The good war?

Jonathan Sumption admires the sweep and bravura  of Max Hastings’s account without agreeing with every word

The second world war is still generally regarded as the ‘good war’. In the moral balance, the cause of the Axis powers was so unspeakably bad that their adversaries have rarely had to justify themselves. But there is, perhaps, more to it than the moral balance. The second war has gained in public esteem by being everything that the first war was not. It was fought for recognisable and, on the whole admirable, objectives. It did not begin, as the first had, among the conspiratorial fumblings of European chanceries. It did not become an object in itself.

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Casualties among combatants were relatively light among the western allies, whose historians have tended to set the agenda, whereas everyone’s image of the first war is one of squalid mud trenches and pointless military massacre.