The World at War and the Coming of the Peace

Is there a single volume that could possibly encompass all that the Second World War was, and meant? Surely not. And yet, from one generation to the next, scholars have striven to produce such a work, although even the best of them inevitably falls short in one regard or the other, revealing as they do the historiographical approaches of their era. For example, when (almost 60 years ago) this reviewer was assisting the great military historian Sir Basil Liddell Hart in the completion of his History of the Second World War (1970), the approach of that work and so many like it was usually rather narrow, concerned with military operations and campaigns—the Desert War, the Battle of the Atlantic, Guadalcanal, and so on. Liddell Hart’s magnificent private library at States House, Medmenham, some 50 miles outside London, fully reflected this military-history approach. There were few studies in it upon the social history of the war; labor and the war; wartime economics and technology; propaganda and morale; the war and Western imperialism—all of that was to come.

There were also very few comparative histories, if any at all. And while there were 15 volumes on the U.S. Navy in World War II, there was hardly anything on the greatest and bloodiest fighting of all—that between Nazi Germany and the USSR along the gigantic Eastern Front. If much had already been written, it was overwhelmingly an Anglo-American operational account of the war, and there was a great deal that was missing.

A half-century later, by contrast, there seems to be no aspect of the Second World War that does not have its historian, or a dozen of them. The racial aspects of the war—and not just Hitler’s—now get proper attention. The complex Japanese perspective, indeed, the whole Asian side of things, gets more regard. The sheer size of the Soviet war effort, and its steady crushing of most of the Wehrmacht’s hitherto-unbeaten armies between 1942 and 1945, is nowadays much better understood. But the more that is written about this gigantic conflict, then the more challenging is the task facing the scholar who wishes to provide us with a new synthesis of it all.

It is rather wonderful to report, therefore, how well the Columbia University historian Paul Chamberlin has stepped up to the task. Scorched Earth is a heavyweight book in all regards, with over 570 pages of densely packed text plus 60 pages of detailed endnotes, and in consequence it really does live up to its claim to be “A Global History of World War II.” Chamberlin writes very smoothly and is a fine synthesizer of the many complex parts of this war. His summaries of strategic decisions, or for that matter strategic quarrels among the Allies, could hardly be bettered. It is admirable that he begins the story of these Great-Power struggles in East Asia, and in 1937—that is, with the Japanese aggressions against China following the obscure Marco Polo Bridge incident. Thus, his account of the onset of the war in Europe, with the German Army’s attack upon Poland in September 1939, does not start until page 101. Chamberlin’s endpiece, a summary of what the war meant for a vastly altered world, is a lot briefer, but the various parts of it are clear; Europe’s place at the center of affairs is gone, the two very egoistic superpowers are jostling for advantage, and even the victorious British Empire is in fast decline. Stalin had once claimed that victory in war (and everything else) went to the powers with the big battalions. Here, in 1945, was the ocular proof.

The maps section here could have been better (there are only really two, and the internal detail in them is just too much), and Scorched Earth sadly lacks a bibliography of the many books and articles Chamberlin has used—was this, as so often happens these days, a publisher’s decision? But the endnotes section is huge and impressive, though perhaps only a fellow historian of the war is likely to go through that scholarly apparatus in detail or notice that there are no foreign-language titles. It would have been lovely to have had a fuller and more detailed index; a book as authoritative as this certainly deserves one. Some readers may find the author’s comments on American attitudes and motives too harsh and sweeping (the terms “hegemonic ambitions” and “racism” come up a lot here), and it seemed to me that by comparison Stalin is treated rather more lightly, or, more matter-of-factly. The compensation is that this really is a “global history,” so that the role of, say, China in this great conflict gets due attention.

Above all, it is the author’s capacity—one might say, adroitness—in describing and then summarizing the various parts of this gigantic war that should command our admiration. Again and again, this reviewer was impressed by how Chamberlin (not by training a military or naval historian) could describe so clearly to the reader how a particular important campaign unfolded, and what were the reasons why a certain battle went to one side, and not to the other. There is, to cite one example, a really good and succinct account of the turning of the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic during 1943 on pages 321-325 of this work, and yet he is equally adept in describing the unfolding of the campaigns in Italy during the same year. Perhaps the most important chapters on the political-strategical front are those of chapters 11 and 12, describing how the United States revealed the unfolding of its massive powers in the West while at the same time a battered but increasingly confident Soviet Union shook off the Wehrmacht’s brutal assault on Stalingrad and began its long advance toward Berlin. By the end of 1943, therefore, the signs were becoming clear that there could be only two real winners in this war. And despite all of Churchill’s inventiveness, leadership, and drive, despite even the huge material mobilization of the resources of the entire British Empire, the island-nation was falling back to a distinct third position in the global pecking order.

Whereas Chamberlin’s book is a very model of balance and comprehensiveness, Holland and Murray’s Victory ’45 is anything but. Although the subtitle of their work calls itself “The End of the War in Eight Surrenders,” in fact only one of those surrenders to the victorious Allies deals with that by Japan—all the others deal with surrenders in the West, or the end of the war on the Eastern Front. The same disproportionality is, alas, evident throughout, and the reader comes away puzzled as to know why. Ten of the 12 chapters here (taking up 236 pages) are devoted to the surrenders in the various European theaters of war, while only two chapters (with a mere 56 pages) are upon the end of the war in the Pacific and Far East, although, curiously, not that large separate surrender to Mountbatten’s South-East Asia Command, in Singapore, in September 1945. Given that the photograph on the front of this book’s dust-jacket is the famous one of the Japanese surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri, also in September 1945, a reader’s puzzlement seems well justified. Perhaps it is because Messrs. Holland and Murray have both written books—in James Holland’s case, many, many books—on battles and campaigns on the European front, that it is so very Eurocentric.

Still, Victory ’45 is a nice and rather breezy text of the sort favored in particular by American popular military history writers (e.g., “It was a stunning May afternoon when [U.S. Army lieutenant] Pratt and his men wound their way up the road from Berchtesgaden towards the Obersalzburg. ‘We rounded a bend,’ noted Pratt, ‘and there before us in a broad opening lay the ruins of what had once been Hitler’s house and the SS barracks.'”). The book uses a great deal of memoir literature, which in this case works very well, and at the front of the volume there is a photo collection of the “Principal Personalities” (American, British, German, and a couple of Japanese generals…).

History buffs will surely find Victory ’45 a pleasant, easy-going contribution to their late-summer reading. In Scorched Earth they will find something else: an important and massive work (in word size it’s almost three times as big) that is much, much more than a military history. Chamberlin’s book joins an already considerable list of attempts at producing a single-volume study of the Second World War. In this reviewer’s opinion, it lays claim to being among the very best.

Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II
by Paul Thomas Chamberlin
Basic Books, 656 pp., $35

Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders
by James Holland and Al Murray
Atlantic Monthly Press, 288 pp., $28

Paul Kennedy is a professor of history at Yale University, and the author/editor of 20 books, including The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and Engineers of Victory.

The post The World at War and the Coming of the Peace appeared first on .