In a letter to Josiah Quincy on September 11, 1773, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “There never was a good war or a bad peace.” Interesting thought. Interesting date. Studs Terkel wrote a book about World War II, which he called “The Good War,” a sentiment often felt, most probably because the enemies of World War II—Nazi Germany and militarist Japan—were of such evil character that anything done to defeat their imperial dreams was deemed good. In the aftermath, most Americans accepted that view, at least for a decade or two.

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Introduction
Background
Home Front
Resources
Chronology
Battles

But no one could ever claim that the war itself was anything but a horror; at its end at least 50 million human beings had perished—a level of destruction scarcely imaginable, even after the carnage of World war I. In 1939 when the war began in Europe, one had a sense that it was nothing but the latest round in an endless cycle of violence going back through the centuries—to the Hundred Years War, the Thirty Years War, the War of the Roses, the imperial wars and war of revolution—and only a fool could hope this would be the last war. Woodrow Wilson had dreamed of making the world safe for democracy, but now it seemed as if what happened at Versailles had merely made the world safe for totalitarian dictators or appeasers.

So once again the world was plunged into darkness, into the hideous abyss of destruction and despair, until on the other side the nations emerged to yet another world, full of uncertainty, shrouded by the clouds of radiation that floated across the heavens from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People wondered, “What will the next one be like?”

Here is information about the last world war.