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By Root 1141 0

in Western democratic societies; and the slaughter of Europe’s Jews precipitated the 1948 creation of the state of Israel. Yet, if the Holocaust made a devastating and lasting impact upon Western culture, many other societies around the world have never identified themselves with its significance, and in some cases even deny its reality. Widespread bitterness persists that the Western Powers assuaged their own guilt about the wartime fate of the Jews by making a great historic gesture in lands identified by Muslims as rightfully Arab.

There is a wider issue: 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 that was not properly theirs. Such arguments represent points of view rather than evidential conclusions, but it seems important for Westerners to recognise these sentiments, as a counterpoint to our instinctive assumption that our grandparents fought ‘the Good War’.

Within Western culture, of course, the conflict continues to exercise an extraordinary fascination for generations unborn when it took place. The obvious explanation is that this was the greatest and most terrible event in human history. 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 that hundreds of millions endured between 1939 and 1945 are almost beyond comprehension. Practically 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 had taken part. All that seems certain is that Allied victory saved the world from a much worse fate that would have followed the triumph of Germany and Japan. With this knowledge, seekers after virtue and truth must be content.

Picture Section

Poles catch a first glimpse of the Luftwaffe

(Hulton Deutsch Collection/CORBIS)

Poland: the occupiers confront the occupied

(Instytut Pamieci Narodowej/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Finnish 'ghost soldiers'; and (below) a Russian, frozen in death

(Keystone/Getty Images)

Norway invaded

(akg-images/Ullstein Bild)

Dunkirk evacuated

(IAM/akg-images)

Parisians watch the Germans march in

(US National Archives & Records Administration: 208-PP-10A-3)

Coventry, November 1940

(Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

British gunners in North Africa

(Mirrorpix)

A German entertains a Frenchwoman who has discovered the virtues of collaboration

(Paul Almasy/akg-images)

Mass execution of Russian Jews by SS Einsatzgruppen D, c.1942. (Library of Congress, Washington D.C.)

Wartime food meant different things to different peoples. In America (above) a family celebrates Thanksgiving 1942, in a belligerent nation where hunger remained unknown

(Bettmann/CORBIS)

Starving man with bread ration in Leningrad, 1941–42. (akg-images)

A German discovers Russia's winter

(AP Photo/Press Association)

Victors celebrate at Bataan

(US National Archives & Records Administration, Washington D.C.)

Indian refugees on the flight from Burma which killed uncounted thousands

(George Rodger/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

American prisoners in the Philippines

(US National Archives & Records Administration, Washington: 127-N-114541)

War in the Pacific: Lexington's crew abandon ship during the battle of the Coral Sea

(AP Photo/Press Association)

Japanese soldiers killed on Guadalcanal, August 1942. (AP Photo/Press