'How naive we seem': US newspaper looks back at what its editors wrote on the day WW II began

On the 80th anniversary of World War II, a US newspaper in an editorial looked back on 1 September, 1939  — the day the first official action by Adolf Hitler-led Nazi Germany started the conflict — when the first Luftwaffe bombers flew over Wielun, a small town in western Poland of no particular importance even as the paper’s then editors remained unconvinced that Hitler’s threats of war would actually manifest into reality. [caption id=“attachment_7264111” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] American troops during World War II. Reuters[/caption] “They certainly knew that war was possible — Hitler himself had been threatening it for months, even years,” the editorial in The Roanoke Times stated. However back then they wrote that the dispute between German and Poland “seems to be resolving itself into a note-writing contest rather than the armed conflict which all feared for a time was inevitable.” “How naïve we seem through the hindsight of history. We now know 1 September, 1939, as a scar in history, one that the world still bears,” the editorial noted. “…on the day it all began, Americans blissfully went about their business, convinced that what happened across the ocean did not concern them.” Even after news of the bombing, the editorial page of the time seemed skeptical that it would lead to the outbreak of a wider war. “‘What the navies of the rival antagonists do to one another on the high seas is no concern to Uncle Sam’” the editorial the next day reassured readers.