With just over 20 years separating the two most cataclysmic conflicts of the twentieth century - WWI and WWII - many historians argue that they were not separate wars, but one bloody continuum that first gripped the people of Europe but eventually spread across the entire globe. And so it happens that the most iconic figures of WWII, the household names that we associate with either battlefield glory or murderous fascism, were themselves caught up in both conflicts - mired first in the trenches at Ypres and the Somme and then years later, often on the very same ground, in the Battle of the Bulge or the invasion of Normandy. Adolf Hitler. Benito Mussolini. George S. Patton. Charles de Gaulle. Douglas MacArthur. Before they were giants, they were infantrymen and privates in the "war to end all wars." This is the story of these devastating three decades of war, through the eyes of the men who were forged in the trenches and came to command a world on the brink of disaster.