Europe at War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory

Whereas in Britain and France it was self-evident that Hitler was waging a war of conquest by launching an unprovoked attack on Poland, it was equally obvious to most Germans that they were caught up in a war of national defence, forced upon them by Allied machinations and Polish aggression.

His generals were still concerned about the dangers of a two-front war, the avoidance of which had always been a bedrock principle in Hitler’s strategic thinking; now, however, he appeared to cast aside his own misgivings. Compared to a cross-channel invasion of England, war against Russia seemed easy, the kind of campaign at which his forces had t

In 1941, though, the British were “hanging on by our eyelids,” as General Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, put it.

As wars go, the Second World War was the big one—a giant, planetwide entropic pulse that converted whole cities to rubble and some fifty-five million living humans into corpses. No war has ever killed more or even come close. From Dresden, Warsaw, Manila, Tokyo, and Hiroshima, that’s what the war looked like: a vortex of carnage. Yet, ironically, p

“We levelled entire cities with our bombs and shell fire,” admitted the high commissioner. “We destroyed roads, public buildings, and bridges. We razed sugar mills and factories.” In the end, he concluded, “there was nothing left.”