Reviews for History of the Second World War

The average rating for History of the Second World War based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-06-27 00:00:00 Adolfo Monroe In 1969, Sir Captain B.H. Liddell Hart -- a World War I veteran and poison-gas survivor -- inked the finishing touches on this towering overview of World War II after working on it for 20 years, and thereafter, ironically, died immediately in the comfort of his own home. The book is a grand legacy of a lifetime of brilliant and innovative military thinking, and up to its time was probably the best and most authoritative general overview of the war yet written. Maybe it still is. The copy I read had sat undisturbed in my parents' library for 40 years until I decided in late summer 2011 to finally give it a go, and once inside I treated it like a military campaign--proceeding cautiously at first, steeling my resources like General Montgomery, and then, once confidently ensconced, striding forth with blitzkrieg speed, gathering ever-faster momentum like generals Guderian and Patton. And what a great achievement it is, all three pounds of it. The sight of me cradling this 2 1/4-inch-thick behemoth prompted someone to ask if I was reading the Bible. If I was heretofore in doubt as to whether this would qualify as my annual big-ass summer read, that question laid it to rest. So, is Liddell Hart's book on WWII perfect? No, not at all. There are omissions and certain instances of over-coverage on subjects nearest and dearest to Hart (the North African tank battles, for instance). At the same time, it is hard to imagine a better job being done in only 715 pages of text, which, to be fair, is really not a lot of pages in which to try to cover a six-year occurrence as massive as the second world war. Liddell Hart was not a great writer, but his prose is clear and uncluttered and user friendly; appropo to his clear and cold-blooded analysis of the strategies and tactics employed. He also, to his credit, eschews hyperbole; there are no instances of "greatest this" or "grandest that" in his account. At the same time he critiques with gusto and well-reasoned authority the mistakes made by the Axis and Allies high commands and political leaders in conducting all aspects of the war. Unlike Ambrose and Ryan and Toland and their ilk -- WWII writers who pinpoint and hone in on details of particular battles or events with a novelistic, anecdotal flourish -- Hart set out on the far less sexy task of conveying macro strategy, and its tactical manifestations, so there's not a lot of room for anecdotal flavor, even though his postwar interviews with surviving German generals and others do lend great insight and authority to the account. Liddell Hart has been criticized as being a bit of a braggart know-it-all (he cites himself and his own previous military works a lot along the way), but the fact that he can cite documents that actually prove his own "I told you so" foresight only lend greater weight and credibility to his analysis, in my view. Hart was a great authority on warfare, new military theories and on WWII in particular, and him saying so either directly or indirectly does not detract from the fact. What's in here is often brilliant and made me think about WWII in whole new ways. I learned a shitload from reading this. Some of what I learned from the book: * There was a logic to the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific and the desert warfare strategy in North African that I previously did not grasp, thanks to Hart's placing them into a more sensible strategic context. Diverting the Axis to the desert theater shifted valuable troops away that Hitler needed in Russia and could have used more profitably in Italy to stop the first Allied invasion of Europe, and also paved the way for the Allies' complete air and sea control of the Mediterranean. * The Allied demands for unconditional surrender from both Germany and Japan probably delayed the war for many months and led to the unnecessary deaths of millions of soldiers, civilians and concentration camp prisoners. * The rosy portrait of Winston Churchill that has so long prevailed does not jibe with Hart's severe criticisms of the prime minister's many strategic and tactical blunders, including his misadventures in Greece, Norway and Italy. * British approaches to the war were often overcautious, too tied to rigid plans, and failed to exploit new opportunities. Hart is especially critical of Montgomery's delaying tactics in jumping from Sicily to the toe of Italy, the Allied command's failure to use more amphibious landings in northern parts of Italy and on the East coast where there was little resistance toward a Roman drive, and the fiasco of the destruction of Monte Cassino monastery and the poorly executed invasions of the beaches at Salerno and Anzio. Throughout the book, Hart sides with commanders who favored quick adaptation to changing conditions (such as Patton) and forward momentum rather than those who reverted to old and slow attrition tactics. * Battleships were shown to be outmoded dinosaurs in WWII, hardly useful as anything other than shore bombardment. By contrast, Hart attributes the greatest success to U.S. subs in the Pacific war, which sunk 60 percent of Japanese shipping and cut off the supplies they so needed to continue the war. There are a number of omissions and disputable points in the book. There are good, if often incomplete, battle maps herein. Hart's coverage of the Normandy invasion seems slighter than it ought to be, and his presentation almost makes the operation sound like a cakewalk; a point I doubt would sit well with the men who were there. The book has nothing about the breaking of the German Enigma code, which proved very valuable, or about the operation of the cipher-breakers in both Britain (at Bletchley Park) or the Navajo Code talkers who stumped the Japanese -- obviously because these ops were still classified as top secret when Hart wrote this book. Some have also accused him of romanticizing German tank commander Rommel. Hart devotes disappointingly little ink to the siege of Leningrad, where 1.5 million starved, or to the remarkable battles inside Stalingrad, or even to the Holocaust. He only mentions the concentration camps in passing, when at the very least they would fit well into his arguments about how the Axis undermined themselves in fruitless projects that wasted resources needed on the fronts. Although Hart's coverage of the Battle of the Bulge is very good, his treatment of the Battle of Arnhem, one of the bloodiest of the war, is bafflingly slight. The level of detail about some of the battles (especially all the flanking moves and countermoves) can get dizzying at times and test your attention span. His insistence that Britain was the birthplace of nearly all advanced modern war theory seems to take a biased nationalistic, and -- in his case -- self-serving tone. I don't doubt that a lot of what he says, and certainly understand Hart's frustration that his theories were not adapted more fully and quickly by the British and Allied leadership sooner, which would have helped foil or lessen the severity of one of the great tragedies of human history. The material Hart gleaned via his postwar friendship with German generals is invaluable, often offering a fascinating look at the decision-making behind the scenes in Hitler's inner circle. Also good is his sense of revulsion and elegant rejection of the strategic use of the atomic bomb on Japan, which he says did not really affect the outcome of the war and was merely a barbaric gesture. As a one-volume work of WWII strategy and tactical maneuvers, the book could hardly be bettered. But if you're looking for more of the "on-the-ground" human flavor of the war, you are best advised to go elsewhere. Anyone interested in the war to any degree would be doing that anyway. (KevinR@Ky, 2011, with some slight updates and amendments in 2016)

Review # 2 was written on 2010-01-16 00:00:00 Corey Feil I decided to read Liddell Hart’s History of the Second World War because I had seen it cited in many places as the definitive one-volume guide to a subject I have watched too many tv shows on but read few books about. (Surprisingly, it seems to be out of print, but I found several old hardcovers [not the one pictured here:] at the Strand.) I would recommend it to anyone interested in a one-volume history or the war, with the caveats below—most of which will probably not trouble the English speaker and broadly replicate the limitations of the familiar “History Channel” treatment of the subject. The book is long, but well organized and rather readable, with the exception of several instances where the volume of units and geographical landmarks become too dense to follow. The plentiful maps are generally very good—I found myself referring to the them constantly while reading the text—but, inevitably, they are occasionally not quite detailed enough. Perhaps unexpectedly, Liddell Hart devotes an undue amount of time to the matters he most familiar with, those involving the British Army. As a result, probably too much of the book is devoted to North Africa and Burma. Conversely, the book skimps on much description of the strategic outlook from the Soviet perspective; the chapters dealing with the Soviet offensives in 1944 and 45 are notably brief. Some of this may be due to a lack of access or resources; nonetheless it is noteworthy compared to the depth in which Hart covers the German leadership. This is really a military history—there is very little in here about politics. The closest Liddell Hart comes is his treatment of disagreements between allied commanders (famously, Montgomery and Patton), which are good reading but fall short of what I remember from Keegan’s WWII overview. I would have preferred more on industrial and logistic factors, which arise mostly only when needed (allied amphibious resources in the Mediterranean, the Japanese shortages of oil cramping naval operations). Interestingly, the book was quite interesting at those points where the narrative dips into politics and strategy. Liddell Hart’s handling of the outbreak of war in the neutral Low Countries and Norway was a new approach to the topic for me. He also emphasized the legitimacy of the British and American embargo of Japan as a causus belli, something I don’t think I’ve read very often. Nonetheless, the book’s strengths really do lie in the authors’ military analysis, especially with respect to the Western and Germany armies. I understand that Liddell Hart got to know many of the German commanders well after the war, and this comes through in the text. At times, it seems bit too much like he is rooting for the Wehrmacht—in particular during the retreat from the Caucuses and Russia—but this also very much reflects the fact that Liddell Hart has a strong opinion on how the war should have been fought, and when commanders did not (in retrospect) follow his advice, he’s critical and vocal about what might have been gained had they done so. This bias comes through most clearly in his description of the fall of France. He sees Guderian’s offensive as the key to the campaign, rightly so, but there’s a valid criticism to be made that this is justification after the fact, as well as that not enough weight is given the workings of chance (or politics, in the case of the British escape from Dunkirk, which I’ve read persuasively attributed to a political miscalculation on the part of Hitler to make peace with the British). It also features prominently in the chapters on the Russian offensives on the Eastern Front—Liddell Hart constantly criticizes Hitler for not allowing his general to adopt a more flexible defensive posture. Yet, as a reader, while this makes perfect sense, the author does not explain what exactly this would achieve beyond a delay of the inevitable. It’s also worth remarking on Liddell Hart’s criticism towards the end of the book of the Allies’ demand for the Axis powers’ unconditional surrender. It’s a stance that I don’t think I’ve reader often before, if ever. When the author uses it to argue against the dropping of the atomic bomb, I’m somewhat sympathetic, but I think he too readily discounts the political arguments (i.e., preempting Russian involvement in the Pacific theater) that he mentions briefly and which I understand to more commonly hold sway. The book’s conclusion is also strangely sad. While this is undoubtedly due to the fact that it was written in the middle of the Cold War, presumably leaving Liddell Hart to question an outcome that led to the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, it strangely omits the obvious upside to defeating Germany and Japan. It’s arguable that any history of WWII, even a military one, cannot ignore the war’s unprecedented effect on civilian populations, overwhelmingly (though not entirely) carried out by the Axis powers. In a book that takes understandable umbrage at the RAF’s approach to area bombing, there surely could be some place to mention the atrocities of Nanking and Auschwitz. That said, if one is willing to swallow the caveats above, the History of the Second World War is an engaging and detailed one-volume of how WWII was fought and won. ###