When this lousy war is over

Reading the latest range of war histories it's rather unsettling to realise that in at least one way almost everything was more or less completely irrelevant. If Stalingrad had been lost, if Alamein had gone the other way, if D-Day had been thrown back into the Channel, the outcome of the war would have been the same. Once America got the bomb nothing else would have mattered. More odd, even, than that; if every battle had been avoided - if no allied soldiers had been put in harm's way - the outcome would have been the same. Every single skirmish, all that heroism, all that cowardice, was pointless.