We at Casemate wish everyone the nicest holiday season. People are reconnecting with family now, taking long-overdue days off, and in general seeking to regenerate in pleasant circumstances for the next year to come.

While we all take a brief respite, nevertheless, a particular song has been going on in our heads that still resonates through the decades, and as a military history publisher it may be appropriate for us here to describe its context.

“I’ll Be Home for Christmas” was written by the songwriting team of Gannon and Kent, with credit to Buck Ram for its original lyrics. The song was recorded by Bing Crosby in 1943, right in the middle of World War II, just as America had flung literally millions of its men across its oceans—to Europe and the Pacific—to try to retrieve Western values against aggressive dictators who sought power through force rather than the universal…