World War Two looked nothing like World War One. Not the tactics, not the strategy, not the politics. Twenty-one years separated them, which is about the distance between the day I enlisted and this morning, plus a fortnight. I have stated my thesis and I will argue it as we go, but before I do I want to just marvel at that for a second. Twenty-one years. One generation of men went into a hole in the ground with a rifle and their sons flew four-engine bombers over cities at night. Nobody planned that. It happened while everyone was arguing about reparations. World War One was where humanity, a word invented by a species ashamed of its history, found out what industrialization d