Many of the soldiers in the trenches of the Great War just wanted to go home. They didn't care a fig for their countries or their governments or even their regiments. You spend a couple minutes watching your countrymen getting chopped up by a heavy machine gun or a mortar bomb and see how long you wanna keep playing soldier.

At the beginning of WWII, say Nov. 12th, 1918, there were many thinking persons who thought that the world would not want to see the carnage and the stupidity and the mud of the recent unpleasantness ever again. What they didn't realize is that much of the world did not see it, as they tended to stay away from battlefields when on holiday or during their lunch hours. Those who had actually been in the mud didn't do much talking except to those who had been there because it's hard to describe horror to those who are too easily horrified. Besides, there was that pesky world-wide depression that came from somewhere and that nasty little influenza bug that killed more people than the war.

It is hard for us to remember now that there were people in Britain, France and the United States of America who thought that Franco, Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini were doing the right thing, making the trains run on time, tossing out the tossers, unsettling the established monarchies, irritating the churches, and getting the people to march in step in a very pretty manner. Even when they were in the military running around Europe setting things to rights, our boys very often found more to like in the enemy than they did in Churchill or Roosevelt. And what's truly funny is that their betters in the upper social classes agreed with them. There were a whole pile of people in the intelligentsia and the unintelligentsia who really liked the idea of goosestepping and social engineering for other people, though they were unlikely to put on a uniform for their own country, they were perfectly willing to encourage the Germans to wear their's, and the Poles to take theirs off, and the boys in the UK and the US could stay out of uniform because it JUST WASN'T A PROBLEM. Senor Hitler has his diplomatic and historical reasons for rearranging the map in his region. Every country has done it at some point or another in their history, it just happened to be his turn.

It's hard to tell when the whole thing went sour with the dons and entrepreneurs and the heavy thinkers. The merchants and the manufacturers weren't too unhappy to be selling things to the governments and militaries. The preachers and teachers weren't too unhappy to have a new evil to inoculate minds young and old against in the pursuit of truth, piety, and conformity. But the yellow evil of the war in the Pacific was easier to parody and personify than the white evil in Europe. If the Germans and Italians had been another colour, it might have made more sense. And the whole Russian thing must surely have been a mistake. Russia didn't have anything Germany needed, outside of oil, steel, wood, farmland, water, and a pile of peasants who weren't too happy being told their cow and pig and chicken had been collectivized. And what could Germany possibly have had against France? Czechoslavkia and Poland one could understand, but France?

But, thought some, if Hitler was bring order to places that had little of it, then reducing chaos was a good thing, weren't it? And others thought that rounding up the Jews was a pretty good thing, as one would rather have them all in one place instead of inveigling their way into the regular populace, doing lord knows what. And the homosexuals, well, they wouldn't have been caught if they hadn't been doing something they shouldn't.

There were those in the United States who felt that it was none of their busines what happened in the Old World. Many immigrants and children of immigrants had built new lives based on principles that they would not have been able to practice in the old countries. So, if the provincials in the place they left behind chose to continue to act the fool and kill each other for obscure and silly reasons, why should those who were fortunate to escape put their lives and their children's on the line for those who had chosen to remain behind, in the last century. Besides, there were plenty of Fascists in America that needed dethroning. Why take issue with another country's behavior when we couldn't get our own house in order?

Then the bombs started falling. Everything changed. A bomb knows nothing. It has no politics, no religion, no skin colour, no bank deposits. A bomb is a bomb is a bomb. Once the bomb builders and bomb flingers and bomb droppers got involved, all that was left was for the diplomats and other lawyers to wait for the smoke to clear before they began picking up the pieces so they could play chess again.