If price is an issue, your best bet would be an outdoor cookout. You'd only have to worry about buying food for everyone, you can have multiple activities such as sack racing, watermelon seed spitting contests, slip and slide, Frisbee tag, and a lot more. You might even have leftover money for decorations and whatnot.
Happy Early Birthday, by the way. :).
Try to go lazer tagging or go to something like a theme park. If you want to invite a lot of friends use a group rate. Or else buy a lot of squirt guns at the dollar store and tell people to bring their own, and set up a big water gun game in your backyard with different things to use as cover etc..
I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.