There are more books on WW2 than on any other historical subject. This is the most complete and insightful account of this global conflagration that I know of. As he states in the Introduction, Gerhard Weinberg focuses more on the "why" than the "how" of the events he covers. There are countless books on the gritty hour-by-hour course of various battles, many not particularly good. Weinberg narrates the events of the war, but he is most interested in the broader, global perspective, as his title makes clear. Weinberg has studied this subject for the last 60+ years, and his understanding of WW2 is profound. It is a delight to read his thoughtful prose. Though the book may seem lengthy at 900 pages, on every page are the often original insights that make this treatise exceptionally rewarding and devoid of monotony.
By considering this "World War" as the global phenomenon that is clearly is, Weinberg is able show how all the events hang together in a unified whole, even in theaters separated by thousands of miles and marked cultural differences. I will give some examples that I found fascinating.
As a prelude to WW2, Weinberg makes clear that the perception of post-WW1 Germany as ruined by the reparations required in the Versailles treaty and thus spoiling for revenge against France, Great Britain, and the USA, is largely a myth. Germany was largely untouched by the fighting in WW1, unlike France and Belgium, and had secured adequate (often American) loans with which to arrange a manageable schedule of reparations payments to the Western Allies. Germany rebounded more quickly than either France or Britain from the post-WW1 malaise brought about by the tremendous costs of fighting the war borne by the major European combatants. While the incomprehensible inflation suffered by Weimar Germany was very real, some of it was brought about intentionally by the Germans as a way to sabotage their payment of reparations.
As Germany under Hitler gained a jump on rearmament over Britain and France, Hitler was determined to start the fighting of the succession of wars he planned in his strategy of world-conquest. Hitler did not want to fight on more than one front at a time (after the disaster of Germany's multi-front experience in WW1), so he wished to pick and choose the timing of the series of wars he deemed necessary for the attainment of ultimate German victory. In this way, Weinberg argues that Hitler sought to start his wars in 1938, and that Neville Chamberlain's Munich compromise, in which Czechoslovakia ceded the Sudetenland to Germany, actually thwarted Hitler's timing and made him all the more determined not to be "cheated" out of war in 1939, leading to Germany's September 1st invasion of Poland.
Japan also wished to strike the USA while it had the advantage in armaments production against America, and thus it decided on the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor. (Weinberg credibly argues that Hitler drove his armies on toward Moscow in November and early December of 1941, in spite of the precariously long supply-lines and attrition of over five months of battle, in the hopes of getting the Japanese to "take-the-plunge" and enter the war as his ally. This German over-extension resulted in the first decisive reversal in the fighting for the Wehrmacht as the Soviets launched their successful winter counter-offensive at the gates of Moscow.)In order to capitalize on their head-start in military industrialization, Japan decided to withdrew from a naval forces limitation treaty with the USA and to produce as many warships as they wished. However, Weinberg notes that this treaty was actually more constraining to the USA than to Japan. Once the U.S. was freed from these treaty obligations and on an industrial war-footing, America was able to out-produce Japan in warships by a factor of 40-to-1, not to mention aircraft and other armaments.
Hitler, as is clear from "Mein Kampf" and his other writings, had always planned to attack the Soviet Union in his quest for German living-space in the East. Once the Wehrmacht was drawn into North Africa after Germany's Italian ally had foundered there against the British, Hitler conceived of two massive strategic German military prongs driving south from the Caucasus and east from Egypt and meeting in the oilfields of Iraq and Iran. In this way Hitler would secure the massive petroleum reserves of the Baku-Caspian region and Mesopotamia, thus denying these to the western allies as well as cutting Britain off from its Indian colonies and the route to these through the Suez Canal. After victory in the Caucasus and Mesopotamia, Hitler envisioned meeting up with Imperial Japan in the Indian Ocean.
It is in the context of the Allied quest to thwart this Axis strategy for the Middle East that Weinberg is able to draw attention to some of the vital yet lesser-known theaters of the early Allied counterattacks. The first decisive Allied victory over Axis forces occurred in 1941 when the British defeated the Italians in Ethiopia and Eritrea. This secured the supply-lines through the Red Sea into the Suez Canal, as well as the western land supply-route over the Sub-Saharan African continent from the Atlantic up through Sudan and into British Egypt. Next the Vichy French forces in Syria and Lebanon were vanquished as were the anti-British Iraqi rebels in Iraq, thus preventing the Mesopotamian oil resources from falling into Axis hands by default. Later Madagascar was occupied to secure the Indian Ocean sea-lanes against Japan. Other than securing Middle Eastern oil, Hitler's main goal in this area was to eradicate the Jewish population in Palestine and adjacent countries.
Prior to invading the USSR in June, 1941, Hitler was essentially allied to the Soviet Union in the non-aggression pact of 1939 by which Germany and Russia divided Poland and some neighboring territories. In this interval, Germany was able to obtain huge quantities of oil and other natural resources through the Soviet Union. Stalin was happy to see Norway, France, and the Low Countries defeated by Germany, and the British pushed off the European continent. However, when Hitler turned his military against Russia on June 22, 1941, Stalin found himself facing the bulk of German forces alone; a situation he would have to endure for almost 3 bloody years until the Western Allies could land in Normandy June 1944. While Russia fought for its life, losing millions of troops but inflicting unsustainable losses on Germany, Stalin was aided by British and American victory over Axis forces in Tunisia in May 1943, and subsequent successful Allied landings in Sicily and Southern Italy. These African and Italian campaigns tied-down hundreds of thousands of German and Italian troops as the Soviets turned the tide against the Germans at Stalingrad in late 1942-early 1943 and began the long slog of ejecting German forces from Russian territory.
The Soviet Union did the bulk of the fighting in defeating Germany, and after the substantial losses in men and materiel the Germans suffered in Russia in 1941 and early 1942, Germany was only able to mount an offensive on one sector of the Russian front in spring and summer 1942, as opposed to full front invasion of June 1941, with northern, central, and southern German prongs. Hitler decided to commit the bulk of his forces in the south in a drive for the Caucasus oilfields. As this southern prong advanced, the German front grew longer and more exposed, leading to the Soviet successful counterattack in Operation Uranus at Stalingrad. In the summer of 1943, with even less forces, the Germans were only able to mount a limited regional offensive on the central Eastern Front around Kursk. This July 1943 battle also ended in Soviet Victory.
While Russian forces did the bulk of the fighting and the dying, the British and Americans provided great quantities of war materiel and other supplies (including thousands of trucks) to the USSR by three main routes: through the North Sea to Murmansk and Archangel; north through Iran; and west across the Northern Pacific to Vladivostok. The last route accounted for a full half of the supplies provided to the Soviet Union. Although these mainly American convoys passed through waters easily within range of Japanese military forces, the Japanese allowed these vital supplies to the main enemy of its German ally to pass due to a neutrality pact Japan had signed with The USSR, and out of fear that hindering these American supplies would lead the Russians to grant the U.S. access to Far Eastern Soviet airbases from which Japan could be bombed.
I will refrain from detailing more of Weinberg's masterful analysis of WW2 in its global nature, but it should be clear that whether dealing with the Battle of the Atlantic against German submarines; American counter-strokes against Japan through the Southwest and Central Pacific; successful British defense of Eastern India against the Japanese at Imphal and Kohima, and counter-offensive through Burma; the sometimes strained relations between the British and American allies and the various planning conferences which surmounted these strains; the utterly dismal nature of coordination between Germany and Japan; the Allied Conferences at Casablanca, Cairo, Teheran, and Yalta; or the Allied plans for an invasion of the Japanese home islands involving over a million American troops to be aided by the tactical use of atomic bombs, this is historical writing of the highest order. Weinberg is also a superb prose stylist, and leavens his writing with a mordant sense of humor. Weinberg's narrative account of the course of the various battles is thorough enough to give a clear sense of the progression of the fighting without getting bogged-down in unnecessary details. Read this book, you will not be disappointed.
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