The Storm of War by Andrew Roberts
Allen Lane, £25
In his new history of the Second World War, Andrew Roberts focuses on Hitler’s key blunders, suhc as ordering his Panzers to halt outside Dunkirk on May 24 1940, switching from bombing Britain’s airfields to bombing our cities on September 7 that year, attacking the Soviet Union without having first defeated Britain, and failing to get Japan to assist in his attack on Russia.
Roberts reckons that his biggest error was failing to prioritise the capture of Moscow and the defeat of the Soviet Union’s main force. He writes: “Western accounts of the war often minimise, to the point of ignoring it altogether, the experience of China, despite the fact that 15 million of those who died in the conflict – a full 30 per cent – were Chinese. It was the Chinese who held down half of Japan’s fighting strength throughout the war.” He then devotes all of one page to the Chinese people’s war of resistance against Japanese aggression.
But he realistically appraises the Soviet Union’s huge contribution to smashing Nazism. He stresses: “It was on the Eastern front that the war against Germany was won. Russian ground-based power tolled the death knell of Nazism.” He notes that as a result of the Battle of Kursk, “Germany lost the initiative on by far the most important front, and was never to regain it.”
Will Podmore
