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The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War Paperback – Illustrated, May 29, 2012
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“Gripping. . . . splendid history. A brilliantly clear and accessible account of the war in all its theaters. Roberts’s prose is unerringly precise and strikingly vivid. It is hard to imagine a better-told military history of World War II.” –New York Times Book Review
Andrew Roberts's acclaimed new history has been hailed as the finest single-volume account of this epic conflict. From the western front to North Africa, from the Baltic to the Far East, he tells the story of the war—the grand strategy and the individual experience, the brutality and the heroism—as never before.
Meticulously researched and masterfully written, The Storm of War illuminates the war's principal actors, revealing how their decisions shaped the course of the conflict. Along the way, Roberts presents tales of the many lesser-known individuals whose experiences form a panoply of the courage and self-sacrifice, as well as the depravity and cruelty, of the Second World War.
- Print length800 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper Perennial
- Publication dateMay 29, 2012
- Dimensions6 x 1.28 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100061228605
- ISBN-13978-0061228605
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Gripping. . . . splendid history. A brilliantly clear and accessible account of the war in all its theaters. Roberts’s prose is unerringly precise and strikingly vivid. It is hard to imagine a better-told military history of World War II.” — Timothy Snyder, The New York Times Book Review
“Elegantly balances fact, thought and fresh, clear prose. . . . Roberts has set a high bar for future historians of mankind’s greatest bloodbath; Roberts splendidly weaves a human tragedy into a story of war’s remorseless statistics.” — The Wall Street Journal
“With his new book on the Second World War, British historian Andrew Roberts has not only written the single best history of that conflict but has also claimed his place as one of our top historians.” — Michael Korda, The Daily Beast
“A magnificent book;It manages to be distinctive but not eccentric, comprehensive in scope but not cramped by detail, giving due weight both to the extraordinary personalities and to the blind economic and physical forces involved.” — The Economist
“Roberts’s narrative gifts are such that it is almost impossible to read his retelling of these nightmares without some feeling of encountering the new. No history book can ever truly be definitive, but this comes close. Roberts never loses sight of the human side of this epic.” — National Review
“Roberts is a great historian because of a rare triune mastery: of the movement of history, in both its broad sweep and particular revelatory detail; a felicitous prose style and gift for narrative; and a commanding moral vision.” — Roger Kimball, The Daily
“Andrew Roberts has produced what Gen. George Patton might call ‘a helluva book’—the first totally readable one-volume history of World War II, a literary and historical blitzkrieg, propelled by strong, positive prose, written with concision yet a wealth of detail, and supplied with an arsenal of sources.” — The Washington Times
“Andrew Roberts achieves a marvel of concision in producing a splendidly written, comprehensive new history of the greatest conflict in history, The Storm of War―particularly good in its insights into Axis strategy.” — Sir Ian Kershaw, The Guardian, Books of the Year
“In what might be his best book yet, Roberts gives us the war as seen from the other side of the hill. He has the knack of making complex military operations comprehensible and salting the grand strategic sweep with vignettes of how it felt to be a soldier.” — Nigel Jones, The Sunday Telegraph
“Roberts is a first-rate historian. He has a sharp eye for a good subject and a knack of getting to its heart. The second world war, which cost more than 50 million lives, has a perennial fascination that Roberts conveys through an admirably lucid narrative.” — Piers Brendon, The Sunday Times
“In one irresistibly readable book, Roberts has done what I thought was impossible--given us the whole bloody second world war from the brass buttons of the generals down to the mud-filled trenches and stretching across the globe.” — Tina Brown, Newsweek
“The best full history of World War II yet written.” — Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Wall Street Journal
From the Back Cover
Andrew Roberts's acclaimed new history has been hailed as the finest single-volume account of this epic conflict. From the western front to North Africa, from the Baltic to the Far East, he tells the story of the war—the grand strategy and the individual experience, the brutality and the heroism—as never before.
Meticulously researched and masterfully written, The Storm of War illuminates the war's principal actors, revealing how their decisions shaped the course of the conflict. Along the way, Roberts presents tales of the many lesser-known individuals whose experiences form a panoply of the courage and self-sacrifice, as well as the depravity and cruelty, of the Second World War.
About the Author
Andrew Robertsis a biographer and historian whose books include the New York Times bestsellers Churchill: Walking With Destinyand Napoleon: A Life (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), Masters and Commanders, The Storm of Warand Salisbury: Victorian Titan(winner of the Wolfson Prize for History), among others. His most recent book, The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III,was published in November 2021. Roberts is a Fellow of the Royal Societies of Literature and the Royal Historical Society, and a Trustee of the International Churchill Society. He is currently Visiting Professor at the Department of War Studies at King's College, London, and the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper Perennial; Illustrated edition (May 29, 2012)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 800 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0061228605
- ISBN-13 : 978-0061228605
- Item Weight : 1.66 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.28 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #79,403 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #144 in German History (Books)
- #619 in World War II History (Books)
- #1,604 in World History (Books)
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The book is very much a European centered out-look on the war. It would have been better been titled, the War Against Germany, as the emphasis is definitely on that part of WWII. I would say that 80% plus of the content deals with Germany, and the fight between the allies and that country. By man-years spend by all combatants of the war, perhaps that is a fair division. One does get the sense (and I especially as a US Navy officer), that the author's heart wasn't really in writing about the Pacific or Far East campaigns. One should understand that the major emphasis of this book is on the war against Germany. He does hit the highlights of the war against Japan, with emphasis split evenly between the US cross-pacific campaigns and the Indian subcontinent. China is acknowledged as a prime diversion of a million Japanese soldiers, and Mr. Roberts does touch base on all the highlights (only) of war in that half of the world, but I left the book feeling somewhat disappointed that the North African and Mediterranean campaigns had more content devoted to those operations than the whole war against Japan.
His overriding argument that Germany could have done so much better if only Hitler hadn't done (fill in the blank) is an old saw, one first put forth in the mediocre post-war memoirs by hack Nazi generals. His counterfactual arguments almost always don't consider how the Allies might have changed their actions in response to the "improved" Hitler.
Just one of the criticisms of Hitler that has always upset me, was first pushed by Galland in his post-war book "The First and the Last" is the rubric that if only Hitler had not insisted that the Me-262 be made into a bomber, it would have greatly impacted the Allied Combined Air Campaign. Let me address two points about that "fact" repeated in The Storm of War. First, Hitler appreciated that only an aircraft with superior performance could hope to get through an air umbrella that the Allies were likely to have over any invasion beaches. Such a jet fighter/bomber, in numbers, could conceivably attack the invasion beaches and reduce the beachhead. In fact, it was after D-Day, that Hitler allowed the bomber priority in jet production to drop, having missed the specific opportunity to use that weapon system in a decisive role. The second point is that the Me-262 was never a ready for prime time player. The more one reads about readiness and availability of the Me-262 force, the more one realizes that the weapon system was introduced too early in it's production cycle, and was not capable of having the strategic significance that people like General Galland professed it as possibly having. As an aside, logistics and streamlined production capability was a particular German weakness. For all their "wiz-bang" weaponry, they squandered allot of production on ineffectual weapon systems. They really needed the equivalent of the western allies operational research scientific establishment to better rationalize weapons production. Just one more reason we can all be thankful for German inefficiencies.
The Eastern Front/Great Patriotic War is of course a central area of discussion emphasis of the book (as it rightfully should be), however I find The Storm of War, in comparison to other specialized books on that part of WWII to be somewhat simplistic. I recognized credited sections of other (better) books on the Eastern front battles and analysis. Anything by David Glanz and his co-author (of many books) Jonathan House offers better analysis of this part of the war at the cost of readability (I just finished re-reading When Titans Clashed). I also very much enjoyed Absolute War by Chris Bellamy, also significantly quoted. I was unsatisfied again by the Hitler bashing as an excuse for eventual Soviet victory in the East. By no means am I "pro-Hitler" (whatever that means), but blaming Hitler for most or all the ails of the Third Reich at war is very simplistic and in many cases, shows a bias in source material and a mis-understanding of the subtles of the war in the East. Not only were some seemingly irrational Führer orders correct at some times (no retreat after Moscow counter-offensive) and wrong other times (later Soviet offensives), but little emphasis is given in this book to the improving capabilities of the Red Army.
In the final, concluding chapter of the book, Roberts sums up all the problems with the German war effort under Hitler's direction. He makes many counterfactual arguments of how a more sane leader could have done better. Yes, state the obvious! It is almost with the final sentence of the book that Roberts acknowledges that the country, government and Hitler were inextricably entwined, and that a genocidal government with a corp of criminal leadership could not be expected to act in any way other than they did. If someone other than Hitler ran Germany in his place, a good counterfactual argument might lead one to suppose the who mess wouldn't have happened at all.
In conclusion, this is a good book for a beginner getting his or her first taste of WWII history. Roberts paints in broad strokes, and gets some of the details wrong, but it is an easy book to read, and less imposing than some of the other, better single volume accounts of WWII (ie. Total War by Peter Calvocoressi et.al. or A World At Arms by Gerhard Weinberg). Given today's education system, an easy to read history book has a value all its own.
With The Storm of War, Andrew Roberts has done a great service to the general reader--he certainly holds that World War II was a good war that achieved a good end in the destruction of the Axis, but he offers constant reminders of what an immense slaughter the war was for all involved.
Roberts follows the traditional chronology of the war from the German invasion of Poland in 1939 through the surrender of the Japanese in 1945. Within the overall story of the war he breaks up his book into chapters that deal with events by theater, examining the Russian Front in one chapter and the Mediterranean in the next, for example. He examines a few topics, the Holocaust foremost among them, in chapters independent from the main narrative. Considering the vast scope of his subject this is perhaps the best way to write a single-volume history of the war, but there are few places in which it becomes difficult to keep track of which events happened at the same time as others in different theaters. For example, one British general shows up in North Africa chronologically after his service in Indian, but before that service is described in the book. Such instances are few but can be confusing.
The book's pages bristle with statistics and while normally I abhor large bunches of numbers in a narrative, Roberts uses them to drive home the immensity of the war--the thousands and millions of vehicles produced, the tons and tons of buildings reduced to rubble in the streets, and the unimaginable millions of people killed in batches of hundreds and thousands. As I mentioned before, it has become easy to reduce World War II to a thing we can wrap our heads around--Roberts demolishes those false images of the war and reminds us again and again of how huge a thing it was.
Most important of all, as I hinted above, Roberts restores the horror experienced even in a good war. Through statistics, through anecdote and description, he describes the slaughter on the Russian Front, the atrocities in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and in the forests and ravines and concentration camps of Eastern Europe. I am not an emotional reader but his chapters on the Holocaust and Japanese atrocities brought me to tears. This is not to say that Roberts is a sensationalist or melodramatic writer--his tone is as sober and factual as any history I've read, but the cumulative effect of the story is heartbreak.
Another great strength of this book is Roberts's critical sense in dealing with issues like the atomic bomb and supposed Allied atrocities. World War II, like any great event, has had a lot of nonsense talked about it, and Roberts cuts through it with precision. His final analysis of the war and why the Axis--Hitler specifically since he was the prime mover among those powers--lost is especially striking. The book concludes with a four-word summary of Hitler's fatal flaw that kept me thinking for days.
The flaw most commonly pointed out in The Storm of War is Roberts's lack of emphasis on the Pacific Theater. Some even accuse him of Anglocentrism. Given the huge space devoted to the Russian Front and the emphasis Roberts gives them in the scope of the war, the latter charge doesn't hold water. The former, on the other hand, is more realistic. Roberts doesn't spend nearly as much time on the Pacific campaigns as he does on Russia and Europe. When writing about the war against the Japanese, Roberts spends most of his time on the campaigns in southeast Asia--specifically India and Burma.
While I would have liked more detail on American island hopping (he covers Guadalcanal most extensively, dealing with Tarawa, Saipan, Guam, and a number of other American bloodlettings in one sentence), his treatment makes sense given his aims for the book; the Axis had what now seems a far-fetched plan to link up in the Middle East, with the Japanese coming through India and the Germans through North Africa or the Caucasus. That lends Burma a great strategic importance that is, again, easy to forget. And as he implies, island-hopping was an incredibly repetitive process, as any history of the Marine Corps in World War II will remind you. But late in the book Roberts does return to the critical fact of island-hopping, that is, the heavy--and ever escalating--casualties. It was this, as exemplified by the horrible fights on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, that convinced American President Harry Truman that the atomic bomb was a vastly better alternative than invasion of Japan itself.
I'll wrap up briefly. The Storm of War is an insightful, gripping, and emotionally devastating read that shows the loss and suffering endured even in fighting a good war.
Highly recommended.
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My best guess is that this should have run to at least six volumes and been Roberts' magnum opus. Instead we get a highly compressed account of the greatest hits of the war, replete with every fact and figure there ever was, along with Mr Roberts' judgements, which on the whole I agree with.
I think its main strength, and its major weakness as an account of the war is that it is not written from the point of view of any party. Certainly we get some insight into the thinking, the arguing and the jostling for position, but this is all necessarily a terse account. I cannot bring myself to give it less than four stars because it appears to be hugely useful as a manual for future warmongers, but for me, just the interested public, no.
Far less time was given to the Pacifc theatre - though Japanese strategy and its unravelling is explained. I leanrt some new information on Japanese atrocities as well..
There are some sections towards the end where the author engages in counterfactuals, and these are less convincing.
The book relies pretty much exclusively on secondary sources - and some general histories - e.g. Max Hastings, though I picked up loads of good references for future reads.
Overall it was a gripping read and I'd recommend it - particularly for a holiday!
I'm totally in awe of Christian Rodska's reading of this 3 disc MP3 {approx. 28 hours listening time) as he seems unfazed by anything the text can throw at him from German & Japanese to Russian - his pronunciation is spot on and his delivery is anything but flat - I believe I'm being read to by someone actually knowledgeable and interested in the subject. As always the reader is key.
I enjoyed this one immensely! Andrew Roberts is one of very few modern historians who writes serious history as if it were popular fiction - very engaging, accessible yet scholarly and deep at the same time.









