The photograph shows a flag above the Reichstag. The city beneath it is the harder subject. By the time Yevgeny Khaldei arranged his famous image on 2 May 1945, Berlin had endured bombing, encirclement and fighting through its streets. The photograph gives the ending a single gesture. The battle had given the people inside it thousands of smaller, less conclusive moments.
On 23 February 1945, while a flag was being raised on Mount Suribachi, Hershel “Woody” Williams was working towards Japanese pillboxes with a flamethrower. The photograph on the summit would become the island’s enduring image. Williams’s task belonged to the other Iwo Jima: the close, dangerous work that continued beyond the reach of that picture.
A junction was a small place to set against a grand strategy. Yet in December 1944, villages and road crossings in the Ardennes repeatedly consumed the hours on which Germany’s offensive depended. The plan pointed towards Antwerp. The fighting kept returning to a road that would not open, a bridge that could not be used, or a position whose defenders had refused to disappear.
By 23 September 1944, Sergeant Dennis Smith’s account from Arnhem had narrowed to the essentials: shelling, rain, exhaustion and the need for relief. Six days earlier, aircraft had delivered an army into the Netherlands with the promise of speed. Now the men around Oosterbeek were measuring time by what they could still endure.
In January 1944, American infantry tried to cross a river below Cassino. In February, bombers destroyed the monastery above it. In March, the town itself was devastated. Only in May did the defensive system finally give way. Those were not four repetitions of one battle: each attempt changed the ground, the armies and the choices available to the next.
Before Eighth Army tried to break the Axis line, it tried to make the enemy look in the wrong direction. Dummy vehicles, disguised tanks and a false pipeline helped create a battlefield that could be misread from the air. El Alamein began not only with guns in the night, but with weeks of work on what an observer would think he was seeing.
“I was scared stiff,” Sapper John Haines remembered in an account preserved by NZ History. Private Ivan Divehall remembered excitement. The same parachutes could produce both reactions. On the morning of 20 May 1941, German troops descended over Crete, and the men watching them had only moments to turn astonishment into action. The invasion would be decided by airfields and command decisions, but it began as a profoundly personal encounter with an unfamiliar way of war.
A trench in the Tobruk perimeter did not look much like the sweeping desert war of popular memory. Its occupants were below the horizon, watching ground they might have to patrol after dark. Behind them lay a harbour. Beyond the perimeter lay an enemy whose advance had carried him past the town, but who still could not use its docks. Holding this unglamorous place imposed a cost on every mile of that advance.
Geoffrey Wellum remembered the telephone. Before the engine noise and the climb, before the enemy aircraft and the decision to fire, there was the waiting for it to ring. The young Spitfire pilot’s recollection shifts the Battle of Britain away from its familiar silhouette in the sky and back towards an airfield where men did not yet know what the next few minutes would require.
At a crossroads in Belgium, the convoy disappeared. Harry Leigh-Dugmore had been told to follow the vehicle ahead; when the military police waved him on, there was nothing to follow. He was twenty, a lance-corporal, and suddenly responsible for eight other men, a truck and a Bren carrier. The road to Dunkirk began, for his small party, with the discovery that nobody knew where to go.
