All they knew were those big totemic names—Pearl Harbor, D day, Auschwitz, Hiroshima—whose unfathomable reaches of experience had been boiled down to an abstract atrocity. The rest was gone. . . . What had happened, for instance, at one of the war’s biggest battles, the Battle of Midway? It was in the Pacific, there was something about aircraft carriers. Wasn’t there a movie about it, one of those Hollywood all-star behemoths in which a lot of admirals look worried while pushing toy ships around a map?” For Sandlin, this broad ignorance demonstrated “how vast the gap is between the experience of war and the experience of peace . . . . [N]obody back home has ever known much about what it was like on the battlefield.”

With the 70th anniversaries of victory in Europe and the Pacific marked last year, that gap has only widened for most Americans, but for the tiny percentage who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s easy to sympathize with Sandlin’s respondents, who might have done well to remember all those totemic names. The war’s enormity is intimidating on multiple levels—historically, empirically, morally—and time and distance have made it no less so. Yet the sense that we are, as Sandlin put it, “losing the war,” doesn’t reflect a lack of relevance or waning public interest.

Seventy years after its end, World War II, the definitive event of the twentieth century and perhaps of the entire modern age, remains enormously consequential, as the West was reminded in 2014, when Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and menaced independent Ukraine, dredging up in the process unresolved conflicts involving the Nazis. New works on the war continue to emerge yearly, from sweeping single-volume histories by Max Hastings, Andrew Roberts, and Antony Beevor to more specialized studies. In a time when even the most educated adults watch impressive quantities of video, films and television series about the war abound, as well as new documentaries, some featuring colorized archival footage.