Other than as victims, does a successful WWII book actually NEED women, blacks, Jews, the handicapped, the poor, gays, civilians ?

The Fox News-ization of WWII : history as re-written by talk radio ...

To answer my title's question : of course not.

The three types of humanity in the early 1940s --- at least as people 'at the top' saw it

In 1940, those people with all the cultural hegemony and economic power found it intellectually easy to divide the world into just three groups.

Type A (themselves) were the smallest group : male and middle aged (generously if vaguely defined as lying between the immature young adult and the senile/impoverished elderly) and from their culture's dominant (and usually majority) ethnicity & religion and middle class or well educated and physically, mentally and morally 'fit' .

Type C , always a poor and repressed minority (and forming a majority only of history's victims of witch-hunts and scapegoating), were all those who fitted in none of these five categories.

Members of Type B , by far the largest group, fitted in at least one of these five categories and so could share , at times, the feeling that they were some small way part of Type A's in-group --- this is how the tiny Type A group maintained its social hegemony over the vast majority of people outside it.

Ie all whites, no matter how poor and uneducated, were in some sense were usually judged superior to even well educated blacks.