"Much popular belief about the war is illusion. Take, for example, the view that the war represented the triumph of democracy over tyranny. In reality democracy was narrowly confined in 1939 - to Britain, France, the United States, and a handful of smaller European and British Commonwealth states - and was even more restricted once the conflict got under way. Far from being a war fought by a democratic world to bring errant dictators to heel, the war was about the very survival of democracy in its besieged heartlands. Victory in 1945 made democracy more secure in western Europe, America and the British Dominions, but outside these regions this form of government has had at best a chequered career in the half-century since the defeat of the Axis."