For this week, ending on May 11th in 1975, news was about the last Americans and press evacuated from Cambodia. The stories now coming out about the atrocities and the takeover by the Khmer Rouge. In South Vietnam, the Tsunami of refugees was still on, with stories of over-flowing boats and chaos and confusion.

So confusing, that the story came out of the last two Marines, killed in Vietnam were still somewhere in a Saigon hospital morgue, waiting to be picked up. Reports also came in that Laos was facing a Communist takeover, based on the elections recently held.

And that was the picture from Southeast Asia.

Meanwhile, it was reported Senator George McGovern was visiting Cuba and talk of the OAS preparing to drop sanctions against the Castro government, sometime during the Summer.

Egypt was moving to finally clear the Suez Canal of wrecked ships leftover from the 1967 War.

And on this week it was 30 years since VE day, and many comparisons were being drawn between the end of that conflict and the one just recently ended in Vietnam.

All in a week, ending May 11, 1975 as reported on The World This Week from CBS Radio.

(Sixty-nine years ago on this day, the world became a different place)

The event is fading from view because the participants are slowly fading away themselves. The world has changed in infinite ways since it was December 7, 1941. War is still the same though - that will never change. How it's waged has changed, but the politics haven't. The enemy has changed, but the armies of refugees and innocent loss of life is the same.

George Putnam (NBC News): “The flame of ruthless war is burning clear around the world tonight, set off by a wanton Japanese surprise attack on American Pacific outposts from Guam to Hawaii and on shipping off the continental coast of these United States.”

And that was then, this day sixty-nine years ago.