Europe at War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory

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

The battlefield at Falaise was one of the greatest killing grounds of the war in the West. “Forty-eight hours after the closing of the gap,” Eisenhower wrote, “I was conducted through it on foot, to encounter scenes that could only be described by Dante. It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead

But the most serious defect in Ike’s broad-front strategy was that the Allied momentum was lost and the Germans were given time to recover.

The price the Allies paid for their missed opportunity in September was heavy. Of the 750,000 battle casualties the Western Allies suffered in Europe, two-thirds occurred after their autumn slowdown. The collateral costs were even greater. Millions of men and women on both sides died as a result of the continued fighting—to say nothing of the ongoi

It took the Japanese movement into French Indochina in mid-1941 to break the congressional stonewalling. With Japan on the march, Congress finally saw the wisdom of fortifying its Pacific-facing territory. The Japanese movement terrified the British even more. They feared losing Singapore and pleaded with Roosevelt to mount an Asian defense. Roosev

The British did not object to the military cease-fire. What they protested was the commitment to keep the Vichy regime in place.