This is history at its best. Roberts comes to the job of reviewing World War II with a great perspective on the major decision-makers in the early days of the war, Churchill, Roosevelt, Marshall and Alan Brooke, in his earlier book, Masters and Commanders. These great leaders faded in importance as Hitler made his single most fateful decision, to attack the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. This ultimately cost Russia more than half of all the fatalities in the war, more than 25 million human souls, but it bled the German armies of their vital strength. Apart from minor victories, the German army never again won a major battle. Roberts has a sweeping command of facts, many of which were new to me. In addition, his opinions are well argued and easy to follow. This is a wonderful book, so well thought through and so well written. The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War
I have been a history buff for most of my life. Strange as it may sound for a doctor, history is my most favorite subject. I had never heard of Dr Andrew Roberts before, now I know what I had been missing. His recent book is a tour de force. His basic argument about the monumental mistakes that led to the German defeat in WW II are not new to those persons interested in WW II history; however, his analysis is superbly trenchant. This is a must read for anyone interested in WW II history. Yesterday Saturday the 18th of June, I saw Henry Kissinger on C-SPAN II saying that he was currently reading this book. Kissinger who in a previous life was a Harvard history professor before devolving into an unreconstructed, terribly insecure political hack, must have found something interesting in this brilliant book. Perhaps only a European, in this case an Englishman, could write such a book about WW II
T. Bah Tanwi, IV, MD
The prose is fine, but it is not as elegant as Jan Morris', nor as crisp as Paul Johnson's. There is too much use of the dash, and some sentences are simply too long, well over fifty words. One was nearly a hundred. But it's not the prose that makes this book important, it's the numbers.
Every major incident of the narrative is studded with statistics: 90,000 Germans surrender at Stalingrad, but only 9,626 returned home; at Kursk the Germans `shot 15,000 people, transported 30,000 for slave labour in Germany, destroyed 2,000 buildings...'; then at the battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history, the Germans lost half a million men, `as well as 3,000 tanks, 1,000 guns, 5,000 motor vehicles and 1,400 planes; of 21,000 Japanese defending Iwo Jima only 212 were left when they finally surrendered to the Americans, who had landed 30,000 - and lost 6,891 in the battle. At the end Roberts does some sums for us. The numbers speak more than a thousand words: over fifty million human beings were killed during the 2WW - six every minute.
This focus on numbers is important as it drills into our minds the horrific carnage of this conflict which towers over all the casualty figures of other wars since then. It is these numbing numbers of the Second World War that surely spurred Washington on to set up her 'soft' hegemony around the world, and makes the Pentagon invest more in military hardware than any of its rivals. It is these numbers then that are the grim backdrop to 'Pax Americana' from which the vast majority have benefited, especially Europeans. In this context all the liberal anti American sniping with its simplistic chants about oil seem out of of place. It is the Second World War that explains the US bases around the world, the saving of the world from war, not mere oil. Certainly mistakes have been made, but Roberts has helped us remember of how grim the world can become when evil men feel free to unleash the dogs of war.'
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