Название: A world at arms: a global history of World War II Автор: Gerhard L. Weinberg
Издательство: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521443172
Год: 1994
Страниц: 1197
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 11.4 MB
This is the first general history of World War II to be based both on the existing literature and on extensive work in British, American and German archives. It covers all the theaters of war, the weaponry used, and developments on the home front. Taking a global perspective, the work deals with all belligerents and relates events in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific to each other. The role of diplomacy and strategy, of intelligence and espionage, and the impact of war upon society are all dealt with, often on the basis of hitherto unknown material. New light is shed on the actions of great and small powers and on topics ranging from the beginning of the war to the dropping of the atomic bombs; the titanic battles on the Eastern Front are fitted into the war as a whole; the killing of six million Jews and millions of others is placed into context; and the fighting at sea and in the air is included in a coherent view of the great conflict.
Although this book contains a chapter on the background of World War II, it defines that war as beginning in 1939 in Europe. While some have argued that the war was merely a continuation of World War I after a temporary interruption created by the armistice of 1918, and that the whole period from 1914 to 1945 should be seen as the age of a new European civil war, a Thirty-one Years War if you will, such a perspective ignores not only the very different origins and nature of the prior conflict but obscures instead of illuminating the special character of the second one. If an important by-product of both wars was the weakening of Europe and its hold on the world, the intentions of the belligerents were fundamentally different. It is true that these changed somewhat in the course of each of these lengthy struggles, but a basic differentiation remains.
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