Fact meets fiction in director Christopher Nolans Dunkirk, the latest film to dramatise the second world war. Photograph: Bros/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

Four generations have been born since the end of the second world war. The infants of today Generation Z in demography-speak arethe great-great-grandchildren of the wartime generation. Since the defeat of Germany and the capitulation of Japan, countless terrible conflicts have been fought, andtens of millions have died in them. Indeed the numbers killed in wars since 1945 will, in the coming decades, inevitably exceed the death toll of the second world war. Yet even as we approach the third decade of the 21st century, and as 1945 slowly slips beyond living memory, it remains the case that when we talk about the war, everyone understands that we are referring to the calamitous conflict of 1939-45.

The borders between numerous nations, the widespread acceptance of the principle of national self-determination, the transnational institutions that for 70 years have attempted to order theworld economy, and the political power still ascribed to the victorious nations of 1945 are all legacies of the war. Yet, as Keith Lowe powerfully argues, the seemingly simple fact that the war made the modern world does reward further examination. The conflict remains a staple of TV, publishing and cinema two second world war movies, Churchill and Dunkirk, are currently on release in the UK. Meanwhile, our understanding of what the war meant to the people whose lives it shaped both combatants and civilians is distorted by layers of myth, the lingering echoes of wartime propaganda and the act of forgetting.

In The Fear and the Freedom, Lowe asks us to question the most critical delusion of all: that the allied powers acted as morally as the circumstances would allow and that this war, more perhaps than any in history, was a good war, fought against an ultimate evil for entirely laudable aims. One of the more discomforting voices raised against this view of the war comes from Yvette Lvy, a Jewish inmate of a Nazi labour camp in Czechoslovakia. She saw little to distinguish the conduct of her various liberators. The Tommies, she says, behave just as bad as the Russians The English soldiers said they would give us food only if we slept with them. We all had dysentery, we were sick, dirty and here was the welcome we got! The notion of allied moral purity is further undermined by Lowes account of the mass rape of German women and widespread looting by the Red Army in 1945.

As a historian of the modern era, Lowe enjoys an enormous advantage over scholars who write about more distant epochs: he is able for the moment at least to draw into his writing the experiences of those who lived through the conflict. Perhaps no historian since Gitta Sereny, in The German Trauma, hasgrasped that opportunity as firmly as Lowe, or done so much with it.

As every journalist knows, the art ofthe interview rests on two principles: asking the right questions and putting them to the right people. With journalistic nous, Lowe has assembled a remarkable chorus of voices and asks the most probing of questions. Their testimony, combined with the authors pointed analysis, elevates a laudable volume into a very readable and startling book.

These are not well-rehearsed stories, worn thin by overtelling. We hear from Leonard Creo, a decorated former GI, aveteran of a war in which all allied soldiers, whether frontline troops or back-office clerks, were designated heroes. From old age he recognises that his single, dramatic experience of combat made him neither hero nor victim. For him, the war and the American GI Bill opened doors to opportunities that would otherwise have remained closed. Another of the more memorable voices is that of Ken Yuasa, a former Japanese army surgeon, who expresses acceptance and guilt. He was one of the infamous doctors who practised surgical procedures on innocent Chinese peasants. These dehumanised human guinea pigs died on the operating table. Only when Yuasa read the words of the mother of one of his victims was he able to acknowledge his crimes.

Disturbing in a different way is the testimony of those who found the war exhilarating. Consider Ogura Toyofumi, a witness to the nuclear attack onHiroshima, who recalls marvelling at the destruction and the loss of life, finding himself able to locate beauty inthe atomic flash and its aftermath.

Lowe shows how the conflict was not just European but fought across the world by people of many different nationalities

Established beliefs are thrown into question. The famous postwar interview in which Robert Oppenheimer tearfully recalled how the scientists ofthe Manhattan Project reacted to thesuccessful test detonation of the atomic bomb is overturned by one of the books most remarkable passages. Oppenheimer did, as he later explained, recite a line from The Bhagavad Gita: Iam become Death, the destroyer of worlds. But he spoke these words of Lord Vishnu not while lamenting the manifest horror of the weapon he had helped bring into existence, but while strutting around like Gary Cooper in the Hollywood western High Noon.

The second world war is still too often written about and imagined as essentially a European conflict. Lowe shows how it was fought across the globe by people of many different races and nationalities. Adding to this global perspective are the insights of Sam King, a celebrated Jamaican-born RAF veteran. Kings story helps Lowe make one of his more nuanced points that the war was as capable of generating diversity as it was of drawing lines of ethnic division on the new map ofEurope.

It has been said that the most impressive and worrying features of human behaviour is our capacity to adapt to the most terrible of circumstances. As one of the messages of theBritish war recently turned into anostalgic cliche suggests, most people have the capacity to keep calmand carry on. Yet the testimony in these pages demonstrates that adaptation to the extremes and horrors ofwar was made possible only by the forging of myth. Both combatants and civilians came to define the war as a clear-cut struggle between good and evil, or as a conflict that would save future generations from the abyss. This myth was an essential tool of survival. Now it is an obstacle to a proper understanding of how this most terrible of allwars continues to shape our lives.

David Olusogas Black and British: A Forgotten History is published by Macmillan. The Fear and the Freedom is published by Viking. To order a copy for 21.25 (RRP 25) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

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The Fear and the Freedom by Keith Lowe the moral surprises of the second world war - The Guardian