The Second World War

I would recommend this book highly to anybody interested in learning about World War II. I really enjoyed reading this book. It gave a very interesting perspective on a subject that is very interesting.

This wonderfully researched, well-written narrative is an excellent primer for anyone seeking a general understanding of the Second World War, from the individual experience to the sweep of historical events.

Outstanding for the way personal, intimate stories are woven into the broader fabric of the history of the war. I discovered facts about wars within the main war hitherto hidden from most accounts. It is also a fine anti-war work.

I have read many, many books on World War 2, so most of the material in this book is not new to me. That being said, this was a fantastic book, and the best one volume study of the Second World War I have read. Beevor is a wonderful author, and the prose is very readable and informative. I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to amateur history readers as well as to history nerds like me.

Ok, it is not that I doubt all that the author says in the book, but I lack some footnotes explaining the documentation that some parts come from. For instance, I remember a conversation between Ribbentrop, Hitler and the british ambassador: the source of this must be the personal diary of the ambassador or something like that, a footnote clarifying this (and many other facts in the book) would be very helpful.

When I ordered The Second World War by Antony Beevor I wondered if I would be getting yet another rehash of WW II. This concern proved unwarranted. After its arrival from the store I began the book and found it hard to put down. In my opinion it is by far the best one volume hitory of this war in my extensive library of military history - very well written with more than enough new information and fresh insights for any WW II buff - a caution, however, while Bevor's The Second World War is a good read it is not a happy read

First of all, I am a big Antony Beevor fan. I count his books on Stalingrad and the taking of Berlin among my absolute favourites. I thoroughly enjoyed The Second World War but have a few minor gripes:

1. It's not as well edited as his previous books. There are obvious syntax errors and the book just feels like it was rushed to the printer.
2. I can't figure out which version of English the guy is using. For the most part, he follows British English practice but he mixes it up with American English. Colour and Harbour are spelled with a "u" and, in most cases, he uses "s" rather than "z" (prioritise rather than prioritize) but not always. I guess this is really a subset of my beef on the editing.
3. It is annoying how he uses outdated terms for the names of Chinese cities and other geographies. Chung-king rather than Chongqing, for instance. In some cases the difference is so great that it's difficult to understand his reference. Contrary to well-established convention when writing in English, he also places Japanese family names before given names.

Others have complained that AB did not include this or that within the book. Of course he didn't! Imagine how many volumes this work would be if he covered every aspect of the war! (an impossible task, of course)

i have read dozens of books on vietnam over the years & this rates as one of the best; does a great job covering the period of the viet-minh/french was & the US role in that; a great american tragedy that we did not support ho chi minh after WWll but instead supported the french efforts to re-establish their colony in indo-china; we did not support british efforts to re-establish control in india but we did the french only because ho was a communist but he was a nationalist first & we did not get it

An extensively researched account of a necessary war. He brings to light the characters of many of the chief participants who were responsible for conducting the Allied forces. I was in Italy as a humble air crew for much of the Italian campagne and the account rings true.

I suppose an afficianado of strategy would be fascinated with this book, but It bored me. There is little of the human in this history, few of the stories that make history real. Instead it's a litany of which officer moved moved which troops where for what reason. On and on and on. It's history of strategy without the people.

Sincretic account...!The Second Worl War described from all the diferent viewpoints posible.The psycological aspects of perpetrarors and victims captured my feelings. Geopolitical facets were very attonisching...!

Yet another highly detailed account of a very complex event. Provides an excellent timeline of the war which is very helpful in understanding how and why it all took place. Typical Beevor. Enjoyed it as much as his other books!

I really like his style. I learned lot of things that I was not aware before, but what really bugs me was completely missing war in Yugoslavia between 1941 and 1945. It is not that Beevor does not know anything about it. He clearly does as it is obvious from his notes about two resistance movements, collaborators and such, but on other hand his off hand comment that military coup in 1941 that removed government that signed pact with Nazis was caused by "irritation of Germans hunger for raw materials". Really?

I fully understand that Yugoslavia was small country in big war, but he mentioned more Duch resistance movement.

I'm not sure his figures are correct as to the numbers of victims of the Nazis during the war. I have read a number of books on the war and his appear less than many others historians specify. Why? Also I don't appreciate moralistic pontifications that some supposedly objective authors don't seem to be able to resist at the conclusion of their book.

This book presents a very superficial picture of WW2, excluding an analysis of the reasons why the war happened. It is understandable that the writing many times are partial but the many references to some unknown German low rank military are tiresome and seems to be shear gossip.

This is generally a good book that is well researched and fairly presented, but there are a few shortcomings worth pointing out. The narrative at times loses steam and is reduced to reporting which generals reached which river with which division on which date. General readers will wonder what the significance of these events are and military buffs will wonder why the type of equipment and weaponry used are never discussed. Beevor keeps most of his attention on the battlefield which may disappoint readers looking for a more comprehensive treatment of a global military/political/economic event, and his chapter on Yalta is an excellent example of how good this book could have been had he chosen to broaden his focus a bit. Other decisions, such as devoting pages to Hitler's final days in his bunker but only a few paragraphs to Hiroshima/Nagasaki are questionable.

I think this book is on par with Penguin's History of the Second World War. Penguin's volume has better maps, a broader focus, and does a much better job of addressing the causes and consequences of the war. It is also much longer though and separates the European and Pacific theaters into separate parts. I strongly recommend Rick Atkinson's series for readers wanting a battlefield narrative from an American perspective.

I saw this book referenced in several other WWII books that I own. Read several favorable reviews. Then ultimately bought it for my library. I am not expert on WWII, but do maintain a fair sized library with all sorts of related books and references.

Antony Beevor writes in a style that is fairly easy to read. Trying to cover a war as immense as WWII in complete detail would entail thousands of pages if various topics and areas weren't significantly summarized. That is what the author does with good effect and clarity.

What captured my attention as I started reading it was the opening chapter discussing the early Japanese-Soviet battles specifically around Khalkhim Gol. Interestingly these battles set some of the tone and approach of the Soviets during the war in both the eastern and western Soviet Union fronts. Details I had not previously known.

Much my past reading is of biographies of military leaders so some areas of the war in those books were very focused. However, Beevor maintains a fairly balanced approach. Just enough detail to explain the situation, but not enough to overwhelm me. The conflict on the German eastern front was covered with probably more detail that other parts of the war. But, then again, a significant portion of the fighting, death and carnage of the war occurred there. Since I have not previously read many detailed books on this front, I found this book a good starter for later related reading.

In several other book reviews, some readers have dwelled on various errors that Beevor included in the book. After doing some fact checking, most, if not all, of the highlighted items are indeed incorrect. However, on balance given the scope of the war, the noted errors do not detract in a major way from the book in general. I think any serious or interested reader can and should do his own fact checking both to learn more and verify the accuracy of authors. This should not be the exception with this book.

By and large, I found this book an excellent read to compliment multiple other books I own about World War II. After reading, I would suggest going to the store.com and reading thru reviewer comments about errors to find details and facts to verify with other resources. Given Beevor's writing style, eventually I look forward to reading some other books by him including, Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin.

This author is a prolific producer of Military History books with a good record & a string of publications of that genere. That said a careful reading of this book reveals nothing new of startling & contains some very irritating factual errors that reveal a lack of research or different contributors to particular parts of the research or book. I will leave it to the readers to find the errors however start with a Admiral named Carnaris. Amongst my 3000 plus military book libary this particular volume sits in the bottom 40 percentile alongside the latter publications of Max Hasings an author of a similiar style & genere which also contain the same irritating factual errors

An amazing informative book on WW2. Utterly priceless in information on all the aspects of WW2. Brilliant in every way. This is a huge book, filled with pictures and the history lesson at its finest. This is one of those books that military buffs, WW2 buffs, history buffs will enjoy and consume. This was a huge undertaking, mainly because of its length and also history lesson. I don’t think the average reader will take to this, because one must enjoy the subject and also know a little about the conflict that led up to World War 2.

I feel this is a book that is a must read for history lovers. I found myself locked inside each page and was utterly amazed at all the information collected in one book. When reading books on WW2, most books stick to one subject or a specific aspect of WW2, this book explores the complete vast array of the conflict and its history.

You can finish my review here: http://www.classicbookreading.com/2015/05/antony-beevors-second-world-war.html

A summary of Scott Palter's review on StrategyPage.Com

'The author, a retired British army officer with a number of good works on World War II to his credit covering Stalingrad, Berlin, D-Day, and Crete, among other campaigns, gives us an excellent synthesis of current scholarship on the war. His primary contribution here is to tie the pieces together. Earlier World War II histories in English have focused on the Anglo-American theaters. Maneuvers of divisions in Libya received much greater attention than the actions of army groups in Russia and China. The fashion changed with the second generation of histories that gave greater weight to the Eastern Front. Beevor extends this trend by increased attention to the fighting in China. Indeed, he opens the text with an anecdote of a Korean captured at D-Day. The man who had been in the Japanese Army when captured by the Red Army at Khalkhin Gol in 1939, found himself in Soviet service, was then captured by the Germans in 1943 at Kharkov, to be captured by US paratroopers on D-Day, after which he spent time in a POW camp in the UK, migrated to the US, and lived there until his death in 1992. Beevor uses this man as a metaphor for a global war in which the theaters cannot be understood as wholly separate from each other. Not every power was active in every corner of the world, but their individual war efforts were all linked by the demands for resources. Thus, Churchill’s fixation with retaking Burma and FDR’s with aiding Chiang’s China limited the resources available for Anzio. While geared to the general reader, even someone with as large World War II book collection as this reviewer was still able to find numerous nuggets of new information. A book well worth the reading.'

For the full review, see StrategyPage.Com

Antony Beevor is one of the most respected WW2 historians of today. In my mind this is because when he recounts any episode of WW2, he is able to detail the political and military decisions, plus first-hand accounts and explain them in a way that can be easily understood by novices to the subject such as myself. I read this book from cover to cover, but for those that are just interested in particular parts of WW2, each chapter does form a concise period of the war. I can see this book being used as a reference for WW2 forever basically. This book was helped by the fact that after the Berlin Wall had fallen, Antony Beevor had access for a short time to a lot of material from the Russian archives which had been unavailable to historians who wrote previous books on this subject. These firsthand accounts as well as accounts gained from other sources were woven into a very detailed account of the battles and strategies used by the Russians. I did find Antony Beevor’s criticisms of some of the leading players of the allied side a little uncalled for, as the benefit of hindsight is a wonderful thing, but others may have a different view. However, this does not detract from the fact that this is an excellent book on a subject that is undoubtable one of the most traumatic periods of the Twentieth Century.

Anthony Beevor published his latest work, The Second World War, in 2012. This book is a magnificent tour de force single volume history of World War II. This is not just a dry recitation of military units moving like strange arrows on a map. Beevor is particularly skilled at bringing history to life with well chosen quotations from eyewitness accounts from the wars' participants. Beevor, for example, quotes Vasily Grossman with the 120th Guards Rifle Division on the eastern front, "When we entered Bobruisk some buildings in it were ablaze and others lay in ruins. To Bobruisk led the road of revenge! With difficulty, our car finds its way between scorched and distorted German tanks and self-propelled guns. Men are walking over German corpses. Corpses, hundreds and hundreds of them, pave the road, lie in the ditches, under the pines, in the green barley. In some places vehicles have to drive over the corpses, so densely they lie upon the ground. People are busy all the time, burying them, but they are so many that this work cannot be done in a day. The day is exhaustingly hot and still, and people walk and drive pressing handkerchiefs to their noses. A cauldron of death was boiling here -- a ruthless, terrible revenge over those who hadn't surrendered their arms and broken out to the west."

Beevor excels at making the impact of the war come home to the reader. The crime of rape seems to have increased exponentially during the war.

Beevor tells us that "The Second World War, with its global ramifications was the greatest man-made disaster in history. The statistics of the dead -- whether sixty or seventy million are far beyond our comprehension."

Beevor is unsparing in his portraits of the war's leaders. Hitler and Stalin are ruthless fanatics with unbounded paranoia like the Roman emperors of old. Commander Kelly's rule: "Give a ruler absolute power of life and death over his subjects and he will make enemies, take lives, fear violent retribution and perpetuate an endless cycle of violence".

The allied leaders come in for their share of criticism as well. Churchill is depicted as an emotional romantic imperialist. FDR is portrayed as being vain, calculating and excessively political. Montgomery and Rommel were both over-rated according to Beevor.

Beevor is harsh in his criticism of Arthur Harris and the allied strategic bomber offensive. The Norden airsight that was supposed to hit a pickle jar from 20,000 feet could do no such thing. Allied bombing raids were carpet bombing runs that targeted Axis cities and claimed the lives of about 1.2 million civilians in Germany and Japan. The raids on cities like Dresden and Wurzburg were impossible to justify on military grounds. Beevor does, however, point out that these bombing raids also diverted Luftwaffe fighters to home defense just when they were vitally needed on the eastern front; this tipped the scale of air superiority in favor of the Red air force. Beevor does not seem to fully acknowledge the importance that the strategic bombing campaign played in raising allied morale on the home front and the political/diplomatic impact it had in holding off Stalin's demands for a premature second front landing in France in 1942 or 1943.

Again and again, Beevor remarks upon the allied intelligence advantages that gave them a crucial edge and helped save many lives. The code breakers of Bletchley Park and their American counterparts at Magic earned their keep by shortening this ghastly war.

Beevor's account even contains moments of black comedy in the grim narrative. "Just a few hours after the execution of her sister's husband, Eva Braun married Adolf Hitler. Goebbels and Bormann were the witnesses. It was a daunting task for the bewildered registrar, who had been dragged back from a Volkssturm detachment. He had to ask both Hitler and Braun, according to Nazi law, whether they were of pure Aryan descent and free from hereditary diseases." Commander Kelly must ask, "Has there ever been more joy in a single room since Adolf and Eva's wedding night?"

Beevor has this to say about President Truman at Potsdam after V/E day but before the defeat of Japan, "The new President had been charmed and awed by the manipulative Soviet dictator, who despised him in return. The prime minister's greatest moment of intimacy with Truman came when they discussed how the President was to tell Stalin of the atomic bomb. But Stalin had already discussed twice with Beria how he should react when given the news. On 17 July Beria had provided him with details of the successful test, obtained by his spies in the Manhattan Project. So, when Truman told Stalin about the bomb in a confidential tone, Stalin barely reacted. He summoned Molotov and Beria immediately afterwards and 'sniggering', related the scene. Churchill was standing by the door his eyes fixed on me like a searchlight, while Truman, with his hypocritical air, told me what had happened in an indifferent tone.' Their amusement was increased when the recordings from NKVD microphones revealed that, when Churchill had asked Truman how the Soviet leader had taken the news, Truman replied that 'Stalin had apparently failed to understand.'" Thus we see staggering naivete in the highest ranks of the allied governments, which were riddled with Soviet spies. Please recall that President Truman dissolved America's chief intelligence service in September 1945 -- the month after V/J day.

The Second World War is a particularly timely work insofar as it discusses Stalin's misunderstanding of the democratic process in the west. Stalin could not believe that FDR had died of natural causes, he must have been assassinated by a plotting Truman! Stalin could also not understand how Churchill could have "allowed himself" to be replaced after he was voted out as Prime minister by the British electorate after V/E day. It is very difficult for those who are have only experienced a police/fear state to comprehend how free societies actually operate. Today we observe middle eastern countries whose masses assume that all American movies are controlled by the American government.

Our most common mistake in thinking about World War II lies in making the assumption that its final outcome was inevitable from the start (e.g. due to allied industrial production advantages, etc.). Beevor points out the fact that the Axis powers almost never collaborated in any meaningful way to coordinate strategy. Had Japan struck north against the Soviet Union capturing Vladivostok in the fall of 1941 instead of attacking south and west versus the USA, England the and Dutch, Stalin could never have reinforced Moscow with the Siberian divisions that staved off disaster in the battle for Moscow in December of that year.

If you have any interest in history, check out Antony Beevor's The Second World War!

If you like Beevor's Second World War you will also enjoy America Invades: How We've Invaded or been Militarily Involved with almost Every Country on Earth by Kelly / Laycock and Italy Invades

To attempt to write a one-volume history of the greatest conflict in the history of mankind is a daunting task: you're bound to offend or displease someone by giving short shrift to their particular pet subject/campaign/national army/theatre of war, or omit some detail considered important by a minority of readers.

Antony Beevor's `The Second World War' stands out in a crowded field of single-volume WW2 histories by being extremely well-written in a style as succinct as it is intelligent and literate, organised into 50 roughly chronological chapters of unequal length and running to 783 pages excluding the index and notes. Beevor offers us a deep understanding of the interdependence of different parts of the global conflict, how for example the long and bitterly-fought war in China between the Nationalists and the invading Japanese armies impacted decisions by Stalin and the STAVKA how and when to deploy formations in the war against the Wehrmacht; at the same time 700,000 Japanese troops tied down in the Chinese conflict were unavailable for the Pacific theatre. Focus is brought to oft-neglected episodes like the short Soviet-Japanese war in the Nomonhan region of Mongolia in 1939 (which Beevor claims with justification marked the actual start of WW2), the brief but savage civil war in Greece in 1944-45 after the German forces departed, and the unbelievable scale of bloodletting in the battles for Budapest and Konigsburg where the death toll ran to hundreds of thousands.

A thorough analysis is presented as to how Churchill (with his obsessive desire for a post-war free & democratic Poland), the genial-but-deepdown-scheming Roosevelt and others in the British and US governments were repeatedly outwitted and out-maneuvered by the cold, calculating and deeply paranoid Stalin, the real victor of WW2. Few of the best-known military leaders - Rommel, Eisenhower, MacArthur, Montgomery, `Vinegar Joe' Stilwell, `Bomber' Harris of the RAF, De Gaulle, Mark Clark - come out of Beevor's narrative covered in glory, the character flaws of all these and many others laid bare.

A notable shortcoming is the poor quality of the maps, too small and lacking detail to be of any use to the reader unfamiliar with the campaigns and who might not have better reference material available. The choice and sheer range of subjects of the monochrome photos however is excellent, and does justice to the global nature of the war.

Beevor's book does not spare the reader details of the ubiquitous horror which characterised the conflict: eyewitness accounts of naked and shorn prisoners, half-starved, being driven by sadistic guards with packs of savage dogs into the gas chambers at Treblinka (where 800,000 were murdered in 13 months, more than at Auschwitz in the same period); the mass gang rapes, murder and pillage perpetrated by Russian soldiers in East Prussia in January-February 1945; the details of how tens of thousands of German & Japanese civilians were incinerated in firebomb attacks by allied air forces; the murderous persecutions of the NKVD against almost everyone including their East European allies and Russian prisoners `liberated' from German POW camps unjustly assumed to have been `collaborators' because they had obeyed their Red Army officers' orders to surrender. One particular detail to which Beevor devotes a couple of pages is the widespread practice of cannibalism among Japanese forces in Asia, who (evidence and testimony from survivors proves) regularly killed and ate Chinese, Burmese and Papuan civilians, POWs and even their own comrades. All this hatred and brutality does not sit well with our 21st century sensibilities but it happened, nevertheless, and just about within living memory.

Overall, Beevor has done a fine job with this massive subject. You will find his book particularly informative if you do not have extensive knowledge of the period but are looking for more than just a general overview; perhaps less so the history buff already steeped in the detail of the military campaigns and political background to the conflict. The writing style is crisp and engaging, the narrative gripping, the editing good (literally two or three minor grammatical errors in 800 pages). Regardless of your present knowledge and reading history about this conflict, this book is highly recommended.

Like it or not, Antony Beevor has set a particular way of writing WWII books, and this one puts them all together in context. As usual, the author excels at capturing events and timelines as they historically occurred, from both the strategic geopolitical point of view down to the personal experience of a regular person involved in them, all written in a very readable manner. I found particularly interesting his approach to widen the scope of the more traditional WW II historians, who usually concentrate on the European and the Pacific theaters of war, expanding both geographical and time-lines to encompass for example the Japanese-Chinese confrontation and the Spanish Civil War.

While his previous books dealt with particular events of WWII, here you will find a coherent and flowing narrative, from the early events that eventually led to WWII to some of the post-WWII developments, especially in Europe. If you read his previous books, you will note that when dealing with events that have been covered in his books, the author freely copies from himself complete paragraphs, and probably whole pages, which is really a shame, considering the titanic effort that producing this very lengthy volume must have taken.

WWII is a very complex and long event in human history, that affected many hundred million people (and some might argue the complete planet), and shaped mankind's history for many years to come, thus putting together one single volume intending to describe this event is a daunting task. Overall, I think Mr. Beevor succeeded, in that the reader is presented with a wealth of facts and figures, but never described in a boring manner. The reader's attention if grabbed from the first page onwards, and while we all know the outcome, it never really gets boring at all. Even so, this book has the same problems as his other volumes, in that the historical accuracy seems to be sometimes sacrificed (or at least compromised) for a more interesting reading experience, for example accepting eye-witness accounts without further proof as a fact. Since I do not understand this book to be the definitive WWII history book (or pretend so), I still recommend it for anyone interested in understanding the context of the mayor forces at stake during those fateful years.

If I had written this book I would give it five stars. But I expect a little more from Anthony Beevor.

Beevor excels at panoptical and episodic histories, such as the Paris book he did with Duff Cooper's daughter. In this book he's very good at describing difficult personalities and social discomfort--Ike's dud presentation and panic at the Casablanca Conference is superb, as are Monty's recurrent bouts of hysteria.

Another Beevor touch is the lurid detail of carnage, atrocities, and 'Mondo Cane'-style exotica. We keep hearing about soldiers who lose a hand but keep loading their howitzer or whatever with the bleeding stump. Then they die or shoot themselves. Russian soldiers who lose limbs kill themselves so they won't become "samovars," as amputees are crudely known. Beevor mercifully leaves out the explanation that a samovar just sits there, taking in water at the top and voiding hot tea through a cock at the bottom.

Lots of rapes in Koenigsberg and Berlin, oh boy what horrible rapes! Meantime, off in the Pacific theatre, Japanese soldiers are eating the natives. They also eat American prisoners, finally they eat each other.

These grotesqueries add new zip to a tale that has too often gone boggy from retelling. If Quentin Tarantino ever wants to film a darkly satirical history of the Second World War, this could be the basic source-text.

Alas, good storytelling is not always good history, and Beevor is a far-from-reliable narrator. He's catty. He puts words into mouths and heads, based on little or no documentation. He plumps up the roles of minor and middling characters, such as Count Palewski and General Alan Brooke, simply because he has a social connection to them or other personal involvement. He makes outrageous errors--getting names and locations wrong, and factual boners and stretches (I wasn't keeping score, but other reviewers have covered these in detail). Beevor even drags in the old canard that the Nazis were making soap out of concentration-camp victims. This was a propaganda story from the 1914-18 war, revived again for its reprise, and completely unfounded both times. It might be possible to make a bar of soap using human fat, but it would not be cost-effective; moreover there is just no evidence that this ever happened in either war. Beevor lingers too long on such frauds and unlikely occurrences.

I'm going to plow through the rest of the Beevor corpus anyway. This book brought to my attention a few books I hadn't seen.

This book is a very good chronological discourse on World War II. It can bring anyone up to speed, so that they would feel comfortable reading a book, on a specific aspect of World war II.
Significantly, much emphasis is placed on the heroism of the Poles, who not only were invaded by Nazi Germany, but also by the Soviet Union. Realize that both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia started WW II. Beevor is adept at telling us about the Polish units that continued to fight the Nazis during the war.
Also, from Beevor's point of view, many did collaborate with Nazi Germany in the rounding up of the Jews. Lithuanians, and Ukrainians are prominently mentioned as aiding and abetting the Nazis. Only 2 European countries NEVER collaborated with Nazi Germany...Great Britain and Poland.

How anyone can deny the Holocaust...well...they must be oblivious to everything. For every Polish Jew who was killed, a Pole was killed. And still, to this day, more Poles have been honored by the state of Israel in saving Jews during WW II, then any other European ethnic group.

This book is worth reading because it balances the micro and the macro of the war, allowing the reader to get a good overall grasp of it. It details the initial events and influences, as well as the concluding chapters, without getting bogged down with minutia and low-impact detail. Few, if any contributing variables, affecting all parties and participants, are left unaddressed.

A particular strong point is the documentation of how many millions were totally displaced, unmercifully tortured, and robbed of any human dignity, above and beyond the millions of Jews gassed and starved to death. The aggregate numbers are staggering and are given the attention deseved by entirely innocent parties.

Also of note is the treatment of how the various military and political parties interacted with each other, and how critical this was to the results of the war. One is able to grasp the very complex and varied personalities, and how certain strong and weak points truly affected so many results, above and beyond the battlefield itself.

This is a good read for those seeking a thorough and well-researched treatment of the war in less than 1000 pages. No key aspect is untouched, with the reader able to identify clear starting points, effective mid-points, and high-drama concluding events.

Well worth the reader's time.

Perhaps the most positive thing that can be said about Beevor's book is that it's better than Andrew Roberts' "The Storm of War". It includes nothing new in the telling, and displays a decidedly unbalanced priority of different battles and campaigns.

This is another British-authored history of World War II that devotes more ink to British defeats of arms than it does to American victories. The Battle of Crete is lavished with nine pages, while Coral Sea and Midway between them rate only five pages, and his three pages on Midway have many errors: the initial sighting of the Japanese fleet was to the Northwest, not Southwest; the Midway aircraft not only "failed to score many hits" they didn't score ANY hits; the US carrier aircrews weren't "barely out of flying school" except for the Hornet's, the Yorktown and Enterprise groups had flown and practiced together for at least two years; no Japanese battleship was "severely damaged". And he perpetuates the Mitsuo Fuchida myth that the Japanese carrier decks were full of armed planes when the American dive bombers appeared. Paschal and Tully demonstrated conclusively in their book "Shattered Sword", which came out seven years before this book, that the carrier decks were empty because the Japanese Carriers had been zigzagging for hours to avoid the string of attacks, and had cleared the decks to land CAP fighters. Why is Beevor's first description of the sublime American Admiral Raymond Spruance limited to, "a fitness fanatic"? Almost three of the fourteen paragraphs quote Japanese participants verbatim. There is only one concluding sentence from Chester Nimitz.

Iwo Jima has two listings in the index, Malta has fifteen and Hong Kong eleven. In fact he uses more ink criticizing American general Joseph Stilwell's conduct than he devotes to Midway.

He's confused about the Pearl Harbor attack. The Japanese planes did not take off at 6:05am on Sunday Dec. 8, but on Sunday Dec. 7 local time. Oklahoma sailors were not trapped "beneath the hull" but rather inside it.

Likewise he claims that MacArthur in Manila immediately called a staff meeting but then "hesitated" to give Brereton orders to bomb Formosa, when it is widely and well documented that MacArthur's staff wouldn't even let Brereton meet with their boss.

Beevor bizarrely characterizes Eisenhower as "politically naive". Ike's been criticized for many things, but his political savvy is one area most agree on.

He cites a story about American general Mark Clark having to board a British submarine near Algiers without his trousers as a "minor humiliation" and "undignified". Interesting that he chose to mention this rather than the many humiliations that the British suffered.

He even makes careless mistakes when writing about the British. Rommel certainly did not have "10,000 vehicles" at the beginning of his May 1942 offensive in North Africa, concealed by sandstorms or otherwise.

I was happy to see Beevor criticize Montgomery's conduct of el Alamein, though his sponsor and water carrier Alan Brooke comes off admirably.

A reviewer from Israel claims that the book gives scant coverage to the War in the East. I couldn't disagree more. Beevor probably gives more coverage to this front than he does to the Pacific. On the other hand, Beevor writes very little about the Combined Bomber Offensive, which tied down the bulk of the Luftwaffe, much of the Germans' store of 88mm guns, and over 600,000 flak troops, for two years. The Bomber Offensive may not have brought Germany to its knees directly, but it did help the Soviet Army's efforts quite considerably.

What was perhaps most disturbing was Beevor's apparent refusal to state that Hitler was aware of, let alone ordered, the specifics of the Holocaust. Very early in the book Beevor writes that Hitler had a "dismissive attitude toward administration," and claims that underlings "seizing on a random comment from the Fuhrer, or trying to second guess his wishes..would initiate programs." This excuse might have been useful to Thomas a Becket's killers, but is shameful in this case. A third of the way into the book, Beevor writes that Hitler "still does not appear to have made an irrevocable decision on a Final Solution" (in Dec 1941), even though Beevor wrote that "the Polish Diaspora had begun" in 1939 and mentions Hitler's specific orders to kill those with developmental disabilities.

And then it was over. After 781 pages, we get two pages that make absolutely no effort to summarize or draw conclusions.

If you don't have any other histories of World War II readily at hand, you might learn something from this book. But many other books written before this past year do a much better job of telling the full story more accurately.

The book is extraordinary; full of detail, often relating tales of incompetence, delusion and arrogance not only among the commanders but on occasion the leaders too including Churchill, Hitler, Roosevelt and especially Stalin and of course Mussolini. It is all very harrowing particularly the descriptions of the way the various civilians were treated by, especially, the Germans, Russians and Japanese. The Russian front and the war in the East were just dire; beyond comprehension.

History is the story of 'ands' and not 'ifs' but you cannot help but wonder. For example: Montgomery's assumption of the campaign in North Africa. Churchill was against his appointment as he wanted Lt. Gen 'Strafer' Gott and would have had his way over Field Marshall Alexander, who campaigned for Monty. However "the situation was resolved when Gott was killed, after his plane was shot down by a Messershmidt." And had that Messershmidt not been passing? There are also examples of extraordinary self interest and one in particular. German and Italian forces were based in Sicily. Axis forces were wanting to bomb towns on the Libyan coast but Italian generals were lobbying against such action. Why? Because they owned holiday homes in those towns!! With the arrival of Rommel and his colleague who was one of Hitler's closest adjutants such pleadings did not prevail for that much longer! Also staggering was the amount of rivalry, often petty, commonly competitive and sometimes verging on the outright distrust between Britain and the US.

The numbers involved are staggering. Talks of just one army campaign of 1.5 million people is common place and so too an air invasion involving 800 aircraft. Beevor is no fan of Bomber Harris by the way and not a great fan of Monty either. Stalin for all his crimes certainly came our of the war having totally out foxed both Churchill and Roosevelt; who both felt they had won the charm war but had in fact been duped themselves by Stalin's own machinations. Interesting how R was very acquiescent to S to ensure his own dreams of setting up the UN were supported and how C unsuccessfully tried time and again to ensure Poland was independent and free of the USSR and also to an extent Czechoslovakia too. Unsuccessful as Stalin was insistent on having a buffer zone from Germany and Western Europe. Realpolitik!!! C was successful with Greece however but from AB's account S did not seem too interested in Greece.

If you can take the truly harrowing then the book is worth reading. It is close to 800 pages but AB writes in a very pacy and readable way. For someone like me whose knowledge of WWII is segmented (largely thanks to films) by certain events and images such as Dunkirk, Normandy, Stalingrad, Burma's railway and Hiroshima the book ties everything together and provides a coherent and thorough chronology. Well worth a read. Just wished there were more and better maps but then that's me = and the reson for no fifth star!

The book is "The Second World War" and the author is Anthony Beevor. First of all, I have to tell you it was one hell of a read. I have had a long-running fascination with the World War II era. Watching the TV series "Victory at Sea" with my dad when I was a teenager, inspired me to join the U.S. Navy in 1955. From that time forward, I have read several autobiographies of war heroes on both sides, read history books on this era, and read fictional thrillers based on WWII. Also there is no end to excellent movies set in that era. "Patton" is one I never tire of watching. If a writer develops writer's block, he/she can easily solve their problem by using the untold stories of this very special time.

It was called World War II for a good reason, the entire world was affected by it, either directly or indirectly. The total scope of the WWII is mind-boggling. It seems that no author was crazy enough to attempt telling the complete story of this epic period. No author, that is, until Anthony Beevor came along. As he tells it, what he knew of the era seemed like a huge unfinished jigsaw puzzle. He was challenged to fill in the missing pieces and make it whole. He completed this epic work in slightly under 800 pages of text. In the book, he walks the reader ever forward through time as he geographically moves the reader from battle ground to battle ground repeatedly circling the globe.

You may be thinking now that these battle scenes must be highly compressed to all fit within 800 pages, perhaps to the point where the reading becomes dull. You would be correct that the author has condensed the material economically, but not that it is ever dull. He provides detailed descriptions of the opposing armies, navies, air support, and often provides maps of the battles. But more than that, he makes each event a three- dimensional experience for the reader. We become acquainted with the commanders in the field, and their relationships with their superiors. Indeed, these relationships extend all the way to the top, where presidents, prime ministers, and dictators play at global chess. We learn how superior weapons determine outcomes. We see how failure to think ahead contributes to defeat. We see the blood and gore, hear the booming artillery, smell the rotting corpses, ache for a bite of food, or dream of an overdue bath to get rid of lice and filth. In other words, Beevor puts you in the middle of each battle as it actually was. If you have any romantic notions about warfare, this book may give you a new perspective.

I would like to tell you that the pages fly by as you read this book. Sometimes that is true, but usually I felt tasked to absorb all that what is going on. The author did a marvelous job in making the episodes accurate, colorful, personal and realistic. Yet, these were complex events. The reader has to make an effort to process all the information being received. Thus, I found myself doing research with my Ipad to better understand the geography, personalities and action being described. I would read a few pages with my 2-3 cups of morning coffee each day. Weeks went by before I completed the book, yet I always looked forward to each new reading session. I think I learned a lot from reading the book. I am still amazed that Beevor knew so much about this worldwide period of conflict. It read as though he had been at every event himself. By now, you have probably decided whether you want to read Beevor's book. If you do, i hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Ralph D. Hermansen, September 18.2013

I have always been fascinated with any and all things to do with World War II. From the rise of Hitler, to the bombing of Hiroshima, this is perhaps the richest time in the history of the world. Due to the staggering scale of this time period, most books, both fiction and nonfiction, choose to focus on specific events or characters. In this hugely ambitious work, Antony Beevor attempts to provide a narrative overview of the entire war.

In the book, Beevor effectively introduces the early onsets of the war for each nation that was involved. Spanning from the German invasion of Poland in 1939 to the end of the war in 45, Beevor manages to provide a research filled account without ever straying from his strong narrative flow. He finds a convincing balance between broad tellings of significant battles, military strategy, and intimate insights into the main personalities of the war.

At nearly 900 pages, this book is no small undertaking. I'll admit, I read bits of the volume between other novels over the course of three months. Despite the length, I felt like Beevor never sacrificed the telling of the story in favor of dry facts, so the book maintained a consistency that easily places it above other historical works. Overall, WWII enthusiasts, history buffs, and any lover of large scale stories is sure to enjoy this book.

The more one reads about WWII the more perspectives one gets. This book certainly provides that on Chang kai Shek, Churchill, Ike and many others. What I liked about this book was that it truly was a book about the total aspects of the War, not just Europe. He tried hard to keep us abreast of all that was happening in different parts of the world.

I would have liked a few more maps. And also I found that the total lack of footnotes or any way to find out where he got the information was lacking. Totally. Many books of this type have 20 to 50 pages of extra info about sources.

Certainly showed again, how War is Hell. The millions and millions of civilians so easily killed, maimed, starved, raped byt the military from top to bottom is appalling. Genocides and reverse genocides and much still continues. Sad chapter on humanity

I will open by writing that I know very little about the Second World War. Well, I KNEW very little about the Second World War. After reading this book I now know a lot more. I'm not sure I'm happier for the knowing.

I did not sit down and read this book through in one sitting. To be honest I've had it for several months and I read it chapter by chapter in between all of the other books I have read this summer. It was too much war for me to take all at once. That does not mean that it was a bad book - not at all! In fact it read beautifully. I just could not take all of that war all at once. I had to pace myself. So pace myself I did and I am a bit later with this review than I promised and I do apologize for that. But this is the first time I've really gotten into the nitty-gritty of WWII and well, it was a lot.

The book discusses all of the battles on all of the fronts of the war. That is a LOT of battles. Mr. Beevor goes into detail about commanders, equipment and all that goes into what makes war and battles happen. I was woefully ignorant as to the Pacific end of WWII and now have a better idea of what the Japan/China side of the war was about.

The one thing that bothered me immensely though, was Mr. Beevor's treatment and descriptions of Hitler. He seemed to be treating him as a puppet rather than as the leader of the Reich. He never has Hitler fully taking charge of, or giving him responsibility for the Holocaust and to write a book about this war and to take Hitler off the hook for that horror is just egregious. I don't understand.

I can't begin to write as to whether this is a definitive work on WWII as I have minimal knowledge of the facts as I stated earlier. I can state that it was easy to read, albeit a bit slow at times. I liked that I was able to learn so much as I was reading the book chapter by chapter as to increase my knowledge of this pivotal time in modern history.

What struck me hard in reading Beevor's in-depth book of history is the treatment of civilians on all sides as mere ants to be squashed. Because they could be squashed.

I think of my mum and dad as children during the second world war. Watching in awe as the over paid, over sexed heroes of the American army marched down Queens Drive. "Any gum chum?" the scrawny kids would pester. With admiration.

Beevor also picks out individual civilian anecdotes. The battles are told as they happened. From the east or west, this many of that type of tank, a general's army goes one way, another does something else. A compelling read. A book of well earned authority. I felt no bias in the facts being relayed to me. Only the unrelenting horror of a war that was made-up as it was going along. Each side trying to out-smart and out kill each other. Men who knew no better. Women left.

I am resisting pointing out anything in particular. The Germans could have won the war. You can pick out for yourself decisive moments, decisions or indecisions. It is clear, however, that Nazi ideology infected the whole German population. Call it momentum if you like, but the will to support their despotic leader had no bounds. No conscience. No fear.

Surely Mr. Beevor is a great military historian. And as a strategist he is even greater. But sometimes he reminds me of a ‘fella’ from a distant village who does his best to tell you a story of a scuffle in his pub.
‘Then Johnny comes… boom! Billy tumbles down. Then Billy gets up… Boom! Bobby tumbles. Then Georgie comes. Boom-boom-boom… I tumble…’
Very exciting! Especially, if you are acquainted with Billy, Bobby and Georgie. Actually, I am not, I’m sorry.
Reading about generals and chieftains I’d like to know something about their merits, previous deeds and personality. And the reason why the author mentions them in his narration.
I also think it’s better if an author makes the difference between great battles and minor skirmishes. Perhaps I am too demanding.
But if you are eager to know what exactly shouted those five Japanese sailors (in Japanese) who were caught and beaten by two British scouts in a tiny grove on a remote northern island of the Philippines on the 19th of October in 1941 – that’s the book for you. Congratulations!
I managed to read half of it (well, almost) and feel very proud of myself. And mind you, I am positive to finish it – I hope I’ve got enough time for it. I am still in my fifties.

This book does an excellent job of tying every part of the Second World War together. Though Beevor is a specialist on the European war, he covers everything from Operation Torch in North Africa to the Sino-Japanese War and its impact on Axis & Allied power.

In his style, Beevor writes in a way that makes it difficult to put the book down. As ever, it's not simply a chronological arrangement of events but a story which is endlessly fascinating.

For all this, it is clear to the reader that Beevor simply doesn't have the same knowledge and thus the same flair for writing about the campaigns and battles in the other areas of the world. This seems to be more to do with the lack of the type of personal stories and anecdotes that he uses when writing about the war in Europe. In this sense, despite Beevor's best efforts, the bulk of the book remains Eurocentric. This is one of the reasons I simply couldn't give it five stars.

Having said that, he does a commendable job of documenting the horrors inflicted on women, in particular the prevalence of rape as a weapon of war. All too often this is mentioned in passing in war history despite horror of these acts and the women who suffered. It offers an answer to his critics who considered him too harsh on the Red Army in his book on the fall of Berlin for being honest about the crimes they committed despite being liberators. He doesn't waver from pointing out these atrocities time and again by soldiers from both the Allies and Axis armies and tries to maintain a balance and humanism that is necessary for understanding the horrific events of the war.

I worked through this book, and of course it is magisterial, and covers the whole story in a deft, comprehensive way. My few problems were: that it is very military, by which I mean that we get a lot of which battalion did what where, and much less of the human side of things than in other histories; I also didn't get a feel for any of the landscapes that all this fighting was happening in, there is very little description; also I was disappointed in the beginning and the end: we get nothing much about the 30s and the runup to the war -- essentially we begin in Manchuria in 1937 and Poland in 1939. A stronger initial chapter would have helped; and as another reviewer has noted, we really don't get much on the long-term postwar impacts. I also missed having more stirring stories. How can you just give a sentence to the amazing glider capture of Fort Eben-Emael, the Belgian fortress,for starters, or not give us the setpiece of Churchill in the commons/and on radio for his first speech as Prime Minister? And that's just in the first quarter of the book. There's a lot of that not here in this book. You can't have everything, I suppose.

I really appreciated the maps. Just when you needed a map, there was a map!! (This never, never happens).

By Beevor's own admission, the Second World War is one of the most written-about events in history. This book is Beevor's own admission to that collection of single-volume histories on the subject: Beevor notes in the book that it was written in many ways to fill gaps in his own knowledge and expertise on the war (he has written a number of works on individual campaigns and battles, including Stalingrad, Normandy and the Battle of Berlin).

On the positive side: he has attempted to approach the war with a relatively fresh scope, giving much greater weight to the war in China than usually has been done in such histories. In addition to using his personal work on the Eastern Front, he has also touched on themes explored in more detail by such contemporary historians as Timothy Snyder on the complex love-hate interplay of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. The book does much to discuss the positives and negatives of all combatants in the war, and does much to dispel the myth of the "Good War" (although spoiler alert: the Western democracies were still a better bet than anyone else in the war, as far as humanitarianism goes).

On the negative side: as other reviewers have noted, a major problem of this book is the level of detail. One gets an exceptionally high level of detail in the discussions of battles and campaigns that Beevor has personally done major research and writing on: the Battle of France, Stalingrad, Normandy, and Berlin. Often this focus is down to a divisional level. However, Beevor's non-specialist areas of the war tend to get much shorter shrift, and his British-based viewpoint seems to further aggravate this lopsided viewpoint: the use of the atomic bomb merits less page space than the British reoccupation of Hong Kong in 1945, for example, and both together take up far less space than Hitler's last days. Naval campaigns also tend to get breezed-through very quickly.

While the discussions of personalities and rivalries and international politics are detailed, they often feel muddled: the same international conference can get mentioned different times with hundreds of pages in between, without a clear indication that it is the same event being discussed. The biographical and personal details on key leaders and strategists like Roosevelt, Marshall and Truman feel weak: they make their appearance only to describe Allied failures in strategy (especially around Poland), and then disappear. Even military leaders seem to mostly get mentioned in order to describe their shortcomings (Air Marshal Arthur Harris comes in for a lot of criticism for example, but with only a partial explanation of why he was so driven to promote strategic bombing). Beevor in my opinion paints Eisenhower in a surprisingly excessive negative light, especially in his decision to not march on Berlin, but without a very good argument on what Beevor sees as better, unpursued alternatives. Perhaps Beevor is too much of a professional military man to handle the political side of the war? Much of the military aspects of the war have hundreds, if not thousands of books and documentaries about them at this point: for a single volume work it would seem that at least a little more politics and more economics would have been helpful to counterpoint the military aspects of the war one reads very little on how combatants' war industries kept their militaries supplied during this conflict.

Another disappointment was the Beevor tried to walk us through too much of the campaigns and the war itself, but devoted very little to its effects both on postwar politics and conflicts, but also to the historiography and cultural effects of the war. His afterword hinted at some very interesting ideas and discussions that Beevor could have had on this subject, but which again he only mentions in passing. I would have loved to read more of his thoughts on these subjects.

Sometimes Beevor's prose can feel a bit repetitive: he seems to be quite taken with the image of people being run over by tanks, because this detail tends to get worked in to almost every battle and campaign discussed.

A final complaint: the maps. Some of the maps had inaccuracies on them, but in general there were just too few, with too little detail to provide a visual tool to follow the more detailed aspects of the campaigns described, especially in China and on the Eastern Front. I mostly had to rely on John Keegan's (a mentor of Beevor) edited "Atlas of the Second World War" to remedy this.

This book is well written, as is no real surprise, and if you knew nothing about World War II, this would be a fairly good introduction. On the other hand, I have considerable knowledge of the war, and this book lacked any great interest. There simply wasn't anything in there I hadn't seen before many, many times. There is no trace of "revisionism" here - every interpretation reflects the standard consensus, so far as I can tell.

This is one of those books that is hard to review because I can't really think of anything very positive to say about it, yet I didn't hate it, either. Writing 800 pages without being interesting or original is an achievement of some sort, I guess.

I didn't think Max Hastings' recent history of WW2 was very interesting, either. In my view, the single best one-volume history of WW2 remains Gerhard Weinberg's A World At Arms, even though it was written nearly 20 years ago.

In this huge volume containing 800 pages of written text, Antony Beevor has tried to do the impossible. He has managed to cover almost all the aspects of World War Two-the most horrible conflict mankind has ever known.More than seventy million people perished in it. This is not only a military history but also a political one. The majority of it covers the Eastern Front and the rest describes the war in the Pacific Theatre.
This book is a synthesis of many and previous works on the subject and its strength lies in its excellent chapters-50 only. Each one tells the reader about another aspect of the war.
There are very good chapters on the Battle of Stalingrad, Pearl Harbour, the Japanese occupation and the Battle of Midway, as well as the Battle of Kursk and the Battle of Berlin.
Beevor is excellent when he writes about the horrors of this conflict, especially during the Leningrad Siege or when he describes in what way the Japanese were engaged in barbaric acts. He writes, for example, about the Japanese soldiers and officers who resorted to cannibalism and not just of enemy corpses. He adds that "human flesh was regarded as a necessary food source, and hunting parties were forth to obtain it. In New Guinea they killed, butchered and ate local people and slave laborers, as well as a number of Australian and American prisoners of war, whom they referred to as 'white pigs', as opposed to Asian 'black pigs'.
His main source and companion when writing about the Eastern Front is Vasily Grossman. The Holocaust gets vey little attention and he does barely mention Ultra's role in the war.
Another excellent point is when Beevor discusses the talks that the Big Three had during the war: Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. Stalin's paranoia is evident everywhere and the fact that he had more than 80 warnings about the Nazis' intentions but dismissed them as fabrications of the mind only proves this point. Beevor is excellent when describing the strategies of Stalin's generals.
The weak points of this book are as follows: there are not many maps in it. In a military history book, the editors had to incorporate a greater number of them. Second, too much attention is given to Europe but not to other parts of of this conflict. Third, the ordinary lives of the combatants and civilians alike gets attention only when he describes the events in Europe but not in the Far East.
However, this book is extremely well-written, engrossing and nicely produced. Highly recommended!

I have read many histories of the Second World War. I will just mention some things that I think Beevor was exceptional at:

- Depicting the British-US-French-Russian rivalry and the inter-personal conflicts between Churchill, FDR, DeGaulle, and Stalin. This was crucial as the war went on.
- Depicting the many blunders made by the British, from "Bomber Harris" to Churchill's Greek obsessions.
- Delineating the "shooting Holocaust" from the "gas Holocaust"
- Depiction of how starvation and Japanese fanaticism resulted in a decimated Japanese soldier by 1943
- How Stalin wanted to attack the Allies in 1945, but was persuaded not to, due to the A-bomb

Anthony Beevor's The Second World War is the only book on World War II I have read that covers the complete war from beginning to end. He covers all the major theatres of the war including China, Pacific, Burma, Europe and Africa. This is very detailed, yet Beevor manages to keep the narrative moving. Beever just doesn't cover the strategic side of the war, but also in graphic detail how much the war cost in human lives. He graphically describes the war crimes of the Japanese, Soviets, and Germans during the war. Beevor also does a very good job of decribing the major players of the war on all sides.

Any World War II history buff should try to read a complete history of the war. Beevor's should be highly recommended.

I would truly rate this book 4 1/2 stars for it's content and completeness but I have read many other WW II books that were much more compelling to read. This book simply didn't have the "page turner" appeal to me. I found the author's emphasis on certain events,such as the asian influence of the start of WWII, interesting since most other WW II summaries have focused more on Europe. The author also did a great job of truly making every chapter separate and with a different focus of the War which was needed due to immense amount of information.There are just so many great books written about the War that for me to truly rate this 5 stars I would not be truthful. It's a solid book, just simply not one of the best.

From the Battle of Khalkhin Gol to Hiroshima, Beevor's one volume history of WWII is as comprehensive as it is full of the detail that one finds in the oral histories of Stephen Ambrose. Even those familiar with the war will find new details as well as new connections that only become evident in a broad narrative.

I thought this book was excellent. It deals with the truly global nature of the war, the beginning of which may be traced to Japanese incursions into China, which is to say the volume is not European or Western centric. Indeed, there is much criticism about the Allies, e.g. the pointless bombing of German cities and the post-war selling of Poland down the river. Also, Roosevelt and Churchill are cut down to size as are various military leaders. The history is well written and, naturally, well researched. I learned heaps and frequently felt depressed. So much senseless cruelty and horror. I wonder if studying up on all the atrocities ever put the writer in a bad mood.

I only have one complaint. I’m not quite sure how the author arrived at his views on Chiang Kai-shek. Here, we only see the Generalissimo behaving really badly after the war. The US should have lent more support to Chiang’s Nationalists, etc. The Chinese were doing their best to resist the Japanese invaders, and so on. I don’t see it that way and wonder why there are no significant accounts of the Nationalists fighting the Japanese, like there are, for instance, of the Russians fighting the Germans. I think the reason is that apart from a bold assault on Japanese-held Shanghai, a victory at Taierzhuang, and a few other battles, there just wasn’t that much organized resistance. Nationalist troops were typically press ganged and untrained and Chiang was mainly conserving his strength to fight the Communists after the Americans had dealt with the Japanese. The author touches on these points, but he doesn’t acknowledge that Chiang was a gangster, his government the mafia. The Nationalists were fascists. When they fled to Taiwan, they slaughtered thousands and turned the island into a police state. They trained Filipino death squads who served the dictator Marcos. As just about every Western journalist and advisor noted at the time: Chiang Kai-shek was bad news – before, during, and after the war. The author is much too sympathetic toward Chiang and the Nationalist Party. But, as I say, apart from that, the book is outstanding.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

After reading The Nightingale I was in a WWII frame of mind and, being that I love history, I dove headfirst in to The Second World War by Antony Beevor. This was a great historical book. It had all of the dates, political intrigue, details, and historical connections that I love. At times it reads like a textbook but I’m so in love with post-1900’s history that this was an excellent educational read. I loved it.

REVIEW: Masterful descriptions make The Second World War by Antony Beevor a must-read

By STEPHEN FRATER

In The Second World War Antony Beevor has delivered an epic, brilliantly researched work on the defining event of the 20th century.

Beevor is the author of the New York Times bestsellers D-Day, The Fall of Berlin 1945¡ Stalingrad, yet those works were mere preamble to his latest work, arguably the best single-volume history of World War II yet written.

Beevor, an ex-British Army officer, unfailingly and even-handedly casts light onto the feet of clay upon which all mortals including generals, dictators and presidents, must stand. Titans such as Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, de Gaulle, Mao, Mussolini and Eisenhower are on full display, warts, foibles, insecurities, egos, errors and all.

While portraying the grand sweep of the conflict, Beevor never loses sight of the intensity that this unique global bloodbath represented for both soldiers and civilians caught up in the war¡¯s bestial, unfathomable terrors.

Beevor¡¯s complete, confident command of the veritable Mount Everest of World War II data, his new research and his pitch-perfect narrative represent a truly astonishing display of art and craft. The Second World War is history at its very best, readable at all levels, compelling, character-driven, original, compassionate and insightful.

The author masterfully describes the conflict's global reach - one that included every major power and left more than 70 million dead. Beevor controversial findings include new information on:

Operation Mars in November 1942 (the deception to keep German troops away from the Stalingrad front as the Red Army launched its great counteroffensive there). The operation was deliberately betrayed on Stalin¡¯s order to German intelligence. The Soviet armies involved were also deprived of artillery ammunition to support them. This ruthlessly cynical sacrifice produced 215,000 Soviet casualties, roughly the same as all the Allied casualties for D-Day and the whole of the Battle for Normandy.

The Tokyo war crimes tribunal. Charges were never brought against Japanese officers for a deliberate policy of cannibalism. Across China and the Pacific, Allied prisoners of war and local people were kept alive to be butchered for their meat. This atrocity was suppressed for the very understandable reason that it would have traumatized the families of all those whose loved ones had perished in a prison camp, since they would never have known if they had been eaten or not.

The assassination of Adm. Francois Darlan in Algiers in December 1942 and how officers from the British Special Operations Executive were closely involved in it. American officers from the OSS also knew of the plot in advance, but neither informed their seniors.

The strategic bombing offensive against Germany by the U.S, Eighth Air Force and RAF Bomber Command. Though highly criticized, it had a far greater effect on the eastern front than has yet been acknowledged.

The attack on the Panther tank factories contributed to the postponement of Hitler¡¯s Kursk offensive to July 1943, with disastrous results for the Wehrmacht. And the relentless bombing of Germany forced the Luftwaffe to withdraw so many fighter squadrons from the Russian front to defend the Reich that German air reconnaissance was unable to spot the Red Army¡¯s massive offensives in advance.

This book, which crowns Beevor's distinguished and bestselling career, is one of the nonfiction events of the decade and for this reader, is by far the best nonfiction of 2012 to date.

Stephen Frater, a former Herald-Tribune reporter, is the author of Hell Above Earth. His website is [...]
Herald Tribune Media Group 7/29/12

Antony Beevor does a sterling job in covering the history of WW2 in what is indeed a very readable edition. Readers looking for some personalized stories in the many sagas of this dreadful war are best advised to look elsewhere since besides the virtually approved policy of cannabilism of POWs by starving Japanese (not disclosed at the end of the war so as to not distress Allied families)there are no new revelations to this already extensively covered history. Still worth a visit to those fascinated by this most dreadful period of mankind's history.

As a longtime World War II buff I have read most of the major works on that hellish conflict written in English. Only a few months ago I perused Max Hastings excellent "Inferno: 1939-1945." Hasting's bookis more anecdotal and opiniated than that of his fellow Brit Anthony Beevor. These are the two one volume histories of the war I would recommend in a course of study on that terrible time. Beevor's great work is a tough military account of the World War II which claimed over 60 million persons and untold hell throughout the world.
The book is divided into 50 relatively concise chapters. In 800 pages of clearly written prose, Beevor covers all the major campaigns of the war including:
Hitler's invasions of Poland, Czech, France, Scandinavia, Holland, Demark, Lux., Beligum, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, North Africa and most importanly the Soviet Union. On June 21 the Wehrmacht attacted the Soviets with an army of over 3.5 million troops.
The major battles on the Russian front are all given coverage including: Leningrad, Stalingrad, the tank battle of Kursk and Operation Bagration in which Stalin's hordes attacked the German home land from the Vistula to the Oder and the capture of Berlin.
The Pacific War is also covered in depth featuring American and Japanese strategy. We witness the horror of such jungle infernos as Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and the dropping of the atomic bombs over Hiroshama and Nagasaki which brought the long war to an end. Over 1 million Japanese died in the futile war against the United States and Great Britain.
General Douglas MacArthur's return to the Philippines is discussed in depth.
Beevor discusses the strengths, weaknesses and rivalries of such Allied military commanders as Eisenhower, Montgomery, Omar Bradley and among the Russians: Zukov and Konev.
Mussolin and the Italian Fascist movement is discussed as well as the Allies campaigns up the boot of Italy to Rome.
Beevor, who has an excellent book on D-Day, does well in his chapters on the D-Day invasion of France on June 6, 1944
Beevor devotes several chapters to the shoah of the Jewish people by the cruel inhuman Nazi regime,
The Sino-Japanese war and the civil war between Mao's Communists and Chaing-Kai-Chek's natonalist forces are covered.
William Slim, Claire Chennault and Vinegar Joe Stilwell's battles in the CBI theatre are explored (China-Burma-India).
In addition to succinct coverage of military operations, Beevor is also good at examining the political and military strategy pursued by the leaders of the major participants in the slaughter. Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and Hitler's plans are stated in language a general reader can comprehend. The book contains several excellent and well drawn maps, has an extensive bibliography (found on the author's website) and extensive footnotes for further reading. It can be read with profit from cover to cover or a person could focus in on a particular subject of the complex war.
We are fortunate to live in a democratic society free from the muderous regimes of the Nazis, Soviets, Italian and Japanese war machines. This book is not for the squeamish. There are many bloody horrors in these 800 pages. The book is an essential one volume popular history that will much discussed, quoted and used in studying World War II. Highly recommended!

Having been fascinated by WWII since I was a kid, and having read dozens of massive works on the subject, I didn't think it would still be possible to still find a single-volume work that covers the entire war to be anything near as fascinating a read as Beevor's is.
How he manages to cover such all-encompassing ground, while still including hordes of up-close eyewitness accounts, and keep it all as smooth-flowing and interesting as he does, I can only imagine. This is a work any WWII "enthusiast" will want to keep to re-read in the future.

A brilliant history written with surgical detail. For both the expert and student of World War-II, Beevor's analysis brings new insight to the pursuit of power by sheer force. The work rivals his brilliant "The Fall of Berlin; 1945." His coverage of all theaters of the war is encyclopedic, especially in Asia and the Pacific. His casting off of political correctness in exposing the little known, and little understood, cruelties of Japanese occupation is a welcome tour d' force. Much of what Beevor uncovers still remains hidden from today's Japanese students, and underscores the fears of a return to Bushido militarism. If you are going to own one book on the whole of World War-II, this is it.

I am a huge fan of Antony Beevor's books on WWII and his book on the Spanish Civil War was good, too. It is the only book I could find on that war that was for the general reader - not expensive books for specialists. This book is a step above most of the many books on the Second World War because Beevor's writing style and the extra attention he pays to parts of this war some authors skim over. A great read, buy it!
If you like WWII histories, be sure to read his other titles on it. All of them fantastic.

I believe the single volume history of WW2 is a futile subgenre, the war is just too complex for one book to cover. However, other writers, like Andrew Roberts, have done this better than Beevor, who seems to be growing into an increasingly opinionated chairborne general as his career continues.

Readers of such WWII histories as John Keegan's "Second World War" and Max Hastings' "Inferno" will be surprised and delighted by this fresh take on the worst war humanity has ever known. From its original beginning in the Japanese invasion of China, this is an original take by a gifted story teller. At 783 pages, it is a bit of a heft, but hey, so was the war. Take a few weeks out of your schedule, settle in, and get to know WWII for the first time.

This is an incredibly informative book which covers most aspects of combat and campaigns in WWII. While not the defining book on the war, it needs to be included in any collection. There is very little mention of the homefront in most of the countries, other than the effects of operations. That does not take away from this work.
HOWEVER......what is missing in huge amounts are maps. He goes into great detail on a lot of battles and campaigns, and the reader has no idea where he is talking about. While there are some maps included, which go into some detail, these are poorly marked. One map included regarding a campaign on the Eastern front does not have one of the key cities that he repeatedly refers to.
Though not important, what is also weird is that on occasion he refers to a picture taken of an incident or a meeting, and does not include it. Most photos included are not the best representative of those available. These almost seem to be an after-thought.
But it is the lack of maps surely detracts from the quality of this book and keeps it from being a 5 Star.

This is the third big study of WWII I have read in the last three years, and the ending is the same each time. That's the problem with non-fiction. On the other hand, you do learn new ways of looking at things you already know, so there is that. I can't really split this from Max Hastings Inferno or Andrew Roberts Storm of War/Masters and Commanders. All books are just superb works that will stand the test of time. This has the best narative flow, perhaps, but there is a little more analysis in the other works, and certainly this is less unhappy than Hastings brutal retelling of the events of 1939-1945.

What Beevor does better than those other two is explore the war in China: perhaps he even does this better than Hastings "Retribution" about the Pacific War. But, apart from the Battle of Khalkin Gol in early 1939, when the Soviets soundly defeated the Japanese, for the most part the rest of the War affected China, while events in China did not really affect the wider war. You could make the case that Andrew Roberts basically one-page summary as "the Chinese tied up 1 million Japanese Army soldiers" is a fair summary of what Beevor covers at length. Of course, that means you ignore a lot of suffering by the Chinese peasantry, which you cannot overlook in today's world, which is still largely shaped by WWII.

In short, every theatre of war is covered in some degree of detail, together with how they all interrelated, and also with the machinations of Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Hitler (and to a degree, de Gaulle). If there is anything in particular I took away from this, its that Roosevelt was a bit of a prick: he appears completely amoral, apart from the big issue of war against Hitler and Tojo. As a sideline to WWII, Roosevelt was focused on dismantling the British Empire, all the while ignoring the rise of the Soviet empire to an extent that must have been either deliberate or negligent. But still, in the great scheme of WWII, the British lost less than most - certainly less than the the Jews, the Poles, or the Balts, or other nations of central Europe.

I guess I have to say, read all of Roberts, Hastings and Beevor. All are great works and complement the other. Beevor's books on the fall of Berlin, the battle of Stalingrad, and D-Day are also excellent. If you have an interest in military history, this is a must read.

An extraordinary survey of World War II combined with individual experiences. Perhaps I am biased, though I have read extensively, but I believe the author gives inordinate attention to wise British leadership while deploring stupid American policies. In addition, Beevor gives scant attention to the successes and sacrifices of the U.S. Navy, especially the submariners. Finally, he fails to recognize the preponderance of American forces and material in the Western European conflict. I liked the book and recognize the perspective of the author.

After reading probably 100 books about WWII this is one of the best. True, it's an overview and therefore can't focus on everything. It has good coverage of areas that we in the US don't usually hear about; the Eastern front and the Burma campaign. I strongly recommed this book, it's well written, well documented and even handed.

This is the best WW2 book I've read. I am not even finished yet (on pg. 557) and already it's pretty damn good. Antony Beevor does it again. I read the Fall of Berlin 1945 after my brother recommended i read his works and it turned to be worth my time. I've read other books, some I didn't even finish simply because it was BORING. But not this one. I recommend this book to anyone who is inspired by the war that changed the world. It's long but it's worth it.

This is a good read. I covers both theaters of action, Europe and the Pacific, and gets into quite a lot of detail. The
recounting of the civilian attrocities by both Germany and the Soviet Union is quite disturbing, but factual. With this
you can see how the world of today came about.

A well-written condensed history of WW II from a European point of view. It sheds light on the complex rivaries that existed among the Allies, and also shows that the Axis powers were less than united. The accounts of Inter-service rivalries on the US side as well as the UK. The scope and scale of the Eastern Front is detailed, along with the barbarism exhibited by both sides. The readability of the book is enhanced by frequent tidbits and anecdotes of specific actions and personalities.
WW II is too big and complex to be adequately told in a single volume, but for those interested in understandig it, this is a good place to start.

Anthony Beevor illuminates WWII like no other Historian before him. His uncanny ability to intertwine Operational and Political History with the personal memories of common soldiers and civilians gives the reader a deep and intense perspective of a conflict that lasted almost ten years and touched every continent and ocean on the planet.

Antony Beevor account of the war is comprehensive, riveting, detailed, but never boring. He does not rehash his fine work on the Eastern Front from Stalingrad and Battle for Berlin, but provides fresh new perspectives on these theaters as well. An indispensable work.

While an impressively researched book looking at the political, military and individual views of the war, there is still some significant information left out, specifically Italy's invasion of Ethiopia (and the war crimes committed there) and Albania, the Tuskegee Airmen, and the Battle of Castle Itter. I would have preferred to see at least one of these topic addressed in the place of the constant reminder in the latter chapters of the plight of the German civilians.

As a first personal insight into the WWII, I found this text exactly what I always wanted to read about the subject. Deep, and specially enlightening not only in the military and political facts but also in the human side of the conflict. Brilliant book.

I have enjoyed the book immensely! Beevor describes in great detail the battles, the high politics and the ordinary human condition, while always keeping the high level narrative moving forward. Would probably read it again in the future.

complete research on a never ending story of the conflict. a perfect edition, for a addition to his other works on the subject. my wife said "another WWll book"? I replied " the book on WWll!
Good read, you will enjoy it!

One wonders: Why do we need yet another two-inch-thick recounting of familiar events with a London bias?

Antony Beevor has shown himself to be a fine writer in the past, but falls flat here. He offers the typical British disregard of the Pacific, with inadequate, incomplete and sometimes inaccurate coverage of major events. Generally the narrative lacks spark and flair. As a writer he seems to be stuck in a middle ground between intimate portraiture and sweeping majesty. It's not clear what his contribution is, following in the wake of Hastings, Andrews, Gilbert, Keegan, Murray/Millett, Commager via Miller, and others. And at the end, where he reaches for significance, he can summon only banality and sloppy logic.

It's only fair to ask a reader to review a book on the merit of the author's own words. The book's concluding notes are where it needs to come together and resonate. Mr. Beevor's conclusion is a major disappointment, a wholly inadequate close to a work of such length.

* "Having been given the mantle of the `good war,' the Second World War has loomed over succeeding generations far more than any other conflict in history." Really? How might we ever measure that? Loomed where, over whom and how? The U.S. Civil War didn't loom, did it? But I suppose a Brit can only speak for Brits. A pointless bit of sophistry, this.

* This one's even worse: "Although it may have ended in overwhelming defeat for the Nazis and Japanese, the victory conspicuously failed to achieve world peace." Was that really any nation or leader's aim in the war? The author's proposition is utterly novel and startling: The magical conjuration of a benign international order is the metric by which we measure wars. Many thoughtful people are satisfied that the Allies' destruction of not one but two evil empires, and their eventual transformation by the victors into peaceful democratic nations, was and continues to be a conspicuous success and a net gain for humanity. Maybe he's trying to make a name for himself as a critic. Unfortunately, his argument is inane and beside the point.

The author tries to support the WW2-as-failure line with: "First there were the latent civil wars across Europe and Asia.... Then there was the Cold War." Yes, all that, it seems, was the fault of FDR, General Marshall, Hap Arnold, and Chester Nimitz. Or was it? The author, sadly, can't help himself from finally revealing his scapegoat: "And we can never forget that the sequence of struggle in the Middle East began with mass Jewish immigration into Palestine, following the liberation of the camps."

That's right, Mr. Beevor appears to believe that the "conspicuous failure" of WW2 was substantially in part the fault of the Jews.

* "Some people complain that the Second World War still exerts a dominating influence nearly seven decades after its end." They do? Who are the complainers? What what dire "dominating influence" is the author even talking about?

* "No other period in history offers so rich a source for the study of dilemmas, individual and mass tragedy, the corruption of power politics, ideological hypocrisy, the egomania of commanders, betrayal, perversity, self-sacrifice, unbelievable sadism and unpredictable compassion." Yes indeed. All those things are ripe for study. One wishes the author had studied them rather than simply trod rather flatly through much-discussed and well-understood events. (And don't we all prefer our power politics to be uncorrupted?)

* "There is, nevertheless, a real danger of the Second World War becoming an instant reference point." Maybe this bit of mysterious inscrutability means that people might talk about it too much. Or that Brits might load up our bookshelves with too many overly long books. It was unclear to me how a "reference point" might be dangerous, but then the author elaborated: The danger, he says, is that "leaders of democracies can become prisoners of their own rhetoric, just like dictators." One looks in vain for any inkling of what this might mean, or support for the idea that it's an issue of relevant concern. I guess he's suggesting that Allied nations have become so proud of their victory in WW2 that they've enslaved millions by boasting about it? The Greatest Generation as opiate of the masses? Can someone help me here?

* "When we dwell on the enormity of the Second World War and its victims, we try to absorb all those statistics of national and ethnic tragedy. This makes us overlook the way the Second World War changed everyone's lives in ways impossible to predict." What exactly are we overlooking as we try to absorb the numbers, the tragedy? I always thought the acting of "dwelling," and the study of statistics, tended to push in the direction opposite of "overlooking" things. The author seems to suggest that the act of studying war is to become ignorant of it. Is he actually suggesting we would have learned more about WW2 if he hadn't written this book?

* As the truisms, nonsequiturs, sentimentalities and banalities pile up, the entire book begins to creak and crumble for lack of coherence. The book is brought to a merciful end on page 782-783, but it's here that the nonsense reaches its crescendo. The author closes with a perfectly asinine anecdote plucked from a 1945 French intelligence report. The story concerns a German soldier's wife who fell in love with a French POW assigned to work at their farm in Germany. The significance of this romance across enemy lines is rather opaque, to be polite, but the author seems to think it raises Large and Momentous Questions important enough to close his 783-page narrative. After three readings, I still can't tell what they are, or what it has to say about decisions by Hitler and Stalin. Maybe you can puzzle it out: "Would her difficult journey [smuggling herself out of Germany to Paris] have been in vain, even if she had not been picked up by the police? Had her lover given her the wrong address because he was already married? And had he returned home, as quite a few did, to find that his wife had had a baby in his absence by a German soldier? It is, of course, a very minor tragedy in comparison to everything else which had happened further east. But it remains a poignant reminder that the consequences of decisions by leaders such as Hitler and Stalin ripped apart any certainty in the traditional fabric of existence." Where I come from, we call this kind of speculative bloviation a "reach." And yet here they are, a bland truism masquerading as profound, and constituting the last words of the book.

The research the author marshaled is as voluminous as any of his many competitors, but one has the distinct feeling that, having marshaled it, he was left with no idea what it added up to, how to deploy it via narrative or analysis, or had insufficient time to develop a cogent point of view to leave the reader with. Facing all the competition from several superior books, well established and recent alike, who can blame a writer for flinching a little and losing his nerve?

Very seldom in selecting a book have I found the few dissenting 1 Star opinions to be accurate, however in this case of Beevor's work I agree.
In agreement with another review this book should be titled "How Brittain Won the War Despite American Incompetence".

Probably a very good book, but impopssible to read on Kindle. Links to chapter notes were so screwed up that, I couldn't read the book, because it kept jumping to the notes if I touched the wrong part of the screen. Then, after it had gone to the chapter note, it would not go back to my place in the text. It jumped back to the beginning of the chapter.

Frustrating experience.

I've never written an the store review before, so first, let me say I am a social studies teacher with ten years experice as well majors in history and politcal science, and a passion for reading military history in general and on the second world war specifically.

Shy do I say this? Simple: Beevor's work violates everything I was ever taught about writing history.

First, his writing is anglo-centric to the point of being amero-phobic. Or, put another way, the title of the book should actually be "How the British (and friends) won the Second World War." Consider: Despite saying early on that the European and Pacific theaters are equally important, he gives short shrift to the PTO for the entire book. Consider: He spends a chapter on Crete - an interesting camapign, to be sure - but devotes a scant page or two to Midway, a far more decisive battle (and even then he quotes the indited narrative of Mitsuo Fuchida verbatim as fact....). Another example? He understandably devotes multiple chapters to the Normandy campaign, but barely mentions the nearly simultaniously - and arguably as important to the defeat of Japan - invasion of Saipan, making the bomber offensive against the home islands possible.

Even more damning, IMO, is his treatment of D-Day itself. He devotes several pages to the Anglo-Canadian beaches, but says NOTHING about the American beaches except that they "faced lighter opposistion but much worse terrain." His next sentance then indites the Americans, telling us that we silly Americans ignored Brooke's warnings of the difficulties involved with the bocage (pg. 581).

And that's all he says. No mention of the Ameircan beaches, or Point du Hoc, or the Rangers. Nope. We had it easy, and the only reason it was hard at all was becuase we didn't listen to out British betters.

Now, I am being sarcastic, but.... I am no anglophobe, and in fact am rather a student of British history. But to do what Beevor did with his D-Day chapter is a shameful disgrace to the men who fought and died there.

Second is his poor research. There were innumerable times that I would read something Beevor asserted that I'd never heard before in twenty years of reading on the topic, and I went to check his sources - no cite. Then I saw "Bibliography online." "Ah," I thoght. "Maybe there the source notes are listed!" Nope. It lists only his sources. No listing of his foot notes. I was taught "If you quote someone, you need to cite the quote." Mr. Beevor has apparently never learned this.

Worse is the lack of depth to his research. History students today are taught the primacy of primary sources; again, Mr. Beevor has apparently not been. The vast majority of his sources are secondary sources written within the last decade or so. He seems to have rarely, if ever, gone back to the words of the actual particpants, or unit histories, or even secondary sources written shortly after the war by people famiiar with the facts and people involved. No, he instead indites authors like David Glantz in his text (he specifically does this in book's text) - a writer who has done more primary source research on the Eastern Front than Mr. Beevor ever has. I own and have read seven of Mr. Glantz's books, and met him at a seminar a deacde ago. His reserach includes reading Soviet Unit histories - in Russian. Mr. Beevor can't seem to be bothered to go beyond ten year old tertiary sources as his primary research.

Third, and in some ways most damning, is his resorting to undignifed ad hominum attaks - again with no evidence to back them up. He does this MANY times - and usually directed at an American. I quote just one example, in reference to the '44 campaign to take Rome. (pg. 571) "Clark's obesseion was so intense that one can assume he had become slightly deranged.... CLark even claimed at one point that he warned Alexander that, if units of the Eighth Army entered Rome before him, he would order his men to open fire on them."

Now, I will say I have heard that Clark had made this reference about getting into Rome before the Brits in other places. But as to Clark being deranged? One can assume that, sure. But Beevor writes it as if it were a fact, not his own opinion But when I went to check his end notes for a source to back this claim up - a psycholigist, the words of someone present at the time, even another historian... Yep. You guessed it: nothing.

In short, this book is a frightful example of anglo-centrisim at best, poorly written and reserached junk in fact, and amero-phobia at worst. Do yourself a favor: don't even get this book from the library, as I thankfully only did, and surely don't buy it. Instead, pick up Max Hasting's "Inferno" (a Brit author who doesn't seem to hate Americans), Murray and Millett's "A War to be Won," or, fromt the American persepctive, Rick Atkinson's "The liberation Trilogy."

Antony Beevor has won an undeserved reputation as a historian. His book on Stalingrad plagiarised John Erickson's far better books on the war on the Eastern Front, and his book on the war in Spain plagiarised Hugh Thomas' book.

On the big questions of the Second World War, Beevor reveals his out-dated prejudices. He has never a good word to say about our allies, the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party. He relies on Jon Halliday and Jung Chang for `correcting' his account of Japan's war on China.

Early in his book he writes, "The Japanese had recently been taken aback by Communist forces in northern China launching a series of attacks." And, "The Communists managed to push back the Japanese in many places, cut the Peking-Hankow railway, destroy coal mines and even carry out attacks into Manchuria. This major effort, using their forces in more conventional tactics, cost them 22,000 casualties which they could ill afford."

These conclusions contradict his later claim (made after talks with Halliday and Chang?) that "Communist supporters such as Edgar Snow had managed to persuade readers in the United States that Mao's forces were fighting hard while the corrupt Nationalists were doing little, when in fact the opposite was true."

Beevor writes of "the Great Leap Forward which killed more people than in the whole of the Second World War ... the seventy million victims of a regime that was in many ways worse than Stalinism". Is it too much to ask that he checks the facts, rather than just repeat Chang and Halliday's absurd lies?

Beevor writes, "Relations between the western Allies and Stalin were bound to be fraught with suspicion. Churchill especially had promised far more military supplies than Britain was able deliver [sic]. And the American President's disastrous assurance to Molotov in May that they would launch a Second Front before the end of the year did more to poison the Grand Alliance than anything else. Stalin's paranoid tendencies persuaded him that the capitalist countries simply wanted the Soviet Union to be weakened while they waited."

Churchill had of course backed Roosevelt's promise. After the facts that Beevor cited, it seems a little rude to call Stalin paranoid for noticing these same facts and drawing the correct conclusion.

Beevor ends by trying to blame Hitler and Stalin equally for the war. He calls the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany two `totalitarians', ignoring the crucial difference that the Soviet Union did all it could to prevent the most terrible war in history, while Nazi Germany did all it could to start it. Beevor is too mean-minded and hidebound to acknowledge that without Stalin and the Red Army we would all be living - if at all - in Hitler's concentration camps.

This is not so much a history of the Second World War as a stream of anecdotes, verging all too often on war porn.

Every single book ever published since the end of WWII till today has no TRUE perspective. 80% of every book covers american and UK (aka "allies") activities in pacific and north africa.
To take it all into the Right perspective, the real WWII wasn't going on in these far away areas, but in Russia, where almost every single battle was THE Most important and decisive battles of WWII. The battles like Kursk, Stalingrad and many others made the turning points in the outcome of the WWII, not in the pacific, with small unimportant really events that had no special impact or influence on the outcome of WWII.
20,000 killed russian troops vs 400,000 killed american troops. So, here is the right perspective. Plus, not to get involved in the real War, in europe, until "dday" of june 6 1944...!!!!! dday didn't have any impact on the war. Red Army was already on the approach to Berlin, and it was only a matter of time. The reason behind " dday" was to be part of the winning team.
every book published in US is filled with so much hype about americans in WWII, so much bravado, so much overblown proportions...and only about 10-15% of the pages usually toward the end, the "role" (ha..ha..ha..) of USSR in the WWII....Yes, true, this is how many books have names of chapters on this topic. ALL are full with misinformation. WE "won" the WWII - this is a general message in all these books.