I have tried to make this the story of ‘everyman’s war’, a bottom-up rather than top-down account. I have focused on the experiences of such people as a British landgirl, an elderly Hamburg housewife, Russian soldiers, American sailors and British aircrew, rather than on the great men, about whom I have written extensively elsewhere. I have focused upon events about which there seem new things to be said at the expense of battles like Normandy and Arnhem, exhaustively explored by hundreds of writers, and indeed in my own earlier books.
Under fire, the hell of bombardment, most people focused upon immediacies and loyalties towards each other. Their hopes and fears became elemental, as described by British Lt.Norman Craig in the desert: ‘Life was so free of all its complexities. What a clarity and a simplicity it really had! To stay alive, to lead once more a normal existence, to know again warmth, comfort and safety- what else could one conceivably demand ? I would never chide circumstance again, never question fate, never feel bored, unhappy or dissatisfied. To be allowed to continue to live- nothing else mattered’.
The chances of achieving this simple purpose varied immensely from country to country and service to service: about 8% of all Germans died, compared with 14% of Soviet citizens, 2% of Chinese, 3.44% of Dutch people, almost 7% of Yugoslavs, 4% of Greeks, 1.35% of French, 3.78% of Japanese, 0.94% of British and 0.32% of Americans. Within the armed forces, 31% of Germans conscripted into the Wehrmacht died, 35% of the Waffen SS. Some 24% of Japanese soldiers were killed, and almost 20% of naval personnel. One Russian soldier in four died, against one in twenty British Commonwealth combatants and one in thirty-four American servicemen.
When the Western allies celebrated victory in Europe in May 1945, tens of millions of people under Stalin’s new tyranny continued to suffer appallingly. For instance, for two years after VE-Day, the NKVD waged a bloody counter-insurgency campaign in Poland and Ukraine, to impose Stalin’s will upon peoples consumed with bitterness about exchanging Nazi tyranny for that of the Soviets. Exiled Poles in the West were dismayed to be denied a place in London’s victory parade, because the new British Labour government declined to upset the Russians. Gen.Wladsylaw Anders wrote: ‘I felt as if I were peeping at a ballroom from behind the curtain of an entrance door through which I might not pass’. Shortly before Labour took office in July, Anders encountered the US ambassador and British foreign secretary Anthony Eden at a banquet: ‘They greet me politely but without enthusiasm. Since our only crime is that we exist and thereby embarrass Allied policy, I do not consider myself obliged to hide or feel ashamed’.