It was 80 years ago. The outbreak of the Second World War.

It was 80 years ago today. Even now with the passage of time the memories are still raw, vivid and for some unbearably painful. The outbreak of the Second World War on this day 80 years ago evokes the kind of images, sights and sounds that may never ever be forgotten nor erased from our consciousness..80 years later and some of us can only watch those harrowing TV documentaries with thick lumps in our throat. For some of us those we once loved and will always love in our hearts the greatest tragedy is that they'll never be able to tell the story again.

 There remains bitterness, a sense of enduring grief that may never go away, the needless suffering, the millions of lives lost, blown up, savagely murdered, sent to the gas chambers, tortured and humiliated, families crushed and buried under the ground in the most barbaric display of man's inhumanity to man and everybody Hitler decided wasn't good enough to draw breath.

When Neville Chamberlain waved those papers at a Munich airport declaring Peace in Our Time most of the world must have misguidedly assumed that all was well with both Germany and most of the planet. Tragically, a year later on September 3rd 1939 he regretted to inform us that this was not to be the case and subsequently that Britain was at war with Germany.

As the wailing air raid sirens blared out across London and the people of the world braced themselves for a prolonged period of conflict and battle, the popular opinion was that after what seemed like a brief sequence of skirmishes, it would all be over by Christmas 1939. But then things took a fatalistic turn for the worse. The horror would be unrelenting and deeply abhorrent.

After wiping out Poland and then rolling his tanks into both Western and Eastern Europe Hitler turned his thoughts to the rest of the world. Soon, the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht turned their deadly gunfire and heavy ammunition on those they believed were just getting in their way. The theme of world domination would come to define the sick ideologies of the Nazis.

For the next six years Hitler, with the assistance of his henchmen Goebbels, Himmler and Eichmann, battered and smashed their way through the far distant lands of the world, blasting and exploding, killing and maiming, looting and plundering, strangling the life blood from humanity as if it were something they were born to do.

So innocent men bravely signed up for the Royal Air Force, the British Army, the Royal Navy and all of the military installations that would become their home. Dressed up in the smart grey uniform of the time they would arm to themselves with rifles and bullets before committing themselves to the bloodiest six years of their lives. They would leave behind weeping girlfriends and wives who were naturally loathe to let their husbands and boyfriends go to war with the ever present threat that they would never ever come back again.

And yet amid all the destruction and death, the violent mayhem and pandemonium, there was a sense that none would live to see the day when peace and harmony would reign. We've all seen those burning buildings in the heart of Central London, tons of bricks and mortar tumbling to the ground and vast gashes in the once formidable masonry that had once held those houses and shops together so impregnably.

Of course it should never ever have happened. Of course it was unavoidable and we can only pray that history will never ever be repeated. For the Holocaust survivors this would also be the turning point in their lives. From that point onwards their lives would change dramatically, now the victims of oppressive dictatorships, mad men with wild tempers and even wilder moustaches. It was all so gruesomely unnecessary, this never ending torment, this constant state of uncertainty, persecution, a time of families torn apart, mothers never knowing when or if their husbands would ever survive and then there was the realisation that that sense of unfortunate estrangement and hurt would never heal.

But they survived those tyrannical tin pot dictators, they muddled through the hell and the very lowest points of depression because they just had to. They endured Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, the Sudetenland, Kristallnacht, the terrifying death camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Bergen Belsem, the cold, calculating manslaughter and, dare one say it, bestiality.

On a monumental scale the Second World War will still be heard, felt and sensed perhaps for ever more. For those who weren't born at the time, the stories are still re-told over and over again if only to re-emphasise their huge importance. We who are now grandsons can only shake our heads because we're not quite sure what to do or say. 80 years on and the political landscape is even harder to fathom. War may have been over but the men and women who sacrificed everything for us can never be thanked enough. We will always be eternally grateful since that's an obvious emotion. But we will never know why and it may be that even the greatest historians can no longer take this one any further.