Sublime

As punishment for siding with the Germans, Finland ended up giving Russia 10 percent of its territory. This included much of agriculturally rich Finnish Karelia; almost a hundred power stations; great tracts of forest; and, crucially in terms of its economy, the port of Vyborg.

The increasing rate of shipping lost to Austrian and German submarines caused the employment of some of the MAS armed with guns as submarine hunters.

Police Chief E. Francis Riggs

Roosevelt’s approval of the Pétain government, like his order to evacuate Japanese Americans from their homes along the Pacific coast, and arguably his failure to disrupt German concentration camps, reveals a side of the president’s personality that is difficult to explain.

was a dead British orator and writer who was on my mind. Edmund Burke said the problem with war is that it usually consumes the very things that you’re fighting for—justice, decency, humanity—and I couldn’t help but think of how many times I had violated our nation’s deepest values in order to protect them.

Between 1940 and 1942, only 11,228 Germans were killed by Allied bombing. From January 1943 to May 1945, however, a further 350,000 perished, along with unnumbered tens of thousands of foreign POWs and slave labourers.