Ask when the Second World War began and you'll get different answers depending on where you ask. A schoolchild in London will say September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. In Moscow, the real war — the Great Patriotic War — started in June 1941, when Hitler turned on the Soviet Union. In Beijing, it began in July 1937, at a stone bridge outside the city, where a missing Japanese private became the pretext for an escalation that would consume China for eight years. He turned up alive within hours. The war he triggered killed tens of millions.

None of these answers is wrong. The first lesson of hindsight is that there was no single experience of World War II. There were regional wars — Japan's conquest of China, Germany's bid for European dominance, Italy's Mediterranean ambitions — that fused, by 1941, into one global conflagration. When Germany invaded the USSR and Japan struck Pearl Harbor within six months of each other, separate fires became a single collision of industrial economies, ideologies, and empires.

The war as it happened

The arithmetic of the war is staggering and still routinely misremembered. Between 70 and 85 million people died — roughly three percent of everyone alive — and most of them were civilians, not soldiers. The Holocaust was deliberate: the systematic murder of six million Jews, carried out alongside — and sometimes at the expense of — the German war effort itself.

Western memory orbits D-Day, the Blitz, and the island campaigns of the Pacific. The numbers tell a different story. Roughly three-quarters of German military deaths occurred on the Eastern Front, where the Soviet Union absorbed the main weight of the German war effort at a cost of roughly 27 million military and civilian lives. Stalingrad, not Normandy, broke Germany's hopes of victory in the East; Normandy ensured that Western democracies, not only the Red Army, would shape the peace. In the Pacific, Midway in June 1942 gutted Japan's carrier fleet just six months after Pearl Harbor — the tide turned far earlier than the war's length suggests. And Japan's surrender in August 1945 followed not only Hiroshima and Nagasaki but a third shock often left out of the story: the Soviet declaration of war, which extinguished Tokyo's last hope of a negotiated peace.

Even the way we remember the war was shaped by what came after it.

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