ABSTRACT
The Second World War once seemed a simple event to explain. If it did not exactly boil down to one word – Hitler – the war was nevertheless the Germans’ war. Unlike the war of 1914, that of 1939 had a simple reducible core: Germany provoked war deliberately to overturn the Versailles Settlement of 1919 and win the continental hegemony denied it in 1914. Moreover, the Germany of 1939 was led by a party committed, so it seemed, to a demonstrably evil cause. Fighting Germany, and later Italy and Japan, was to fight on the side of good in the defence of democracy and freedom, against what President Roosevelt called ‘the forces endeavouring to enslave the entire world’ (Roosevelt, 1938-50: vol. 8, 639).
