Customer Reviews

The Real History of World War II: A New Look at the Past (Real History Series)

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This is a great overview of World War II without an overabundance of detail. A real history buff would probably like to read a more wordy account, but, for readers like me, this is enough. I was a little disappointed that more information wasn't given about the Japanese-American internment camps in the US. This is a subject that I didn't anything about until maybe 10 years ago.

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I like Mr. Axelrod's writing style, which is easy to understand and not tediously boring. I highly recommend this book.

Axelrod's book on World War II is more a social and political than a military history.

He gives abundant background--from World War I on up. He also analyzes, briefly but deftly, the social, political, and economic trends that provided the seed-bed for the war.

His work is encyclopedic, jumping from Europe to the Pacific to Africa to South Asia; but he manages to fit all the pieces together into a coherent whole.

Mercifully, he does not get bogged down in details of battle, but concentrates on strategy and overall goals.

The book has many virtues, but here are some of the best:

It is replete with sidebars that clarify and summarize and give notes on interesting details.

His scope is panoramic, and he puts the war, its leadup and aftermath, in a broad context.

He is trenchant about the interaction of personalities and social trends.

Best of all, Axelrod is a wonderful writer. Pithy, concise, elegant, probing, his prose is alway flexible and revealing.

The one criticism I have--and it is a small one--is that the maps have been shrunk to microscopic size.

But given his overall descriptive powers, this hardly matters.

P.S. Among his several "What Ifs" Axelrod poses this. Rather than speculating if WWII might have been averted if the Versailles Treaty had not been so harsh, he says (far more plausibly) WWII might have been averted if the U.S. had not entered WWI--leaving it a stalemate, from which a less lopsided peace might have emerged. A cogent point.

A great read with excellent visuals and sidenotes to really pull in the reader. This book is great, it gives an excellent overview of every aspect and major battle in the war. I also enjoyed it because it gives you a nice flavor of World War I and how is attributed to World War II. Can't recommend it enough.

If you're a WW II or history person, this book is a must. Enjoy the unfolding drama from a different perspective rather than same-old, same-old facts.

Overall the book is not bad, but I cannot stand when American history is sold under the cover of World History greatly distorting the overall real picture.

Just look at the list of war leaders at the beginning of the book. Among others it got 43 Americans, 16 British and only 4 Russians.

Now question: what Allied country made most of the fighting on the ground, destroyed 75-80% percent of German army and took Berlin? Was it USA, Great Britain or Russia?

For me it's like painting a portrait of a man with small head but huge ears, because we are interested in the ears the most.

I began this treatise with a great deal of anticipation, and to begin with it met my expectations. Axelrod's previews of events that led up to World War II, including the mistakes made after The Great War, were clear and enlightening. Then I ran into some difficulty when he described how the British were farther advanced than the Germans in the area of radar, and having recently read "Instruments of Darkness" by Alfred Price, a wonderfully detailed account of the war of electronics between Britain and Germany, years of measures and countermeasures between the combatants, I realized that Axelrod hadn't done enough homework. Then, a few pages later, I came across a word spelled "Aldertag" which puzzled me for a moment, until I realized he meant "Adlertag", German for Eagle Day, which was the beginning of the Luftwaffe's attempt to destroy the Royal Air Force before Hitler's scheduled invasion of Britain. Again, more homework, especially by editors and proofreaders as well as Axelrod. I will continue reading, but with less confidence than that with which I started out.