It is a truth universally acknowledged that, at some point in their descent into middle age, every middle-aged, middle-class American man becomes a little too interested in the history of one of two all-encompassing wars. Invariably, those wars are World War II and the American Civil War, and I am unashamed to relate that, at the tender age of 39, this transformation has begun to happen to me, too.
Perhaps because I am originally British — and because both my father and his father served in the Royal Air Force — it had thus far been World War II that had attracted the lion’s share of my attention. This fascination started, as it so often does, with Winston Churchill, and then morphed swiftly into other areas. My grandfather fought in North Africa, and then up into Italy, including at Monte Cassino. My other grandfather served aboard ships in the North Atlantic. At first, I ranged into the details out of a desire to know what that was like, but then one thing led to another and I became swept up in the whole thing, from the Sudetenland to Singapore. I apologetically told my wife that I’d become one of those guys, and that, on balance, I suspected that my war would be the more recent one of the pair.
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