Article: What is lost? What happens to history when those who lived it can no longer tell their stories?(SPECIAL REPORT)(World War II veterans)(Report)

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The statistics are as stark as mortality itself: of the 16,112,566 American veterans of the Second World War, fewer than 2.5 million remain alive. With another 311,000 projected to die this year, they are passing at the rate of 852 a day, or 35 an hour, or about one every two minutes. Sometime around Christmas 2014, the number will dip below one million, according to demographic tables compiled by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and a decade later, in 2024, fewer than 100,000 will remain. In 2036, the latest year for which figures have been calculated, the cohort that fought and won the most destructive war in human history will be ...

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