Charles, re the European Union rechristening World War Two as the “European Civil War”, it’s not just (as The Daily Mail’s report notes) the geographical myopia but the fundamental dishonesty of the characterization: If this were truly a “European Civil War”, it would have been over in nothing flat, because on the Continent of Europe every nation was either neutral, conquered, or on the wrong side. It’s hard to have a civil war with only one team. The only thing that makes it a “European” civil war at all is that, after the fall of France, one small island way out on the periphery off the continental shelf and its non-European empire declined to submit, and were eventually joined by its transatlantic ally. It was, in a certain sense (and putting Russia and Japan to one side), a “western civil war” between the Anglophone democracies and Continental Fascists – but for some reason that’s far less congenial an interpretation to EU myth-makers.
My mother’s family chose to emigrate to Canada after the war because their Belgian town had been liberated by Canadian troops. It’s a funny kind of “European civil war” that needs quite so many non-Europeans to do all the liberating.