In the other theatre of the war, North Americans have come to recognize that the defeat of Nazi Germany was more a matter of the huge Russian sacrifice on the Eastern Front than eloquent Churchillian resolve in the Battle of Britain, General Patton’s tanks, Jimmie Stewart’s bombing missions, the Normandy invasion and American heroism in Italy and at the Battle of the Bulge. It seems, for example, we have learned that there was more to the lead-up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor than was originally discussed in polite company and that Japan may have been provoked to make the first strike by an American administration which knew that no less an event would be needed to pull American citizens out of their preternatural isolationism. Over the past seven decades, some of the factual issues about the war have come under close scrutiny and the more-or-less official versions have been found wanting. Even many otherwise principled pacifists have difficulty denying that it was a “just war.” A primordial reaction of limitless disgust at Nazi atrocities remains, no matter how much I learn that the Allies were far from blameless. Only later did I allow myself doubts, and even now I am vaguely discomfited by those who declare that it was an immeasurable human tragedy and one that might have left the world no worse if it had not been fought. From John Wayne’s film “The Sands of Iwo Jima” to a cursory reading of the initial six-volume edition of Winston Churchill’s Nobel Prize-winning history, both the moral rationale for the conflict and the outline of its main events, causes and consequences seemed perfectly clear. As a boy growing up in rural Ontario, Canada in the wake of World War II, I was open to all the popular mythologies about what some people now call the “last good war” (Weber, 2008).
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