Six long years later and in a very different world from what they had so confidently predicted they'd be in, back in 1939, the Allied world celebrated that they had won.
(Those of the world - the majority - who had remained neutral during some or all of the moral battle against Hitler's evil chimed in that they had helped, too, by killing this latter day Kaiser with their mouths.)
More accurately, the Allies had survived : calling it 'winning' was going more than a bit too far.
The Soviet Empire was in ruins, with its population base and physical superstructure permanently damaged.
Its 1939 belief that the capitalist nations would fight it out during WWII, while the Soviets stayed neutral awaiting the inevitable triumph of a wonderful world of Communism was revealed to be hopelessly wrong.
Its buoyant pre-war self confidence in the rightness of the Soviet cause was pretty well gone by 1947.
Over the next 45 years, it slowly, slowly, slowly slip down into third world conditions by the time the empire formally imploded in 1992.
The British Empire of 1939 - holding 25% of the world - the biggest and richest ever seen - began formally collapsing much earlier, in fact the day Labour was elected in July 1945.
But for many Britons and their world-wide admirers, the bounce had gone out of the Anglo strut around the time of the Fall of Singapore.
America in 1939 had said it had no Empire and wished only to live apart and above the worldly fray.
It instead ended up as the world's policeman - at such a high cost in terms of money and moral certitudes - that is still dragging itself ever downwards today.
But let's rehearse all the good things that came out of of WWII , at least as 1945 saw it.
Victory ( see above) .
Jet planes - jet fighter planes with radar , atomic bombs, proximity fused shells and napalm.
Rockets - with atomic bombs.
Nuclear powered submarines - armed with atomic missiles.
Cheap ,clean power from atomic power plants. Energy too cheap to meter, with radiation levels too low to monitor.
Plastics, lots of plastics and other synthetic chemicals.
Chemical insecticides - based on nerve gas and the gases used at Auschwitz.
The United Nations for peace - with an absolute veto over any possible action for peace handed over to the only nations powerful enough to cause a serious war.
And penicillin.
Penicillin and other life-saving antibiotics.
That's my case .
Please add your choices for the best news out of WWII in the comment section below.....
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