History of the Second World War

This book provides a comprehensive history of the Second World War like no other. It was B.H. Liddell Hart’s last work as well as his magnum opus, embodying the fruits of twenty years of research and a lifetime of thinking on war. It abounds with controversial judgments, including provocative assertions about the true causes behind France’s defeat in 1940, Hitler’s failed invasion of Russia, and Japan’s strunning victory at Pearl Harbor: the effectiveness of the Allies’ strategic bombing of Germany; the questionable necessity of detonating atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and much more. As a military historian, Liddell Hart believed in re-checking official documents and records with first person accounts ‘…for it became very evident that the memories of the participants in dramatic events are apt to become coloured or twised in retrospect, and increasingly as the years pass. Moreover official documents often fail to reveal their real views and aims, while sometimes even drafted to conceal them’. Liddell Hart’s research took him to meet British and Allied commanders, and at the end of the war, he had the opportunity to also interrogate the German commanders who were then prisoners-of-war. His friendships also contributed tremendously to his research. He was able to hold discussions with such old and valued friends as Field-Marshal Montogomery, Field-Marshal Auchinleck and Field Marshal Alexander, as well as many of the German Generals ‘on the other side of the hill’. Any student of politics, history or warfare, and anyone interested in how our world came to be the way it is, should read this book.