At 11:00 a.m. in London, the ultimatum expired like a clock running out of mercy. Eleven is a polite hour—late enough for tea, early enough for errands—but on Sunday, September 3, 1939, it became a hinge on which a century swung. The British government had told Berlin: withdraw from Poland, or war follows. The hour …
At 9:02 a.m. on September 2, 1945, the morning in Tokyo Bay felt like a held breath. The sea was pewter under an overcast sky, the air still with that strange quiet that follows thunder. Allied battleships and carriers crowded the water like punctuation marks at the end of a very long sentence, their decks …
It began with a sound that didn’t belong to morning. In the gray just before sunrise on September 1, 1939, roosters and church bells and the first clatter of carts should have owned the air of Poland. Instead there was concussion—steel on silence—when the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish Military Transit Depot …
