This text is inscribed on a memorial to British soldiers who were killed in one of the most desperate but least known battles of World War II: the fighting around the town of Kohima in eastern India not far from the border with Burma, from which a Japanese army had set out to march to Delhi in 1944. At Kohima, Indian and English soldiers had defeated a Japanese force which was followed by some Indians who believed that the Japanese treated the people of their colonial empire, such as the Koreans, far better than the British treated theirs. The leader of those Indians who believed that a victory of Japan and Germany over Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union was greatly to be desired was a man named Subhas Chandra Bose. He had fled from India to Germany across the Soviet Union during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and had had an opportunity to see for himself in Europe how kindly the Germans were disposed toward those they conquered until, in 1943, the Germans sent him by submarine to the Indian Ocean where he had transferred to a Japanese submarine for the rest of the trip to East Asia.

This series of inter-related events may serve to illustrate why it has seemed to me to be appropriate to try to write an account of World War II which looks at it in a global perspective. For the origins of that vast conflict, I believed it both appropriate and possible to pursue a theme which might serve to tie the whole complicated story together; it appeared convincing to me that the foreign policy of Hitler's Germany provided such a theme. I stated in the preface of the first of my two volumes on that subject: