The only reason I ask is because it seems a lot of young people don't have a clue about WWII. They don't know who Churchill was, have never heard of The Battle of Britain and many believe Adolf Hitler is a character from YouTube who has been banned from iSketch. And when I say young, I am talking about people in their 30s and 40s, not kids.

When I was a kid and the boys used to play war, the enemy was always the Germans. Sometimes there'd be a Japanese thrown in but mostly they were Germans.

These days, if health and safety allows boys to play war, I daresay the enemy is the Taliban. After all, the Second World War was a long time ago and people have changed, haven't they?

Why should kids run around gunning down other kids whose turn it is to play the bad guys and die spectacularly after being shot with pretend bullets? The Germans are now our allies and as a nation they go out of their way NOT to be involved in foreign conflict. They have learned their lesson when it comes to world domination and it's a pity we haven't. In fact, the Germany of today is a country to look up to and its people are not only friendly, they have a sense of humour (of sorts) too. Their football team isn't bad, either.

My father fought in a war that started over seventy years ago and ended six years later. The chances are that babies born today will never meet a man or woman who fought in that war, just as I will never again meet a First World War veteran.

Of course, when we talk of WWII, we invariably think of the Holocaust and the suffering and deaths of millions of innocent people as a result of a tyranical maniac's view of the world and the German people's place in it. Nazi Germany was defeated by the Allies, its cities were flattened and its leaders and henchmen committed suicide or died at the end of Albert Pierrepoint's rope, so should we stop commemorating events such as the Battle of Britain and D-Day? I mean, in his day Napoleon was just as big a threat as Hitler, but we tend to forget that little fact. How about the Boer War - does anyone really know what that was all about?

Perhaps when the last veteran of World War Two dies, we should consign the conflict to the drawer marked 'History' and accept the fact that wars of the last century are merely past events taught in classrooms.

History, after all, is just that. History.