My father remembered coming out of church and then hearing the news about Pearl Harbor on the car radio. My mother already had three brothers in the services by that time. My father and an additional one of her brothers had orders to report by the time Germany surrendered and a future brother-n-law was cut off in the Bulge. My ex-father-in-law and one of my mother's brothers saw intense action in the Pacific. The other brothers saw it in from North Africa and Italy through Germany including one who was among the first into part of Dachau. One of my father's younger uncles was even part of the supply inside the Soviet Union. These were all enlisted men, the guys who faced and lived through the worst that American service men faced. They all returned home, thankfully if all deeply scarred by what they had seen and done, but picked up and carried on anyway. Their letters home were full of horror, my mother's father's heart was broken by what the Germany he had been born in had become. He was not a young man by then and I really don't think he ever recovered. To say that those men saw action would be an understatement yet they did not experience the worst of it.

We dare not forget. We dare not allow what led up to it to happen again either.

The Japanese are making a huge mistake to ignore the preliminary buildups that led them to what they did. I suppose that would be in part because the Emperor's family had been directly involved with much of that, but the Emperor's family is now dead ended and there will be no future Emperor's out of that line.

The same for the European participants. Most of us know that side of it a little better than what happened in the Pacific. The Japanese and even the Chinese themselves were every bit as brutal as the Germans and the Soviets were, perhaps even more so.

We dare not forget those lessons of history, because we as a species dare not allow anything similar to WWII to happen again. Another all out war like that may not have any survivors, and it will almost certainly leave few if any surviving nations.

We dare not roll over again like happened ahead of WWII, but I do not see the solution simply in military buildup and action either. Excess military gets used by those who will not see the front lines and face the horrors directly. We have not yet worked out any other answer though and keep putting ourselves minutes away from another such conflict. I hope I never see one of those timelines get violated.