World War II was the most destructive conflict in history. More than 50 million people were killed. The conflagration touched six continents and all the globe’s oceans. It was the
Second
World War only in chronology; in everything else, the war of 1939–45 outdid that of 1914–18.

The pages following bear witness to that war. They are not a shot-by-shot history of the 1939–45 conflict, but the communication of what it felt like to live and fight in that time – be it as a Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain, a GI in a foxhole on Okinawa, a
Frontsoldaten
in the inferno of Stalingrad, a woman worker at an aircraft plant, a tank gunner at Sidi Rezegh, or a US Marine in boot camp. Some of the witnesses are leaders of men (and women), but in general I have selected the ground-eye view of events.

I have also consciously chosen words of testimony; that is, accounts of the holocaust against the Jews. The holocaust is the cruellest proof of the barbarity of Nazism. It reminds us that World War II was not a mere military happenstance, but a struggle for the soul of civilization. In the words of Herbert Mitang, for the Allies at least, World War II was “the good war”. An Axis victory would have turned the world's clock to a moral Middle Ages.

This is not to say that the Allies were saints (think of the RAF’s fire-bombing of Dresden; racial segregation in the US’s armed forces), nor all the Axis forces sinners. It is just their masters were. What follows is the war of 1939–45 in all its brutality, glory, cock up, courage, inspiration and destruction.

Originally I had intended to include eyewitness accounts of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the slide of the world into war, but even a book this size struggles to contain the main events, campaigns and theatres of war itself. (Some omissions are inevitable, but I hope few.) A little context is therefore in order.

Musing on the 1919 Treaty of Versailles which concluded World War I, Marshal Foch of France remarked, “It is not peace, it is an armistice for twenty years.” The Marshal was right to the year. The terms of Versailles were punitive, demeaning, and left Germany shorn of considerable amounts of territory, money, the right to bear arms and, in the war-guilt clause, national honour. The new Germany was rackety and ashamed, thus wide open to a demagogue who promised economic stability, the restoration of German pride and geopolitical position. A more enlightened Treaty might have left Adolf Hitler as a small-time beerhall orator in Munich.

Instead Hitler assumed power in January 1933, and wasted little time in installing dictatorship at home and land-grabs abroad. This should not have surprised anyone, for he was as bad as his word, as given in his 1925 manifesto,
Mein Kampf.
Unfortunately, Hitler’s bent for territorial acquisitions – the demilitarized Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia – tended to be encouraged by the democratic powers of Europe under the naive policy of “appeasement”. The reasons for appeasement were various: some in Europe saw Hitler as a useful bulwark against Stalin’s Russia, some hoped that by sacrificing Czechoslovakia, Hitler’s territorial appetite would be satisfied.

After so many green lights, it was with some surprise that, in September 1939, Hitler found France and Britain determined to defend the territorial integrity of Poland. Because, as even the most gullible Anglo-French politician had been finally forced to concede, there was no limit to Hitler’s demands. He had to be stopped sometime. Poland wasn’t the issue; it was the pretext.

The Nazi invasion of Poland allowed the German Army to hone its theory and practice of “blitzkrieg” (lightning war), the connected use of air and armour in decentralized offensives. The
Wehrmacht
of early World War II was arguably the most accomplished professional army of all time, not least in the calibre and training of its officers and NCOs. Moreover, behind the
Wehrmarcht,
the armed SS, the
Kriegsmarine
and (which in combined strength numbered 2.75 million at the outset of war, rising to 6 million at peak) stood an economy geared to military endeavour: in 1939 Germany poured an extraordinary 20 per cent of its gross national product into armaments. Small wonder, then, that when the
Wehrmacht
turned west and north in May 1940 it bested France, Belgium, Holland, Norway and Denmark, plus the British expeditionary forces sent to aid them, in such dramatic fashion. The
Wehrmacht
of 1940 accomplished the invasion of France in six weeks; the army of the Kaiser hadn’t managed it in four years. By the end of June 1940 Britain was the only force in the world still standing against Hitler and Mussolini. A prospective invasion of the UK was then rebuffed in the air “Battle of Britain”, but that country was powerless to lift the Nazi occupation of mainland western Europe and was hard pressed in the theatres where it did conflict with the Axis, North Africa and Greece. Conversely, the
Kriegsmarine
was unable to break the power of the Royal Navy in the sea lanes around Europe.

If the war had continued with these combatants only, it might have lasted indefinitely. However, 1941 brought more nations to the fray. On 22 June Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. The attack was largely compelled by ideology – Hitler wanted
lebensraum
(living space) for Germans in the east – although the Russian oil reserves in the Caucasus tantalized. Despite the
Wehrmacht
great victories, reaching to the very suburbs of Moscow in late 1941, the Russian campaign never boded well. Hitler expected the Soviet Union to collapse like a rotten shack (“You have only to kick the door in”, he informed one field marshal), whereas even the considerable military ineptitude of Stalin was unable to undo the Soviet Union’s natural strengths: almost unimaginable manpower and limitless space. The Red Army lost some 1.75 million men in the first two months of fighting, but kept finding more reserves.
Wehrmacht
General Haider lamented in the War Staff diary in August 1941: “We reckoned with about 200 enemy divisions. Now we have already counted 360.” Even the Red Army’s retreats caused the
Ostheer,
as the
Wehrmacht
in the East was termed, severe problems, since they overextended its lines of communication and supply. More, Nazi brutality rebounded spectacularly in Russia; had Hitler urged his generals to promulgate the war there “with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness”. In practice, this meant that Russian prisoners of war were routinely massacred. The effect on the Red Army was to make it fight harder. For what had it to lose?

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