Second World War

Product Description

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 & writing with clarity & compassion 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 to the Burmese jungle SS Einsatzgruppen in the borderlands Gulag prisoners drafted into punishment battalions & to the unspeakable cruelties of the Sino-Japanese War. Moral choice forms the basis of all human drama & no other period in history has presented greater dilemmas both for leaders & ordinary people nor offered such examples of individual & mass tragedy the corruption of power politics ideological hypocrisy the egomania of commanders betrayal perversity self-sacrifice unbelievable sadism & unpredictable kindness. 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. A beautifully produced hardback edition with embossed jacket 53 black & white photographs & 25 maps.