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Australians evacuate a casualty during the struggle on Papua-New Guinea's Kokoda Trail

(AP Photo/Press Association)

Chipping ice on an Arctic convoy

(AP Photo/Press Association)

Survivors of a U-boat sunk in the North Atlantic, April 1943. (Photo by Jack January/USCG Historian’s Office)

WRENS – women of the Royal Navy – push out a submarine torpedo for loading. Britain mobilised a larger proportion of its female population for war service than any other nation save Russia.

(Imperial War Museum A 19471)

Some of Chiang Kai-shek's unhappy soldiers, of whom more than a million died in their 1937-45 struggle against the Japanese

(Jack Wilkes/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

A retreating German on the Eastern front

(Keystone/Getty Images)

Collateral damage: Russia in 1943

(© The Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive at Krasnogorsk (RGAKFD)/N. Asnina)

Women riveters in an American dockyard

(CORBIS)

A twelve year-old Russian worker at the Perm aero engine factory

(ITAR-TASS)

The Red Army advances

(© The Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive at Krasnogorsk (RGAKFD)/Minkevich collection)

One of Zainul Abedin’s sketches from life – and death – of victims of the 1943-44 Bengal famine

(Courtesy of Mainul Abedin)

Italians with one of their would-be liberators

(US National Archives & Records Administration: 208-AA-240C-3)

Crewmen of the US carrier Intrepid bury comrades at sea

(US National Archives & Records Administration: 80-G-468912)

A Hellcat pilot quits his cockpit after a flight-deck mishap

(AP Photo/US Navy/Press Association)

Temporary reprieve: a British bomber crew returns from a raid on Germany during the strategic air offensive which killed more than half of the RAF aircrew who took part

The price of collaboration: a street scene in liberated France

(US National Archives & Records Administration: 111-SC-193318)

A Japanese family on Saipan encounter their first American

(US Marine Corps/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

One of Slim's bren-gunners in Burma

(Imperial War Museum SE 564)

Recovering wounded in France

(AP Photo/Press Association)

Jumping into Arnhem

(Airborne Assault Museum)

A Dutch child during his country's 'hongerwinter', 1944

(© Marius Meijboom/Nederlands Fotomuseum)

Hitler's last human resorts: Wehrmacht prisoners at the Rhine, March 1945

(Mirrorpix)

Soviet assault guns massed for the battle of Berlin

.

Ohrdruf concentration camp, April 1945

(AP Photo/Byron H. Rollins/Press Association)

Marines on Iwo Jima

(AP Photo/US Marine Corps/Press Association)

Hiroshima

(Alfred Eisenstadt/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Notes and References

References below to my own earlier works relate to material now lodged in the Liddell Hart Archive at King’s College London, here abbreviated as LHA. AI signifies Author Interview, meaning an eyewitness with whom I held conversations at some time over the past thirty-five years. IWM refers to manuscripts in the collections of the Imperial War Museum; BNA to the British National Archive; USNA to the United States National Archive; USMHI to the United States Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. References to Potsdam denote the magnificent multi-volume history Germany and the Second World War, published by the Research Institute for Military History in Potsdam, and translated by Oxford University Press. For this work, I have consulted a manuscript narrative and some papers of Air Vice-Marshal Sir Ralph Cochrane held by his son John. I have not provided references for statements by prominent figures which have been long in the public domain.

Introduction

‘These are strange times’ Anonymous A Woman in Berlin Virago 2009 p.35

‘Pfc Eric Diller’s battalion’ Eric Diller Memoirs of a Combat Infantryman privately published 2002 p.77

‘in January 1942 Hitler’ Helmuth von Moltke, ed. Beatte von Oppen Letters to Freya Collins Harvill 1991 p.204 24.1.42

Chapter 1 – Poland