I did note the fact that it was a humorous point, Joe.
But -- yikes! -- while I meant to say that England's war against Germany began in '39, it does look like I said they instigated it. That, of course, is not the case. Their declaration was a result of German aggression in Poland.
But my main point was that even though the War in Europe was a slaughter that saw the Germans dispatch Poland, a number of Balkan nations, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France in stupefying fashion and driving the British back to their home islands...it was not seen as a truly "global" conflict (or, another way of putting it, a "world" war) until the Americans joined in.
In a way, 1939 isn't really a good point for the "start" of WW2 either. It can be argued that the Munich Pact of 1938 sealed the inevitability (even if French and British leaders didn't notice at the time), but the Japanese and Chinese had been fighting since 1931 when the Japanese Imperial army invaded Manchuria. Couldn't that be a "start" to the war? I'd even go so far as to say that WW2 can be considered to have begun in 1919 when the Treaty of Versailles imposed such harsh conditions on Germany that it merely began the incubation process for another generation of Germans to avenge it.
As I read your response, we're not in disagreement. And I applaud you for your service in Korea. That was called everything but a "war" (which was exactly what it was) because only 5 years after WW2, some people felt uncomfortable to call it what it was. It should have been a reminder that the UN and politicians have no right waging war; however, we've seen from the actions in Vietnam, Desert Storm, Afghanistan (both with the USSR from '79-'88 and the U.S. since 2001) and Iraq that the lessons weren't understood. Not only were the people handling the Korean War afraid to get anybody offended when the U.S., China and the U.S.S.R. all had nuclear capabilities...the way they "ended" it was meek. The Korean War never ended; the fighting was stopped by a "cease fire" that is still in play today, some 56 years later. As a fellow vet, I want to applaud you, shake your hand and buy you a beer if we ever get to meet.
Of course, you probably had little to say about being sent to Korea (though I don't know for sure...were you drafted or did you volunteer?) or anything regarding the way it played out. Like myself in '91, we were soldiers who did as we were told and trained to do. Except I willingly enlisted out of high school (in peacetime) because I was after the college money. As the son of a 'Nam vet, the grandson of two WW2 grunts, the great grandson of a doughboy who went to France in '18 and the great-great grandson of men who served on both sides of the Civil War...it seemed like a worthwhile effort.
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