Antony Beevor
History is seldom tidy. Eras overlap and unfinished business from one period lingers into the next. World War II was a war like no other in the magnitude of its effects on the lives of people and the fates of nations. It was a combination of many conflicts, including ethnic and national hatreds that followed the collapse of four empires and the redrawing of borders at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I. A number of historians have argued that World War II was a phase of one long war lasting from 1914 to 1945 or even until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991—a global civil war, first between capitalism and communism, then between democracy and dictatorship.
World War II certainly brought the strands of world history together, with its global reach and its acceleration of the end of colonialism across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Yet despite sharing this international experience, and entering the same order built in its wake, every country involved created and clung to its own narrative of the great conflict.
Even the matter of when the war began is still debated. In the American telling, it started in earnest when the United States entered the conflict after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the German dictator Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States a few days later. Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, insists that the war began in June 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union—ignoring the joint Soviet and Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, which marks the start of the war for most Europeans. Yet some trace its origin back further still. For China, it began in 1937, with the Sino-Japanese War, or even earlier with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931. Many on the left in Spain are convinced that it began in 1936 with General Francisco Franco’s overthrow of the republic, launching the Spanish Civil War.
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