World War 2 has left an indelible shadow on the latter half of the 20th and 21 centuries. The conflict’s scope, scale, and impact will likely be studied for hundreds, if not thousands of years, much like how the Peloponnesian War, or the Punic Wars, are still studied to this day in history classes. World War 2 was the culminating war at the height of industrialization in the west, and its impact on the dominant culture has been sewn into the very fabric of western civilization. With that, a lot of mythology has also been sewn into the fabric of the west because of the various myths about the war. The war itself has taken on an almost biblical, holy tale, something one might read about in the Book of Exodus. We fail to remember that the conflict that created World War 2 was just like any other conflict, it was driven by naked human interests, and not by morality, ethics, or ideals. These may have played a part in the course of the war, but the fact that there was conflict in the first place was due to general human nature, something that is relatively unchanging throughout the entirety of human history.
For a brief overview of the war, the war started in the early 1930’s in Asia, when Japan invaded the Republic of China, and in 1939 in Europe when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and triggered a defense pact treaty that the Allies had with Poland. Both of these conflicts were driven by the imperial and material interests of the governments of Japan and Germany respectively. Japan was seeking more territory for resources to build their economy up, and Germany was doing much the same by invading eastern Europe. Japan foolishly believed that the weak and ineffectual government of Chiang Kai-Shek would collapse if the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) invaded. Hitler believed something similar while he was invading eastern Europe, prepositioning his troops for an invasion of the Soviet Union, aiming to eventually take the oilfields in Azerbaijan to feed Nazi Germany’s economic development. The cassus belli for the war overall was one of resources, which the overall majority of conflicts throughout human history are based.
The involvement of the Allies, a predominately western coalition, aside from the Soviet Union, was about stopping conflict that would ultimately harm the national interests of the constituent nations. The UK initially became involved because WW1, the last major land war on Europe, got out of hand quickly in part due to an indecisive response by the British, leading to the grind of trench warfare from 1914 to 1918. The UK believed that if Nazi Germany could be stopped on the continent, wide scale bloodshed might be averted. This of course did not work out either, as the French had dug too far into doctrine of WW1, and had built their defense policy around built up bunker systems that the German Army simply bypassed. The UK home territory was bombed directly by German forces during the Blitz, so it isn’t too far fetched to understand that the UK would want to defeat Nazi Germany decisively to ensure they don’t strike the home islands again.
American involvement in the war was similarly due to being pulled into a wider conflict over national interests, and relations. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor because of competing economic and military interests in the western Pacific, believing that by striking America first, America would want to isolate itself further from any involvement in the Pacific. This was a gross miscalculation, as it incentivized the United States to wholly and totally dismantle the war machine (and by extension economy) of the nation that had conducted such a grievous attack. This is in contrast to the land war in Europe, which conversely America was fairly insulated from, as the German Navy was small, and did not have the range to mass enough forces to strike the eastern seaboard of the US. The involvement of the United States, much like the United Kingdom, was preemptive, as Germany had demonstrated that by conquering the majority of mainland Europe, they likely could be a threat in the future to the American mainland.
I say all of this not to say that the United States, the United Kingdom, or anyone else was not justified in their involvement in the war. However, the framing of the war, and the postwar framing of conflict in general, has been warped by a rather unique conflict in human history. The scope of the war is still, do this day, fairly incomprehensible to the average person. Any media about the war, at least in America, is framed from the perspective of the American infantry rifle squad, either in France, or on the islands of the Pacific. These American soldiers and Marines were fighting for truth, justice, and the liberty of oppressed peoples in the places they were fighting. The post war framing of conflict frames it as something which ought to be wholly and completely decided in one direction. Conflict isn’t something that ought to be settled through compromise, but rather one side completely dominating another side into absolute capitulation. Of course there is also the framing that all opponents are just as bad as the Nazis, or that war increases technological development due to the necessity for better weapons systems and equipment. All of this is mythos that only exists in the storytelling of history buffs and booksellers trying to earn a living.
The reality is that World War 2 was a conflict that had purely human motivations that led to its occurrence. The fact that the war was a large, and complex war, it only demonstrative in the fact that as human societies become more sophisticated, the specific reasons for conflict are less directly related to specific material necessities. The current Ukraine-Russia war is a prime example of inappropriate World War 2 framing: Russia invaded Ukraine for a variety of reasons, and while I personally think the invasion was a terrible idea for Russia to involve itself in, Russia has logical reasons for invading Ukraine (To be clear, I don’t endorse the Russian invasion, and I believe Ukraine is well within its right to defend itself). Vladimir Putin isn’t some maniacal dictator who is unhinged and giving orders like the meme of Hitler is. Rather, Putin is making calculated decisions in what he believes his interests to be. Our involvement on the side of Ukraine is also one based on interests, and our interests in maintaining an international rules based order, ideally to prevent war over all.