Richard Overy

I cannot praise this book enough. Eighty years since the battles of Guadalcanal, El Alamein and Stalingrad, Overy's 878-page masterpiece manages to cover much more than the canonical Second World War in one perfectly arranged volume. It is the new starting point for its study.

Overy solves the problem of the competition between narrative and thematic history by doing both in an orderly way. Four chapters take the story from 1931 to 1945, seven chapters look at the great themes of the conflict show more and a final chapter looks at the legacy of the war in decolonisation.

He takes one broad interpretative position (that the conflict must be seen as an essentially imperial struggle between older and aspirant empires finally decided by new ideological structures that were against empire) and asks one question that he never actually answers perhaps because he cannot.

That most interesting question is why vast populations within the contesting powers suddenly switched into behaviours that involved the acceptance of conscripted enslavement and complicity in mass murder under the command of relatively small elites with the levers on power.

It is a question of fundamental importance to our objective assessment of the capability and worth of our own species and is probably beyond the ability of any working historian to answer without moving into speculative territory that would work against his or her credibility.

What Overy does, though, is provide the facts as efficiently and as completely as may be possible in a single volume so that we can make our own anthropological and perhaps moral judgements of what happened not only in the fourteen years of imperial war but afterwards.

I might criticise him a little for one lapse in one section in failing to question the standard moral narrative provided to us in the West by our victorious history but I think not lapsing would have taken him into such dangerous territory that his book would have been devalued immediately.

I cannot blame him for not answering the question he poses because the answer may be very frightening to all of us, to our own self-image of being individuals and not a herd, of being good rather than evil, of being superior to animals rather than fundamentally animal ourselves.

The precise mechanisms of power are not merely institutional, they are fundamentally psychological and anthropological. They lie in issues as basic as the pecking order that you find in nature and the way co-operative behaviours create dependency on others.

The consequential horrors of nation-empires at war are provided as facts on the ground and not as evidence in some moralistic polemic. One picture he has of what would be primary school children being guided by trusted authority into gas vans is the tip of a terrifying abyss of murder.

The Holocaust is the known worst or is it? Do we sometimes conveniently present the Holocaust as a 'unique' horror so that we can load all the evil onto one apparently unnatural event run by demons from hell in order not to face the sheer breadth and depth of violence in war?

This is the problem. The Holocaust was actually a natural event, the latest in a long line of genocides in history and prehistory but one merely with access to inventive technologies. The perpetrators were not demons but humans such as you might see walking down your street.

Let us step back to the primary focus of the book. Three aggressive 'hungry' powers challenge two fat self-satisfied empires in an expectation of empire as their right. But why do they consider it their right? Because they think themselves 'civilised' and civilisation means empire.

What does empire mean? It means the control of vast areas of the world as natural territory where 'lesser' human beings exist to serve the civilised and where any brutality is acceptable to control those peoples and clear space for the civilised and their needs.

Does that sound familiar? It should. Because the Axis imperial mission is precisely what the British, French and the Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and Belgians had done in the not-so-recent past and what American Manifest Destiny did to indigenous peoples in their turn.

In other words the mentality behind brutality was created and shaped by what we think as the 'good guys' in the Second World War who could moderate their position only because their command and control (and brutality) had worked - it had created a resource base.

The Japanese looked at China and thought that it was their right to own it before the Westerners could seize it. The Germans looked East, seeing Slavs as if they were African natives with the problem of the Jews a gross racial inconvenience. Italy wanted a slice of an Africa already carved up.

It is undoubtedly true that Axis racism and brutality was of another order to that of the older empires (or at least the Axis brought their brutality closer to home and 'civilisation') but the mental map and attitudes would not be alien to British officials in India or French in Indo-China.

The other victors too were lesser demons rather than angels. The hypocrisy of a deeply racist US in trumpeting the rights of man is well known as is that of the Soviet Union with its Gulag and its strategy of slaughtering national elites as it did in Katyn Wood.

Of course, when war broke out, we see the conduct of Japanese troops (the rape of Nanking and the slaughter in Manila), of German troops (with the Wehrmacht willing war criminals ready to slaughter families) and of Italian troops murderous in their inept and blundering way.

But, before too long, Churchill was complicit in the deliberate terror bombing tactics of Harris over Germany and Roosevelt in the equally vicious and deliberately terror-directed fire-bombing of Tokyo while Soviet troops raped their way across Prussia with complete tolerance back in Moscow.

One officer who protested rape ended up in the Gulag for 'bourgeois humanism'. American intelligence officers had a tough time trying to get front line troops in the Pacific to take prisoners for questioning.

This gets us back to the problem of our species. This is that we are not truly free individuals (or rather only some of us are). However, we are not a potential hive either as might be suggested in the nightmare post war fashionable liberal critiques of totalitarianism.

What we are is something closer to a complex herd species, perhaps with a lemming quality. At a certain point, we all willingly coalesce into a social narrative not of our making and quite possibly personally harmful to us and our families and have done so certainly since the Greek city-state.

As the international socialists crumbled within days of imperial-national war being declared in 1914 so did the churches in 1939 and 1941, despite all the cant of believing in the gospel of peace of Jesus Christ. Only the Jehovah's Witnesses showed courage and many died for that reason.

Pacifists too represented very considerable movements of people in the 'free world' in the late 1930s but they too crumbled under social pressure quickly. Here we get to the heart of the matter - reality is socially constructed and war allows elites to construct that reality.

The mechanism by which our herd species, allowed freedom in peace in the West at least, enslaves itself to imperial elites is what is not and cannot be covered in this book but the book is absolutely invaluable to the person who wants to start that process of understanding.

It is an understanding that is vital because you can see the same mechanisms re-emerging even as I write this in the struggle for mastery between the latest iteration of imperial conflict, a process that goes back at least to the facing off of the Egyptians and Hittites at Megiddo (Armageddon).

This time the now-cyclical nonsense is between the 'West' (actually the political class of the Western alliance) and the 'SCO' (the political elites in Moscow and Beijing). Once again, reality is being falsely constructed by both sides to get their herds moving in the right direction.

For this reason, Overy's book is not just a history book, it is a book that gives us the raw data in a new form, without bias or loss of moral compass, that we need to understand our own situation - impotent as individuals before the mass and the State as manipulator of the mass.

The social construction of reality under the command of elites is not a false reality or 'fake news', it is reality and that reality can quickly get out of control and unleash animal forces that are quite capable of mass rape, the murder of ordinary people and widespread destruction.

And if you do not believe me - take a look at the atrocities on all sides in the current Tigrayan War in Ethiopia or the deaths, barely reported in the mainstream media, that took place in the Congolese Wars or the evidence of our own and French behaviour during decolonisation.

The final chapter of Overy's book is the most cursory but in some ways the most revealing because it shows how the savagery of 1931 to 1945 did not end there but continued out of sight of the 'civilised', perpetrated by precisely those victors who had claimed the moral high ground.

Nuremburg refused to deal with mass terror bombing or US unrestricted submarine warfare in the Pacific. Germany was never obliged to deal with the murderers of women and children in the East. Soviet crimes are self-evident. Dutch behaviour in Indonesia was unconscionable. The list goes on.

Although the story of the Second World War is one we all think we know and there is much that is familiar, there is also much here that will be new to most of us and possibly awkward, supported by references that indicate a man who is in total command of his sources.

Churchill may be regarded as a great war leader from the point of view of the homelander but he was a ruthless imperialist too. Stalin was a brutal leader but his troops were exhausted when they reached the Vistula and it would have been unreasonable to test them further to relieve Warsaw.

The German military was highly effective in its early expansion but lost its edge not simply because of greater material resources on the opposing side but because the Allies learned by doing in the face of challenge in both theatres.

This brings out another, perhaps more positive side of the socially constructed herd, its adaptability under pressure, its ability to learn rapidly and exploit its advantages and an understanding of the behaviours of the other side.

No one has a workable system to win in the casino in the long run and no power can beat the house in the struggle between empires. The house is a matter of resources and control over populations, economics and that ability to construct narratives that enable power to be exercised.

The Axis powers were doomed from the point that the United States decided to fight back and hard and the Nazis failed to push Stalin out of the industrial zones to the East and create the conditions for regime change amongst a discontented population. It was only a matter of time.

But it was also only a matter of time before the triumph of the two new ideological powers unravelled the older empires as well and came into direct conflict. The blindness to this aspect of strategy is perhaps what is most unnerving about Axis and old imperial decision-making.

Perhaps, despite the racism in the East (which had some reasonable origin in foul Japanese behaviour), the terror bombing of Japan and the hypocrisies, the nation that comes out of this best is the US which, for all its flaws, showed an anti-imperialist commitment to be commended.

It can also be honestly said that it was least inclined to oppress its own people to undertake war and least inclined to atrocity. Its later history may have tainted its status as moral arbiter (as did the cowardice of elites towards popular racism) but it was easily the best of a bad bunch.

Given just how evil war is, the act of perpetrating war for whatever reason should be a mark against a nation. Both the US (attacked at Pearl Harbour and with war on it declared by Germany) and the Soviet Union (attacked by Germany, noting its earlier occupations of others) come out best here.

If the Axis empires are the prime aggressors, it has to be said that the British and French Empires escalated things by initiating declarations of war against Germany in 1939. We should fear today that alliances designed for defence may end up with our being dragged into things we may regret.

Complex alliances to maintain the balance of power, neglect of homeland defence and failure to distinguish between wrongful imperial acquisition and legitimate unification of peoples are permitted because elites know that, ultimately, they can guide the herd.

Our entire international system is based on some fundamental conceptual flaws - above all, that borders must be fixed eternally and externally rather than through democratic non-violent self-determination - and those flaws are going to see many small wars and some big ones to come.

And the herd will follow as it always has done and always will, elites will countenance horrible crimes claiming existential necessity and ordinary people will once again become thieves, rapists and killers when they are unleashed on the world. And so it goes ... show less

Every time I walk past the statue 'honouring' the aircrews of Bomber Command in Green Park, I taste something unpleasant in my mouth.

I can imagine a decent German feeling much the same if Berlin had a major monument to the Eastern Front war dead of the Wehrmacht.

Yes, both sets of men were courageous and died for the sins of their leaders but both sets of men were complicit in appalling atrocities under orders that specifically targeted civilians.

This remarkable, well evidenced and well show more written book is about the use of bombing and its effects in Europe during the Second World War - at least that is its primary purpose. It is, in fact, a book about evil.

Half a million Europeans were murdered from the air either indirectly as part of the prosecution of war or directly as a deliberate strategy of area or political bombing by air power advocates.

The book is dense in places. Overy does not put statistics into foot-notes but makes sure you have them to hand when you read of this raid or that campaign - whether deaths or tonnage of bombs.

He does not go into too much detail of effects - just enough for us to be clear what bombing involves - because his interests (and ours) are the policies that led to these horrors.

This is one of those books where the complexity of issues requires that we do not try an easy summary. Overy is fair-minded. He seeks to understand and not condemn. There is no emotion here.

The final conclusions are measured and pointed. He also provides a useful coda that suggested that nothing was fundamentally learned from the experience.

He rightly points out that the area bombing of Bomber Harris - who must be the very epitome of the banality of evil if you have a soul - was of its time and could not be repeated.

He then stops any sigh of relief at this point by pointing out that these maniacs (my opinion, not his) did not need to repeat it because they soon had nuclear weaponry. We have been lucky so far.

Half a million dead over five years could now become 80million Russians in a few hours. The strategy of total war would dictate first strike in the forlorn hope of limiting the effect at home.

One should continue to think on this as a bunch of war loons try to convert crises in the Middle East or over local self-determination in the Ukraine into confrontations with well armed nuclear powers.

The point is that the area strategy was not a general one amongst the combatants but a specifically Anglo-American - indeed British one - based on the thinking of an Italian proto-fascist, Douhet.

The irony of this is not lost on Overy who points out that Allied bombing of Italians (while their Government was an ally) cost more lives than the Blitz.

One gets a shock to the system when one discovers just how evil the British as a war state had become in what was clearly an existential struggle of constant escalation with no quarter given.

Let us start by noting something uncomfortable. Although air power advocates promoted independent bombing strategies, the general view in the 1930s was that civilian bombing was a horror.

Neither the Soviets nor the Americans adopted civilian bombing as a policy directive and (surprise!) it was Hitler who attempted to outlaw it and chemical and gas weapons at the beginning of the conflict.

Of course, this does not gainsay Hitler's villainy against first the Jews and the mentally disabled and then anything that got in his way of a civilian nature in the East or in terms of reprisals.

But facts are facts. And probably because he still had a residual notion that the West Europeans were a basically civilised people, Hitler seems to have thought it uncivilised to bomb people in war.

There is, as well, multiple room for misunderstandings, sometimes wilful, in international relations with deeply unpleasant political warfare operatives muddying the truth at every opportunity.

Overy, somewhat embarrassingly, places Guernica, Warsaw and Rotterdam in their military context and draws the critical line between what we call 'collateral damage' and deliberate terror.

This is central because we need to understand that the British not only had a strategy of terror (the only nation to do so) but, with the Americans, banked up gas bombs in Italy ready to use in the last days.

Biological weapons may have been in their infancy but it seems (from Overy's coda) that the next total war contemplated by the air power loons included advocacy of bacteriological warfare to retain assets.

So what is going on here? Certainly Churchill was troubled by the strategy of terror though unafraid to use any resource to meet political ends. As we will note, we can still see his point.

Similarly, not only the Germans and the Soviets but also the Americans may have been ruthless though happily held to the notion of tactical use of air power where civilians were unfortunate collateral damage.

The secret of evil seems to lie in its true source - the corporate mentality. The RAF was a new arm of state force and competed for budgets and resources. It positioned itself as the future.

Its chief, Bomber Harris, somewhere ceased to be a human being and became the pure will of his force. He had done a common thing, lost himself in the task and ceased to be more than the task.

Edgerton has written persuasively that last century air power was associated with the technological right and he has pointed out the ideology underpinning Liberal Militarism.

Overy does not go down this route but we should remind ourselves that the driver for techno-war was the protection of one's own people by mustering massive power targeted at the population of the other.

This reversion to a Mesopotamian attitude to the cities of your enemy also held a sub-text of fear that democracy (actually the hold of the liberal elite) could not survive another general call-up.

The solution - tanks on the front and planes in the sky - neatly converged with the institutional aspirations of the RAF to an equal or dominant role in war strategy.

Since fighters and fighter-bombers by definition were always going to be ancillary to armies fighting blow by blow across country and naval forces defending trade routes, this meant bombing.

The justification of bombing however was not easy. Aiming was poor, air crew losses were high and the equipment was very expensive. To be more than ancillary required a 'result'.

What these callous men offered was one or both of two possibilities, one taken up more reasonably by the Americans and the other - fanatically - by Bomber Harris.

The first was to claim that bombing raids directed at aeroengine works, transportation and oil facilities (and so on) could degrade the economy of the other side so that his war capacity would fail.

Naturally, given the weakness of bomb aiming equipment and the constant pressure on air crews of fear, this meant serious collateral damage to the civilian population.

Needless to say, this is what happened not only in the Blitz (which was always military in purpose in terms of economic warfare) but also in many of the major raids on Germany and all those in allied states.

Overy plausibly demonstrates that this sort of airpower was far less effective than the bombers claimed but he (and we) can give the men of the time the benefit of the doubt here.

The bombers in these cases seem to have killed a lot of people, including allied citizens to the increasing frustration of the resistance, but there was at least a theoretical case for action.

It could be reasonable in an escalating existential crisis to accept this massive collateral damage if it brought the hell to a faster end - this is the dark justification, of course, for Hiroshima.

This sort of bombing is just - just - on the right side of morality for most people: we say again, that which reasonably might be considered to be the lesser evil in an existential struggle.

Strategic area bombing of civilians to inspire terror in the dubious and unevidenced belief that this might cause panic and bring down a regime is another kettle of fish however.

There are cases where regimes were brought down by terror bombing - Italy seems to be an example - but nearly all countries appear to have adapted and even seem to have seen the regime strengthened.

The fact of bombing and disruption exposed weak and poor regimes like Mussolini's but it enabled a narrative of resistance and a politically-led popular organisation to emerge elsewhere.

Just as general tactical asset bombing oddly tended to increase production through reorganisation, substitution and determination so area bombing tended to strengthen political legitimacy.

In the first case, it might be very reasonable for strategists not to have understood that this would be the case but in the second we are faced by two new factors.

The Blitz itself should have provided sufficient evidence that regimes strengthened on existential threat while what we have here is something different - the deliberate targeting of workers.

Ah, I seem to have slipped into the unforgivable here - the values-driven business of morality!

The point is that Bomber Harris was no different from Himmler in this - the destruction of persons deliberately because of their nature, in this case as German workers, in Himmler's as Jews.

The argument that the Jews were 'innocent' and the German workers were 'guilty' is specious. To Nazis, the Jews were as 'guilty as hell' as origins of the war (yes, absurd but believed culturally).

German workers, many of whom voted social democratically in the 1932 and previous elections and who were led no less than workers anywhere by malign elites, were suffering here from collective punishment.

The deliberate firestorming of Hamburg and other cities was a war crime that the Allies knew to be so when they decided not to prosecute the Nazis at Nuremburg for their bombing atrocities.

The most notorious case, Dresden, ironically probably falls into the milder category of tactical warfare bombing in support of the Soviet push to the East. Overy is good at revising our preconceptions.

The lessons of all this are largely academic, on the old mafia saying that 'that was then and this is now'. The conditions were peculiar and unrepeatable - new atrocities entirely are for our time.

However, we can draw some lessons about the human condition, about the blind and unaccountable nature of institutional forms operating in unevidenced ways and doing bad things under unrestrained leaders.

To be fair, Churchill was a man under severe pressure to whom bombing remained a tool-at-hand and a sideshow and, though committed absolutely to success, he was neither stupid nor psychopathic.

What is worrying is that, under conditions of existential crisis, power to do great evil can be delegated so easily. This story raises very uncomfortable thoughts about other war leaders.

And not just Stalin and Hitler but Cameron and Obama. The post-war Presidents, for example, appear to have had some reasonable grip over their forces through acceptance of their authority. Are we so sure now?

One question is what happens when the 'fuhrerprinzip' sends down the line vague generalities alongside instructions that can be interpreted brutally because they were stated brutally (the Hitler/Stalin model).

But another question is what happens when a Leader is not working on full information and makes false or 'bad' judgements on the claims of the institutional pressure groups who claim to serve him.

There are signs on several occasions in this story that Bomber Command lost the ability to do two things under Bomber Harris: think beyond the interests of itself; and have reasonable moral boundaries.

The British were far from alone - the Soviets were restrained only because they were fighting a different sort of war - and the Americans soon descended into hell themselves with the Tokyo firebombing.

But bombing itself was over-egged as tool - strategic bombing in the battlefield could lead to the 'friendly fire' errors that we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan as well and often did more harm than good.

It may - given existential struggle and acceptance of the 'just war' (ho, hum!) - have had some important function in degrading the flow of materiel to the enemy front and redirecting production.

What strikes me as unconscionable, especially with political motives of pure populist revenge, is to continue with a campaign of total war against civilians long after it is clear that it is just murder.

Almost every civilian death could be justified by some rational explanation based on the struggle for existence by the end but, by that time, everyone has lost the moral plot.

The great lesson of all this is that war has its own remorseless logic in which (as Overy wisely notes) political conditions eventually block the chance to do the right thing.

However, you can make up your own mind. Overy is detached and clinical. The facts are all there in his book. I urge you to read it and ask where you think the boundaries of death-dealing should lie. show less

This is a short, focused book about the few months in 1939 that led to war, in particular the actions, beliefs, hopes, fears of key players all of whom wanted to avoid war, but at different levels. Hitler wanted a short, sharp war with Poland and didn’t believe that France and Britain would truly declare war in support of Poland; leaders of France and Britain wanted to avoid war and they grasped at straws of intelligence and rumours in the effort to do so, but they knew from bitter show more experience that Hitler could not be trusted. As Overy puts it, “All the sides eventually involved in the crisis in August and September that led to world war were locked into a collision course from the spring of 1939. Poland was determined not to concede to German demands, and was armed with an international guarantee to strengthen that determination”.

Overy argues that Chamberlain felt a “deep sense of personal betrayal” when Hitler broke his word and occupied the Czech state on 15 March. From that date forward, though he always preferred peace to war, he had few illusions about Hitler and he “turned his singleness of purpose and unyielding temperament to the task of obstructing any further violence to the European order”. Overy refutes those who charge Chamberlain with seeking further appeasement to avoid war: “Historians have been generally unwilling to concede that Chamberlain and Daladier were committed to war rather than to further appeasement. This view is at odds with the evidence”. Chamberlain may have fought to the last minute to find solutions, but “on the central issue of honouring the pledge to wage war when Poland was attacked there is no evidence that he would have abandoned it”.

Looking back, the course of events looks linear, but Overy is very good at depicting the fog of events and the uncertainties of decision-making for those involved in the crises, all recognizing that war would mean a general, possibly world-war, and the deaths of countless numbers of people: “Insufficient account is taken in all the final days of drama of the extraordinary toll imposed on those at the very centre of events that tumbled over each other in bewildering profusion…All those involved fell prey to debilitating bouts of tension, uncertainty and anxiety, and it is little surprise that frayed nerves and hurried thoughts made democratic politics more difficult to conduct in the final days of crisis”. There was also the very natural human tendency to seek collaboration of already held views and to discount those at odds when sifting through intelligence and rumours. For the Germans this meant finding straws to confirm Hitler’s belief that Britain and France would back down. For Britain and France, it meant seeking any hint in words or phrases that Hitler would back down. These “mental boxes” provoked a “growing irrationality in which the wider picture of the longer causes of the confrontation were abandoned…”. There was, in addition, a sense of events taking over and as those involved “grew more steadily subject to the mental pressures and physical debilitation of long periods of intense labour with little sleep”, it was “increasingly difficult to think in any terms outside the immediate crisis for the moment or to consider the larger consequences”.

Did Hitler want a general, world war? Overy argues no. He sides with those who argue that Hitler wanted war with Poland to “flesh out the central European empire and open the way for the eventual confrontation with Stalin’s Soviet Union”, as part of fulfilling a German “geopolitical fantasy” about carving out from Eastern Europe “a larger and more savage version of the Habsburg Empire”.

In the end, though the honour of their pledge to Poland was important for Britain and France, “the reality of war in 1939 was not to save Poland from a cruel occupation but to save Britain and France from the dangers of a disintegrating world”.

A thoughtful, insightful book on the fateful months and decisions that led to WWII, not without lessons for today, particularly on the tendency to be trapped inside mental boxes and to seek collaboration of views rather than refutations that could require reassessments. show less

First of all, I'd like to thank Oxford University Press for my ARC via NetGalley.

Military history is fascinating, that much is certain, especially when related in a vivid, engaging way that appeals to the well-initiated and to the novice alike.

One of the greatest advantages of this volume is the division of the selected battles into six themes according to the factor considered to contribute to victory the most: leadership, courage in the face of fire, deception, innovation etc. Along with show more the introductions to each theme and an outline detailing the ways in which the factor in question can secure victory for one side, this arrangement allows for room to reflect on some universal truths related to the psychology of battle. This, in turn, provides a solid background and ensures understanding that battles are fought by people, and that analysis of these people's behaviour is tantamount to comprehending the reasons for fighting, the course of the battle, as well as the outcome.
Naturally, it is not the case that a single aspect of warfare was sufficient to win the battle (e.g. only the aptitude of the leader or the innovative strategy or weaponry alone), but the focus on those points facilitates, nay, encourages the recognition of those aspects and the role they play in every battle, so that understanding and critical appreciation of events come subtly and beautifully.

All of this perfectly justifies the choice of such a layout over the expected uninterrupted chronology (which naturally exists within the chapters). Starting from the earliest battle in the chapter and moving on to the most recent, and then doing so over and over again makes for a certain smoothness and flow in the reading process, so that the reader is refreshed each time and attention never wavers. Furthermore, the arrangement also highlights the core similarities and differences, the things that have changed and the things that have stayed the same in the 4000 years of conflict in recorded history that are covered in this book.

The choice of the battles included is another aspect that has evidently been decided on with a lot of care. Geographically and chronologically, the span of the sample is unbelievably high: it covers almost all continents from the first recorded battle at Kadesh in 1285 BC, to Operation Desert Storm just over two decades ago. So then, we encounter not only names of battles we have been familiar with since our earliest history classes at school, but such conflicts that are to this day immersed in controversy and seldom studied.

The writing itself is very pleasant and as objective as possible (even though the author does not hesitate to point out misconceptions, misattributions, the mistakes of certain commanders that led to their downfall, and instances of politics interfering with what really happened). The background and aftermath to each conflict is described as briefly, but as efficiently as possible, so that hardly any previous knowledge is required in order to follow the course of events with sufficient understanding. Facts and numbers are always included, even when their accuracy is a matter of speculation, but they are, of course, essential to grasping the magnitude of the conflict, imagining the battlefield, and, of necessity, judge the scope of human (and often animal) life lost.
Another very commendable thing is the effort to include at least one photograph for every battle detailed, the merit of which is obvious.

All in all, this is a valuable reference for anybody interested in military history for any reason and on any level. show less