These opening two paragraphs in The Second World Wars by Victor Davis Hanson, published just weeks ago, are brilliant in evoking not only his theme of the global scale and scope of World War II, but in casting the experiences and various losses endured by his own family in personal terms.
Hanson has written movingly of the story of his namesake Victor, killed at Okinawa, in his previous work The Ripples of Battle, where he tells of his personal connection to his deceased uncle through his letters and conversations with the surviving veterans of F Company, 2nd Battalion, 29th Marines who had served with his uncle, and were there at his death. The story culminates 57 years later with the return of his uncle's ring—the band cut and containing an image of a Roman legionary—to his nephew, now a professor of classics and military history in California.
