To The Reader’s Forum:

The year was 1918. On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the armistice to end World War I was signed. Ten million military personnel had died. In Germany, one in three men who had been aged 19 to 22 when the war started was dead by November 1918. In Russia, combined military and civilian deaths were more than five million. The three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty was destroyed. Communism was born. The German, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires were shattered. American losses were one hundred seventeen thousand.

Hopes were high for the creation of a new and better world that would justify the sacrifice of the war, but bitterness and conflicting interests between the winners and losers led to disillusion and a second, much broader conflict whose horrors would supplant those of the Great War. And this time, the end would come from the air –unimaginable, irresistible and mushroom-shaped.

Dr. James Dahlie,

Lakewood