For an event that was wholly created in the poisonous psychological warfare kitchens of the Second World War, run by the ministries of propaganda in many countries, not just by the British or the Americans, but also the Russians and undoubtedly the world Jewish organizations.
In my experience of the men of action I have met – whether from the Second World War or Iraq or Vietnam – they often had to do things that they would rather not reflect upon afterwards. This is perhaps one reason why the story of the Bielskis remained untold for so long.
During the Second World War, the Cote d’Azur as a holiday destination closed down, but once the Allies had liberated the coast in 1944, the Riviera’s infrastructure grew rapidly.
During the Second World War, we lived in a flat on Whitechapel Road in the East End of London. At one point during the blitz, the air-raid sirens went off every night for 30 nights, and each time, my parents would grab my sister and me and take us to the shelter beneath Whitechapel underground station.
My parents had three kids right after the Second World War, and we were all sort of sickly. Then I had a fourth sibling, with very serious asthma. The medical bills… So my parents always struggled.
The U.S. dropped more high explosives on Vietnam than the Allies used on Germany and Japan together in the Second World War.
Ever since the Second World War, television signals (as well as FM radio and radar) have served as Homo sapiens’ emissaries into deep space. High-frequency, high-power broadcasts have filled an Earth-centered bubble more than 60 light-years in radius with signals.
Since the end of the Second World War, our population has more than doubled to 27 million people.
Warsaw’s historic heart was deliberately almost entirely destroyed towards the end of the Second World War by the German occupying troops. After the war, it was painstakingly rebuilt and that reconstruction is perceived as expressing the nation’s determination to survive, to conserve its history and its culture.
I actually collect old First and Second World War memorabilia.
The dramatic wish of Romanians at the end of the Second World War was to be occupied by the Americans and not by the Russians.
In the case of the second world war the distorting factor is not poetry but our seemingly insatiable need to view the war through the prism of national mythology.
I studied history at university, so I’m always quite fascinated by the Second World War and France. That’s one of my interests.
I don’t really think much about how I would have fared in the Second World War. It’s a topic that has to be treated with respect and subtlety, and you can’t just go in all guns blazing and make an epic action film.
My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor’s on the very day.
Vietnam was the first time that Americans of different races had to depend on each other. In the Second World War, they were segregated; it was in Vietnam that American integration happened in the military – and it wasn’t easy.
There has been a huge attack against private sector unions. Actually, that’s been going on since the Second World War.
Fifty years after half a million gypsies were exterminated in the Second World War – thousands of them in Auschwitz – we’re again preparing the mass killing of this minority.
The memory of the Second World War hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous.
American power remains today what it was in the Second World War and the Cold War: the greatest force for freedom in the world.
When the Second World War came to an end in Europe, my uncle Sir Alexander Korda was the first filmmaker to reopen offices in Germany and Austria.
At 11, I passed the scholarship – only just; I wasn’t very good at maths – to Ilford County High for Girls. When the Second World War started we were evacuated, first of all to Ipswich, and then to Aberdare, Queen of the Valleys, in south Wales.
When we dwell on the enormity of the Second World War and its victims, we try to absorb all those statistics of national and ethnic tragedy. But, as a result, there is a tendency to overlook the way the war changed even the survivors’ lives in ways impossible to predict.
There’s a tendency to locate the cliche of the ‘strong woman’ exclusively in the present day, as if those many women who endured such inconveniences as the Depression and the Second World War were porcelain compared to, say, Amy Schumer.
Norway was occupied by the Germans in the Second World War, and I’ve met a lot of people who had to live through that occupation in varying degrees.
My father was an air officer in the Second World War. My brother was a marine in Vietnam. When I was given this opportunity, I leapt at the chance because I thought it would be a hell of a lot more interesting than what my friends were doing.
