May 8th, last week, was Victory in Europe, or VE Day. It is a public holiday across much of Europe. This year’s is a bit different. It marked 80 years since the end of World War II in Europe, after Germany’s unconditional surrender. On VE Day this year, I thought about two memories from my own, relatively short, life. One was of all the people I met who fought in the war, but particularly a man my family knew as Uncle Ned.

He was a quiet and reserved man. But during World War II, he fought all over Europe as a tank commander in the Canadian army. In Italy, he took part in the exceptionally brutal Battle of Ortona, in the Abruzzo region, in December 1943. Before the war, Ortona was, as it is today, a picturesque seaside town. Fighting between the Canadians and the German Wehrmacht destroyed much of the town. This led to it attracting numerous sobriquets, including the Italian Stalingrad. Uncle Ned won a Military Cross there, for holding a bridgehead over the Moro River.

The next year, 1944, he arrived in northern France a few weeks after D-day. He fought through Normandy, including in the Battle of Falaise. In August, his tank was destroyed, but he managed to escape it. Uncle Ned was very short. He attributed his survival through the war to his stature making it easy for him to crawl out of a tank. Much later in life, he would be awarded the Légion d’honneur for his actions in France.

The other memory I think back to was watching a documentary about World War I with my father. The documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old, was produced and directed by Peter Jackson, of Lord of the Rings fame. Jackson, and the crew working on the film, found, restored and colourised a wealth of previously unseen film footage of the war.

Jackson was inspired to make the film by his grandfather, who fought during World War I. My dad is about the same age as Jackson. He was born in 1960, and Jackson was born in 1961. He was quite emotionally engaged throughout the entire film. Like Jackson, he knew people, even relatives, who fought in World War I personally. That was his grandparents’ generation too.

I do not have the same connection to that war as my father does. The last surviving combat veteran of World War I was Claude Choules. He served in the Royal Navy, and died in 2011, when I was 15. The much better-known Harry Patch was the last man alive to have served in the infamous trenches that Jackson’s film focused on. He died in 2009, when I was 13.

Unlike my father, I never knew anyone personally who had served in World War I. Instead, I learned about the war through lessons at school, books, educational documentaries, and the war’s permeation through popular culture in the Anglosphere. Because of the use of modern weaponry, like tanks and planes, during the war, and the film footage we have of it, World War I seemed fairly modern to me. It was not the Napoleonic Wars, or even the more contemporary Boer War.

But my relationship to it is completely different to World War II. World War I, to me, is history. I learned about it not directly from people who were there, but from others. But World War II is not like that. To me, it is memory. I could see, and speak to, the people who fought in it. They were real to me, and so was the war. Ortona and the Battle of Passchendaele, which took place in 1917 on the Western Front, were both ferocious. But I can feel Ortona in a way that I just cannot feel Passchendaele.

Now that it has been 80 years since World War II has ended, my generation will probably be the last to have this relationship with the biggest conflict in human history. There are people who relate to World War II in the same way as me across the entire world. Not just the UK or Canada. But all of Europe, the US, China, Korea, Japan, Australia, India, Indonesia, the Philippines. Even as far off as Brazil, there were people my age who would have known World War II veterans personally, and been able to see the war through their eyes.

There are still surviving World War II veterans. I expect there will continue to be for at least another decade. But they are dwindling in number. Edward Amy, my Uncle Ned, died in 2011, at the age of 92. He was 21 when Canada entered the war in 1939, and 25 in Ortona. An 18-year-old on VE Day would now be almost 100. Relatives of mine who are even just 10-15 years younger than me, about my age when Uncle Ned died, have probably never met someone who fought in the war.

It is still hard to think of a more significant event than World War II. It cemented many of the contemporary world’s borders, and gave rise to numerous post-war conflicts. The Israel-Palestine and India-Pakistan conflicts, now in the news, both trace their lineage to World War II’s immediate aftermath. China’s ruling party, the CCP, gained its strength and support from resisting the Japanese invasion of China during the war. After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, both Russia and Ukraine invoke their fights against Nazi Germany in the ongoing war.

World War II also gave us nuclear weapons. The presence of massive nuclear arsenals makes another war like that inconceivable. When vicious conflicts today happen, like in Ukraine, Gaza, or Kashmir, they are regional, contained by the threat of Armageddon. These conflicts divide, rather than unite. They compete for column inches and screen time in today’s attention economy.

But the same threat means that a global great power war risks being devastating beyond even what we saw before. World War II is now fading from memory, and into history. But World War III exists in the realm of imagination, or perhaps more accurately, nightmares.