ABSTRACT
Pace revisionist historians, World War II was an ideological war. As early as September 1, 1939, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, told the House of Commons that the Allies had no quarrel with the German people, only with the Nazi Government. In 1943, the future Poet Laureate Cecil Day Lewis, parodying official appeals in ‘Where are the War Poets?’, understated what many felt:
It is the logic of our times, No subject for immortal verseThat we who lived by honest dreams Defend the bad against the worse.
