Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, by Paul FussellFussell turns to the Second World War, the conflict he himself fought in, to weave a narrative that is intensely personal and wide-ranging. Fussell examines the immediate impact of the war on common soldiers and civilians. He describes the psychological and emotional atmosphere of World War II. For the past fifty years, the Allied War has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by "the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty." Americans, he says, have never understood what the Second World War was really like. In this stunning volume, he offers such an understanding.