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in the First World War, particularly regarding armoured vehicles. The evident rise of Nazi Germany during the 1930s did spur British rearmament, but when Britain went to war again in September 1939, there was no denying that it was woefully unprepared to face the might of Germany’s new army and air force, which now ranked as the best in the world. (Britain’s one saving grace in these early days of the conflict was the Royal Navy, which still wielded great power on the waves.)
    Here is not the place, nor the space, to present a history of those apocalyptic years between 1939 and 1945. Suffice to say that the Second World War evolved into what was a ‘total war’, a conflict in which the combatants aimed to destroy the entire military, civilian and cultural infrastructure of the enemy. The fighting was also truly global. What started as a Northern European war spread through the Mediterranean, the Balkans, North Africa, into the Baltic States and the Soviet Union. Once Japan began its own campaign of conquest in late 1941, bringing the United States into the conflict (and widening the British theatre of operations considerably), the war zones reached out across the Pacific Ocean, from the northern coastline of Australia to the Aleutian Islands, and from humid jungle trails in Burma to sun-bleached atolls thousands of miles from continental Asia. One frequently overlooked aspect of the conflict is the war between Japan and China that had been waged on the Chinese mainland since 1937. By 1945, that aspect of the broader war had cost the lives of 20 million people.
    It must also be remembered with solemnity that the estimated Soviet war dead numbered about 25 million. The war on the Eastern Front was conducted with a level of brutality and lack of pity rarely experienced anywhere else. The Soviet Union lost more people in the first weeks of the German invasion than Britain and the United States did in the entire war. German Einsatzgruppen (Special Purpose Units) also began to implement the first stages of the Holocaust in 1941 and 1942, conducting the mass executions of 1.1 million Jews in woods, forests, gardens and ravines. The Eastern Front had a voracious appetite for German manpower – more than 70 per cent of Germany’s casualties were taken in this theatre, some 3 million soldiers.
    Looking back to Britain, the Second World War was a turning point in the nation’s political and military history. Between 1939 and 1941, it seemed touch and go whether the nation would survive at all. Hitler’s army had conquered virtually the whole of Western Europe by June 1940, the BEF dispatched to France defeated and ejected from Dunkirk. Only the Channel separated German forces and free Britain, which now stood quite alone on the periphery of Europe. In the summer of 1940, Hitler pitted his Luftwaffe (air force) against the Royal Air Force (RAF), attempting to rid the island nation of its air cover in preparation for a planned invasion. The Battle of Britain, as it is now called, was an incredible victory for the British, bought at a heavy cost in both British and German aviators. (Within the category of ‘British’, we here must include the many foreign pilots who flew for the RAF, including those fighting in exile from their own Nazi-occupied countries, such as the Poles and the Czechs.) It rendered (alongside the undiminished power of the Royal Navy) a German invasion impossible, although by the autumn of 1940 Hitler’s strategic focus was swinging to the east rather than the west. Nevertheless, truly awful days were ahead for the beleaguered British. The Luftwaffe unleashed the ‘Blitz’, a campaign of strategic bombing against British cities that ran until May 1941. Sporadic air attacks on the British mainland, plus a vicious V-1 and V-2 missile campaign from 1944, continued until nearly the end of the war. What this meant was that death came as much to Britain’s civilians as it did to its military – more than