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heavy casualties in Italy and north-west Europe. ‘We, the Poles in uniform integrated into the British armed forces, became an ugly sore on the English conscience,’ wrote Pilot Officer B. Lvov. In 1945 such people found themselves pariahs, for the crime of rejecting a Stalinist puppet regime in their own country. The Poles ended the war as they began it, human sacrifices to the 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 the military means to save ninety million people of the eastern nations 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.

In the victorious nations, simple people greeted the outcome of the struggle as a triumph of virtue over evil, heedless of the fashion in which liberation was blighted in many parts of the world. Painted high on the walls of several adjoining houses in housewife Edie Rutherford’s Sheffield street were the words GOD BLESS OUR LADS FOR THIS VICTORY. She and her friends spoke of Churchill: ‘Everyone agreed that we have been well blest in having such a leader. I felt once again great gratitude for being born British.’

Millions of humble folk thought not of global issues, but of movingly personal causes for gratitude. On 7 September 1941, nineteen-year-old gunner Bob Grafton, an east Londoner, had written to his adored girlfriend Dot before embarkation for the Far East: ‘Darling I know that you will wait for me. Darling do you know this. I swear that as long as we are apart I will never never touch another woman either physically or mentally. I do mean that Dot an awful lot … Yours Ever, with Love and Devotion so deep that the fires burn even in sleep, Bob.’ Before Singapore fell, Grafton escaped by junk to Sumatra, then lived wild in the jungle until he was captured by the Japanese in March 1942. Having survived a bondage which included two years on the Burma railway, in September 1945 he wrote to Dot from a homeward-bound troopship: ‘This I know: that it was you of the two of us who had the more difficult task. For I am a man (perhaps prematurely) and men must fight and women must weep. So my share was no exception, yours was … Even if we have lost four years we’ll make life so that it is never regretted.’ Grafton’s story had a happy ending: he married his Dot, and they lived happily ever after.

Gunner David McCormick had been captured in North Africa in December 1941, and spent more than three years in Italian and German PoW camps. A few days after VE-Day his wife met him at Salisbury station. ‘He was very thin, very pale and had the most enormous bump on his forehead. I wore a blue dress with white spots and bows on it, for which I had given several clothing coupons. I can’t remember if we kissed. I don’t think so, not until a little later on when we stopped on the back way to Ditchinhampton. We were both very nervous. He apologised for the bump, explaining that on his first night of freedom some Belgians had entertained a whole bunch of prisoners rather too enthusiastically, and afterwards he had met up with an anti-tank trap. He talked a great deal … He so desperately wanted to get four years “in the bag” off his chest as quickly as possible.’

Many others, however, returned home to discover that old ties were shattered, former passions extinct; they were obliged to content themselves with their own survival. For more millions, there was no return at all: the previous autumn Kay Kirby had become a presumed widow at twenty-one when her husband, a navigator in Bomber Command, was reported missing over Germany. In the absence of an identified corpse, she nonetheless clung to hope. ‘For years I expected George to turn up. I couldn’t reconcile myself to the fact that he wasn’t coming back … Before George started his tour when he came back on leave unexpectedly,