World War II for Busy People: the Essential Guide to Causes, Campaigns, and Consequences of Global That Changed Everything

Everything you think you know about World War II is half right. Here is the real war, fast. D-Day, the Blitz, the mushroom cloud. That handful of images adds up to a kind of cartoon: a mostly Western war, a clean fight of good against evil, won by Britain and America. Almost every part of that picture is incomplete, and some of it is flatly wrong. This is the book that finally makes the whole thing click. Written for the busy, curious reader who wants the entire picture without a thousand-page tome, it shows you the war as the several interlocking wars it actually was, all at once. It was a military contest, decided not in France but on the Eastern Front, where the German army was destroyed at a cost in Soviet lives almost beyond imagining. It was a clash of ideologies over what kind of world the century would be. And it was a moral catastrophe, at the center of which stood the deliberate murder of six million Jews. Inside this book: - Why the war really started, from the failed peace of 1919 to Hitler's war of conquest- Which campaigns actually decided it: Barbarossa, Stalingrad, Midway, D-Day- How the powers fought, and why the Allies out-produced and out-lasted the Axis- The Holocaust as a central war aim, not a footnote- The hard questions historians still argue: the atomic bombs, the bombing of cities- Why 1945 built the modern world: the Cold War, the United Nations, human rights > Finish it, and you will understand World War II better than almost anyone you know.

Pagina's: 231, Paperback, Independently published