury and destruction is comparable to, and in places even higher than, the corresponding preliminary wars of the 1930s.

A new age of savagery is descending upon the world and we are slowly but surely being psychologically conditioned to living in an age of mass warfare.

Recently, a young person I know told me that should an international peacekeeping force including Australians be sent to Ukraine to enforce an armistice, they would consider joining the army. Hearing this, I felt as if I had been transported back to 1938, when it dawned on the world that unless the dictators were finally faced down, a reckoning was inevitable. This is the new reality – the new dangerous era – that we are now living in.

The question for us now is not how to stop a major global conflict from starting – it appears to already be under way – but how to stop it from expanding and spreading and becoming ever more brutal.

So far the deaths are being counted in the tens of thousands – but if we fail to stop the drift to war, the deaths might be measured in the tens of millions. (In the era of nuclear weapons, that too may prove to be a massive underestimate.) By the time Japan surrendered on September 2, 1945 around 50 million people had perished.

Lest we forget those 50 million this Anzac Day. The best way to honour them is to say “lest we forget history”.

Dennis Glover is a speechwriter and author. His latest book is Repeat: A Warning from History, published by Black Inc.

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