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There was a striking contrast between the attitudes of European and Asian peoples, who sought social and constitutional change as a reward for victory, and that of Franklin Roosevelt’s fellow countrymen, who were largely content with the society they had got. A New York Times writer observed sardonically about the American overseas: ‘Tea from the British and vin rouge from the French have only confirmed his original convictions: that America is home, that home is better than Europe.’ Ernie Pyle recorded the aspirations of soldiers whom he met before the invasion of Sicily, overwhelmingly dominated by the hunger to go home: ‘These gravely yearned-for futures of men going into battle include so many things – things such as seeing the “old lady” again, of going to college, of holding on your knee just once your own kid, of again becoming champion salesman of your territory, of driving a coal truck around the streets of Kansas City once more and yes, of just sitting in the sun once more on the south side of a house in New Mexico … It was these little hopes that made up the sum total of our worry rather than any visualization of physical agony to come.’

Men’s obsessive ambition to return to where they belonged became more emphatic when such ‘physical agony’ came. US Army nurse Dorothy Beavers wrote a letter for ‘a beautiful young man, a captain, who had lost both arms and legs. Yet he still seemed thrilled that he could say: “I’m going home.”’ When American machine-gunner Donald Schoo’s driver had a hand blown off, the man ran in circles yelling hysterically, ‘I’m going home! Thank you, God! I’m going home!’ A soldier who received a ‘Dear John’ letter from his spouse told a reporter: ‘Any guy overseas who says he’s in love with his wife tells a damn lie … He’s in love with a memory – the memory of a moonlit night, a lovely gown, the scent of a perfume or the lilt of a song.’

Isolation was a towering sensation, even for men serving amid legions of their compatriots. ‘I see all these thousands of lonely soldiers here,’ John Steinbeck wrote from the British capital in 1943 about the GIs on its streets. ‘There’s a kind of walk they have in London, an apathetic shuffle. They’re looking for something. They’ll say it’s a girl – any girl, but it isn’t that at all.’ Although soldiers often talk about women, under the stress and unyielding discomfort of a battlefield most crave simple pleasures, among which sex scarcely features. A US Marine Corps lieutenant colonel in the South Pacific fantasised about his ambitions on returning home: ‘I’m going to start wearing pyjamas again … I’m going to polish off a few eggs and several quarts of milk … A few hot baths are also in order … But I’m saving the best for last – I’m going to spend a whole day flushing a toilet, just to hear the water run.’

It is striking to contrast such modest ambitions, common to most soldiers of the democracies, with the martial enthusiasm of some of Hitler’s men, especially those of the Waffen SS, which persisted in surprising degree until the last months of the war. An American-born Italian woman wrote with mingled bewilderment, repugnance and fascination about two German officers she met in 1943: ‘They are the most highly specialized human beings that I have ever encountered: the “fighting man”. Both of them are under twenty-five; both have taken part in the campaigns of Poland, France, Russia – and now Italy. One of them, risen from ranks, commanded for six months a company of Russian deserters … It is impossible to convey the depth of conviction in his voice, while he expounded to us the familiar doctrines which had been taught him: the needs of Gross Deutschland, Nordic racial superiority, the inevitability of Germany’s entry into the war (in spite of all Hitler’s efforts to make peace with England), his pride in his country and his men, and above all his unshakeable certainty, even now, of victory.’

It is an enduring enigma, how a German army overwhelmingly composed of conscripts, as much citizen soldiers as were their Allied counterparts, should