This book by Michael Bess tells the story of World War II through the lens of these myriad moral choices, tracing the common threads that run through them, and assessing their enduring impact on the world we have all inherited. How a nation conducts its wars, and how an individual citizen or soldier chooses to behave during wartime, say a great deal about who they are.  Moral considerations are not just a froth playing on the surface of war’s campaigns: they permeate the policymaking and the conduct of military action in countless ways.  In this book I seek to show how the moral choices made by individual persons — military and civilian, at all levels of society — played a pivotal role both in shaping World War II and in determining its long-term impact on the postwar world.