Another D-Day anniversary has come and gone.
This one was the 69th, and generally, not too much ado was made of it.
The in-between anniversaries get less and less attention. The Second World War is now far enough in the past that serious note is only taken every five years - soon we'll only bother at 10-year intervals, or not at all.
Anybody remember the end date of the Napoleonic Wars? Perhaps a handful of history majors do, but wars tend to lose their lustre after a 100 years or so, after all those who experienced them have passed into faded memories themselves.
But that's precisely why we should remember important dates like June 6, 1944.
And we should forestall the growing misconception that that date marks the end of the Second World War. It wasn't the end at all.
Not even close. Indeed, it barely marked the beginning of the end stage of the war.
The trek across Europe from the beaches of Normandy claimed tens of thousands of lives over the course of nearly a year, before the European armistices were signed - Italy on April 29, 1945, and the rest of Western Europe on May 7, 1945. Tens of thousands more had yet to die before the curtain was drawn on the Pacific theatre on Sept. 2, 1945.
Those are dates that hardly anyone brings immediately to mind. Perhaps they are more mundane than the date that launched the largest-ever sea-borne military assault - an assault that was not anywhere near as successful as we are commonly led to believe through movies and popular history.
But even the attention that D-Day commands is dwindling, as forgetfulness seems to grow. along with war.
