Book Review: The Second World Wars

The Second World Wars:How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

by Victor Davis Hanson

Basic Books, 2017

Some publishing seasons are thicker than others when it comes to sturdy, one-volume histories of the Second World War, but the autumnal run-up to the year-end Holidays is usually a sure bet for half a dozen of them, trundling down the conveyor belt and filling up the bookshop New Release tables with doorstops titled things like Inferno or Whirlwind or Cataclysm. The books are inherently predictable – Munich, the Western front, Operation Barbarossa, the Pacific Theater, the Holocaust, the Bunker, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Marshall Plan – which throws the reading emphasis where it properly belongs, on the thinking and writing of the authors, as opposed to the originality of their research. These books are opportunities for writers to collect hefty fees almost purely for narrative arm-swinging, which is why military historians in particular almost never miss the opportunity to indulge themselves at least once in their career.

Which makes it all the odder than Autumn of 2017, although it's turned out many WWII books of specific focus (Meredith Hindley's excellent Destination Casablanca, for instance, or George Kundahl's first-rate The Riviera at War), has featured only one doorstop soup-to-nuts Second World War history: Victor Davis Hanson's taut The Second World Wars, which takes as one of its storytelling tasks the world-wide nature of the war (hence the tell-tale plural in the title). This is by no means a new approach, of course, but Hanson doesn't spend much time dwelling on it in any case: he works in a mention here and there of Morocco or Java, but the bulk of the book is a straightforward Holiday-season run-through of the war, from the fumbling, astonishing early days in the West:

After 1939, Germany's ally Russia was so close to East Prussia that it still seemed inconceivable that Hitler would ever attack westward with such a historically and ideologically hostile “partner” at his immediate rear. Nor could he move eastward against the Soviet Union with France and Britain mobilized on his western border. A despairing Admiral Raeder on the eve of Operation Barbarossa purportedly sighed about Hitler, “I expressed myself as incredulous of any intent on his part to unleash a two-front war after his own constant denunciation of the stupidity of the Imperial Government in doing this identical thing in 1914 ...”

… to the epic, sprawling end days in the Pacific:

The Pacific naval war should have progressed with far more difficult for the British and the Americans, given the greater resources of the Japanese imperial fleet and the ostensible Allied “Europe first” policy of allotting resources. Instead, the British and American fleets achieved parity in six months, naval superiority in two years, and outright supremacy in less than three. By 1944 Allied naval power was free to turn nearly all its attention to ensuring supply and enhancing ground and air power – the chief objective of putting a fleet to sea.

Hanson is generally a shrewd and articulate military historian, and as those excerpts indicate, he maintains a brisk and readable narrative line throughout The Second World Wars. His prose is neither as gripping as that of, for instance, Andrew Roberts in his The Storm of War, nor his scope as capacious as that of Antony Beevor's The Second World War, nor can he indulge himself in the ways that would be possible in a multi-volume work like James Holland's ongoing “The War in the West” series. And occasionally his summations seem oddly flat-footed (the first sentence of the chapter “Why and What Did the Allies Win?” reads: “The Allies won World War II because in almost all aspects of battle they proved superior” – tough to argue with that, but …), as though parts of the book were written in haste or mild distraction. But his insights into the international reach of the conflict are very much worth reading, and in this book as in all his others, the reading momentum never flags.