THE SECOND WORLD WARS

HOW THE FIRST GLOBAL CONFLICT WAS FOUGHT AND WON

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Basic, 652pp, £18.99

This is military history written by an arch-strategist, in which brute industrial strength is the key element. ‘One of Hanson’s running themes is that the Allied victors mainly killed German and Japanese soldiers, while the Axis focused more on killing civilians,’ explained Thomas E Ricks, who reviewed it for the New York

Times. ‘Over all, in its accounting of the global carnage, this book amounts to an ode in praise of deterrence and against appeasement and isolationism.’ Ricks ‘found it lively and provocative, full of the kind of novel perceptions that can make a familiar subject interesting again. It wouldn’t make a good introduction to World War II, but it may win readers already familiar with the conflict’s events.’

Hanson, wrote Gerard Degroot in the Times, is ‘a brutally pragmatic historian who cuts through myth and hype. Stripped of emotion, his war is reduced to simple equation: “Victory ... was a morality tale of production besting killing: those who made more stuff beat those who killed more people.”’ Hanson ‘provides some fresh insights on an excessively popular subject where originality is difficult. He eschews narrative, concentrating instead on a systematic deconstruction of the war that examines in intricate detail the six big combatant nations — Britain, the US, the Soviet Union, Germany, Japan and Italy.’ But the exercise left Degroot cold. Hanson ‘counts ships sunk, but never considers the lives shattered. Emotions never impede rational analysis. Presented in this starkly reductive fashion, war becomes too easy to contemplate. Military history used to be written this way. It should no longer.’