In the Iliad Homer calls all the fighting men “heroes,” even when they are behaving in a decidedly unheroic fashion on the battlefield. We do the same today. For the West and the former Soviet Union, the Second World War was a war of national survival. Victory was a clear and concrete objective. Few people questioned its purpose. It was a war in which ordinary people did their duty. Some did things of extraordinary bravery. Many did not. But today we look back on all those who fought in the Second World War as heroes, the Greatest Generation.
Even in lesser wars we tend to see soldiers as heroes—the British soldiers who fought in the South Atlantic in 1982, the coalition soldiers who fought in the Gulf War in 1991. There is good reason for this convention, or fiction. The pain of war is so great, the loss of young...