A magisterial single-volume history of the greatest conflict the world has ever known by our foremost military historian The Second World War began in August 1939 on the edge of Manchuria & ended there exactly six years later with the Soviet invasion of northern China The war in Europe appeared completely divorced from the war in the Pacific & China & yet events on opposite sides of the world had profound effects Using the most up-to-date scholarship & research Beevor assembles the whole picture in a gripping narrative that extends from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific & from the snowbound steppe to the North African Desert Although filling the broadest canvas on a heroic scale Beevor's THE SECOND WORLD WAR never loses sight of the fate of the ordinary soldiers & civilians whose lives were crushed by the titanic forces unleashed in this the most terrible war in history