The Second World War

From the great cities of Europe to the jungles of Burma, and from the deserts of North Africa to the remote islands of the South Pacific and the freezing waters of the Arctic, the Second World War touched every continent and ocean on the planet. And from the Blitzkrieg to the atom bomb, the fighting fuelled new technological development on land, at sea and in the air at a ferocious pace. Our future was forged by war.

Sixty million people died in the Second World War, and still they tell us it was the Peoples War.
The official history of the Second World War is Victors History. This is the history of the Second World War without the patriotic whitewash.

The Second World War casts a long shadow, portrayed as a necessary and paradigmatic war that defeated fascism. During recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, US presidents and British prime ministers have tried to claim they were following in the footsteps of Winston Churchill by standing up to dictators. In The Second World War Chris Bambery tests this position in a thorough account of the war and tries to understand why it still dominates TV history channels and school history books. Bambery argues that the conflict ultimately was about a division of the world between the great powers, as well as a rising of ordinary people against fascism. He offers a complex and radical analysis, that is unique when compared to many modern and conventional histories of the war.