" Millions of men came to fight in this war and I find it incredible that I am the only one left." HARRY PATCH Harry Patch was the last living veteran of World War I. My astrophysicist friends tell me that the most amazing thing about living in this universe is TIME. According to them, physics state that this Blogger should be able to get up out of this room and travel back to 1731, without taxing himself. But it does not work like that; even if a Time Machine is eventually fabricated, it will only go one way, time travel into the future. Mankind will not be able to go back in time because time  goes only in one direction-it is an arrow. Which means every living witness to this moment in time, regardless of how young or how fit will eventually die; which means there will eventually be no living witness to any event. Harry Patch  was a plumber, an inarticulate plumber, yet by design or chance or fate he outlived them all, and eighty years after the end of the war  h...

Eighty years ago, World War II started. "The statistics of the war are almost mind-numbing. Estimates differ, but up to 70m people died as a direct consequence of the fighting between 1939 and 1945, about two-thirds of them non-combatants, making it in absolute terms the deadliest conflict ever. Nearly one in ten Germans died and 30% of their army. About 15m Chinese perished and 27m Soviets. Squeezed between two totalitarian neighbours, Poland lost 16% of its population, about half of them Jews who were part of Hitler’s final solution. On average, nearly 30,000 people were being killed every day." There would not have been a World War II without Hitler; Stalin did not want World War II, neither did Churchill, nor Roosevelt nor the French nor the Italians. Even the Japanese did not want World War II, the Japanese Empire wanted a war just not World War II. Only Hitler wanted World War II. One man bent the world to his will. Hitler was an amazingly gifted sociopath, no fictio...