At a time when the number of World War II survivors dwindles by the day, Lucy Colback set out on what quickly became a four‑year global pilgrimage to interview those that remain. The result is Afterbursts: Reliving World War II, a collection of oral histories from survivors – soldiers, civilians, prisoners, combatants from every side.

I spoke to Lucy by video call, and our talk revealed a more intimate truth: that war’s aftermath lives in people’s minds, not just their papers or medals. Lucy’s inspiration began not with archives, but with an image: in rural China, she saw a photograph of an American GI sharing a cigarette tip‑to‑tip with a Chinese man in traditional dress. It struck her that wartime allegiances could shift, yet the human connections were often forgotten.

Rather than begin with archive documents, Lucy started with letters between her grandparents – people who never fought – and moved on to interviews. “I came to realise that the generation who could speak about their experience were vanishing,” she said. “The people who’d lived through it, and still had the capacity to tell the story, wouldn’t be around for much longer.”

What she discovered, she told me, was that most history books tell you where regiments landed – not how it felt. “They don’t tell you what it was like for the person in the trenches, in hiding, or in a prison camp,” she said. “That was what I wanted to capture: their emotional experience, not just the military one.”

What began as curiosity resulted in the creation of what would later become Afterbursts. In Hong Kong, a memoir of a former prisoner of war led her to others, across national boundaries. Then a Holocaust survivor she interviewed urged: “If you’re talking to the Chinese, you’ve got to go talk to the Russians.” That led Lucy to Moscow in 2019, where she interviewed former Soviet soldiers – many of whom she later educated herself about by tracing their battles and wartime paths.

The result is not a neat chronological narrative of specific campaigns but common themes that run through the history: stories threaded together by shared experience, including trauma, memory, and sacrifice. As Lucy explained, the hardest editorial challenge was wrestling stories from “different nations, different theatres, different operations” into a single volume without flattening them. “Everyone kept asking how I would organise it,” she said. “And I thought – I’ve thought of all those ways. I can’t do it like that. I don’t want to do it any other way now. This is their voice.”

One recurring image from our conversation was the emotion Lucy felt after leaving her interviews – a kind of familial intimacy. “It was a bit like leaving family every time,” she said. “You form this bond. And then you go.”

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Many of the people she spoke to had never shared their stories before – some not even with their own children. One Japanese veteran, contacted through a network of volunteers, told his wartime story first to Lucy’s interpreter and then to her. “I think for him, he had never told it before,” she said. “And it was probably the last time, too.”

The emotional weight, she said, was tied not only to hearing about unimaginable suffering but to the responsibility of carrying these stories.

“Challenging is one thing and emotionally challenging is a different thing,” she said. “Structuring it was hard. But emotionally… to hear what they’d gone through, and to be the one holding that now—it was heavy.” One of the most striking takeaways Lucy hoped readers would embrace is this: war is devastating across all sides. There are no winners. “It’s only now I begin to understand what one of the British guys said to me: ‘There can be a justified war. You had to stop Hitler.’ But it’s still war. And war is devastation.”

The same sentiment echoed in survivors from Axis countries, each grappling with shame or loss in their own way. “One Japanese soldier told me how hard it was to integrate when he came back,” she said. “There was this sense: you should have died on the battlefield. What are you doing coming back?”

Lucy wants readers not only to engage with battlefield facts but to feel the depth of loss, compassion, regret, and resilience. “People are people,” she said. “It’s a bit idealistic, but I wrote it to foster a bit more compassion and understanding – for our own soldiers, but also the other side.”

Afterbursts echoes the ethos of the best FT long‑form features: it is deeply researched, but not academic. It is visceral, not glorifying. In that tradition, the voices Colback foregrounds disrupt standard narratives, turning statistics into flesh and bone.

Afterbursts: Reliving World War II (May 2025) is published by Borderless Publishing.