When Darkness Fell

By 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.