World War II continues to capture the imagination like no other conflict in history. A large part of this may well be because it is the most recent traditional war – as popularly imagined. Although any number of large-scale conflicts have arisen since then, none have been “traditional” as World War II has been. Most wars are between usually unequal powers. After all, no one bothers fighting unless they think they can win – or are forced to.

On the other hand, in WWII, though it started out as the usual big-power-attacks-small-power conflict, big powers – the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union – soon joined in and also the conflict expanded worldwide virtually overnight. Thus World War II was the kind of war we all know and even “love” – a “set-piece” conflict with a real good versus evil theme.

For most wars are over trifling matters; a hill here, a river there. World War II was literally a cultural war, where not just territory was at stake but the extremely nature of civilization itself, the form it would take for the next many decades or, even, as envisioned by Adolf Hitler, centuries.

It was a war to figure out the way of life that should exist in Europe, and by extension as the world’s center of geopolitical gravity at the time, the whole planet. One more factor accounting for the enduring appeal of World War II are the personalities of its leading antagonists.

There was Winston Churchill, an imperialist leading the charge against Hitler in the name of “freedom;” there was Roosevelt, a blue-blood with especially democratic beliefs allied with the imperialist Churchill and a totalitarian dictator no better than Hitler, Iosef Stalin from the Soviet Union, whose own anti-Semitic views and actions were simply overlooked. Then there was the gangster-king Chiang Kai-Shek in China and his equally brutal nemesis Mao Tse Tung, battling for control of one-fifth of humanity against the also-brutal cabal of military nationalists in Japan.