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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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082889
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08288900.026
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1990-09-17
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WORLD WAR II, Page 28WHEN DARKNESS FELLBy Otto Friedrich
World War II began last . . . Friday, Sept. 1, when a German
bombing plane dropped a projectile on Puck, fishing village and air
base in the armpit of the Hel Peninsula.
That sentence, appearing in TIME magazine 50 years ago,
reported the start of a cataclysm that would ultimately sweep
across five continents and change the world forever.
By the time the slaughter ended nearly six years later, more
than 50 million people, two-thirds of them civilians, had been
killed -- shot, drowned, bombed, frozen, starved, gassed. A number
of ideas and institutions too had been killed or gravely wounded:
the Third Reich, the British Empire, isolationism, appeasement,
peace in our time.
But out of all that suffering, new ideas had been born, from
the technologies of radar, sulfa drugs, jet aircraft and nuclear
energy to the concepts of collective security, the Atlantic
alliance and the United Nations. New horrors, almost beyond
description, now had to be given names: fire storm, radiation,
holocaust. But other terms suggested rays of hope: jeep, airlift
and the symbol of three dots and a dash: V for victory.
This is how it all began, a half-century ago.