His bitterness was justified: he and almost 150,000 of his compatriots had fought gallantly with the allied forces, suffering heavy casualties in Italy and North-West Europe. A Polish pilot named Lvov wrote: ‘We, the Poles in uniform integrated into the British armed forces, became an ugly sore on the English conscience’. In 1945 he and his comrades suddenly found themselves pariahs, for the crime of rejecting a Stalinist puppet regime in their own country, for whose freedom Britain and France had gone to war in September 1939. The Poles ended the war as they began it, human sacrifices to realities of power; Anders, Lvov and many of their comrades chose exile in the West rather than return home to Soviet subjection and probable execution. The Americans and British had delivered half Europe from one totalitarian tyranny, but lacked the political will and military means to save ninety million people in the East from falling victim to a new, Soviet bondage that lasted almost half a century. The price of having joined with Stalin to destroy Hitler was high indeed.
Some modern historians who are citizens of nations that were once European possessions regard their peoples as victims of wartime exploitation. They suggest that Britain, especially, engaged them in a struggle in which they had no stake, for a cause which was not properly theirs. Such arguments represent points of view rather than evidential conclusions, but it seems important for Westerners to recognise such sentiments, as a counterpoint to our own instinctive assumption that our grandparents fought ‘the Good War’.
Within Western culture, of course, the conflict continues to exercise a fascination for generations unborn when it took place. One obvious explanation is that within the vast compass of the struggle, some individuals scaled summits of courage and nobility, while others plumbed depths of evil, in a fashion that compels the awe of posterity. Among citizens of modern democracies to whom serious hardship and collective peril are unknown, the tribulations which hundreds of millions endured between 1939 and 1945 are almost beyond comprehension. Almost all those who participated, nations and individuals alike, made moral compromises. It is impossible to dignify the struggle as an unalloyed contest between good and evil, nor rationally to celebrate an experience and even an outcome, which imposed such misery upon so many. Allied victory did not bring universal peace, prosperity, justice or freedom; it brought merely a portion of those things to some fraction of those who ha d taken part. All that seems certain is that allied victory saved the world from a much, much worse fate that would have followed the triumph of Germany and Japan. With this knowledge, seekers after virtue and truth must be content.