After the battle of Iwo Jima, one of the fiercest and bloodiest of the Pacific war, a rabbi chaplain in the Marine Corps delivered the eulogy for the fallen. “This shall not be in vain,” he said, surveying a battlefield that witnessed the deaths of nearly 30,000 American and Japanese soldiers. Speaking of American losses, he said, “from the suffering and sorrow of those who mourn this, will come — we promise — the birth of a new freedom for the sons of man everywhere.” The toll of “suffering and sorrow” from World War II was enormous. Worldwide, more than 50 million soldiers and civilians were killed, nearly 2.5 percent of the globe’s population. The Holocaust took the lives of 6 million European Jews, 2.6 million from Poland alone. Nearly 100 million additional soldiers and civilians were wounded, and 30 million people across the globe were rendered homeless. It was one of the most wrenching, disruptive, and terrible wars in human history.

Alongside the human toll stood profound economic and political transformations. Hundreds of cities in Europe and Asia had been bombed. Some of them, like Dresden, Warsaw, Hamburg, and Hiroshima, had been simply obliterated. Much of the industrial infrastructure of Germany and Japan, two of the world’s most important industrial economies before the war, lay in ruins. Moreover, despite emerging as one of the victors, Britain was no longer a global power. The independence movement in India was only the most obvious sign of its waning influence. Indeed, throughout the colonized world in Asia and Africa, people had taken the Atlantic Charter, and FDR’s insistence that this was a war for democracy, seriously. For them, resumption of European imperialism was unacceptable, and the war represented a step toward national self-determination.

In the United States, too, the toll of war was great. More than 400,000 lives were lost, and nearly 300,000 American soldiers were wounded. Yet millions returned home, and in the coming decades veterans would play a central role in national life. Incredibly, in 1950 World War II veterans made up one-third of all American men over the age of nineteen. Only the Civil War involved a comparable commitment of military service from a generation. Americans paid dearly for that commitment — though not, it must be noted, as dearly as other peoples in Europe and Asia — and the legacies of the war shaped families, politics, and foreign policy for the remainder of the century.