- I don't think there is such a thing as good war.

There are sometimes, necessary wars and I think one might say, just wars and that, I never questioned the necessity of that war and I still do not question that it was something that had to be done.

(somber music) - [Narrator] The greatest cataclysm in history grew out of ancient and ordinary human emotions.

Anger and arrogance and bigotry, victimhood and the lust for power.

And it ended because other human qualities, courage and perseverance and selflessness, faith, leadership and the hunger for freedom, combined with unimaginable brutality to change the course of human events.

The second World War brought out the best and the worst in a generation and blurred the two so that they became at times, almost indistinguishable.

In the killing that engulfed the world, from 1939 to 1945, between 50 and 60 million people died.

So many and in so many different places, that the real number will never be known.

More than 85 million men and women served in uniform, but the overwhelming majority of those who perished were civilians.

Men, women and children, obliterated by the arrhythmic of war.

(somber music) The United States of America was relatively fortunate.

More than 405,000 soldiers and sailors, airmen and marines died.

But that figure represented proportionally fewer military causalities that was suffered by any of the other major combatants.

American cities were not destroyed, American civilians were never really at risk.

But without American Power, without the sacrifice of American lives, the struggles of outcome would have been very different.

The American economy only grew stronger as the fighting went on and by the time it ended, the United States would be the most powerful nation on Earth and a once isolated and insular people, would find themselves at the center of world affairs.

The war touched every family on every street, in every town in America.

Towns like Luverne, Minnesota.

Sacramento, California.

Waterbury, Connecticut.

and Mobile, Alabama.

and nothing would ever be the same again.

- I'm not sure I can speak about why human beings in general go to war, I think that's a pretty large category.

I can only speak about why 18 year olds from Minneapolis go to war.

They'd go to war because it's impossible not to, because a current is established in the society, so swift, flowing toward war that every young man who steps into it is carried downstream.