Overy solves the problem of the competition between narrative and thematic history by doing both in an orderly way. Four chapters take the story from 1931 to 1945, seven chapters look at the great themes of the conflict and a final chapter looks at the legacy of the war in decolonisation. He takes one broad interpretative position (that the conflict must be seen as an essentially imperial struggle between older and aspirant empires finally decided by new ideological structures that were against empire) and asks one question that he never actually answers perhaps because he cannot. That most interesting question is why vast populations within the contesting powers suddenly switched into behaviours that involved the acceptance of conscripted enslavement and complicity in mass murder under the command of relatively small elites with the levers on power. It is a question of fundamental importance to our objective assessment of the capability and worth of our own species and is probably beyond the ability of any working historian to answer without moving into speculative territory that would work against his or her credibility. What Overy does, though, is provide the facts as efficiently and as completely as may be possible in a single volume so that we can make our own anthropological and perhaps moral judgements of what happened not only in the fourteen years of imperial war but afterwards. I might criticise him a little for one lapse in one section in failing to question the standard moral narrative provided to us in the West by our victorious history but I think not lapsing would have taken him into such dangerous territory that his book would have been devalued immediately. I cannot blame him for not answering the question he poses because the answer may be very frightening to all of us, to our own self-image of being individuals and not a herd, of being good rather than evil, of being superior to animals rather than fundamentally animal ourselves. The precise mechanisms of power are not merely institutional, they are fundamentally psychological and anthropological. They lie in issues as basic as the pecking order that you find in nature and the way co-operative behaviours create dependency on others. The consequential horrors of nation-empires at war are provided as facts on the ground and not as evidence in some moralistic polemic. One picture he has of what would be primary school children being guided by trusted authority into gas vans is the tip of a terrifying abyss of murder. The Holocaust is the known worst or is it? Do we sometimes conveniently present the Holocaust as a 'unique' horror so that we can load all the evil onto one apparently unnatural event run by demons from hell in order not to face the sheer breadth and depth of violence in war? This is the problem. The Holocaust was actually a natural event, the latest in a long line of genocides in history and prehistory but one merely with access to inventive technologies. The perpetrators were not demons but humans such as you might see walking down your street. Let us step back to the primary focus of the book. Three aggressive 'hungry' powers challenge two fat self-satisfied empires in an expectation of empire as their right. But why do they consider it their right? Because they think themselves 'civilised' and civilisation means empire. What does empire mean? It means the control of vast areas of the world as natural territory where 'lesser' human beings exist to serve the civilised and where any brutality is acceptable to control those peoples and clear space for the civilised and their needs. Does that sound familiar? It should. Because the Axis imperial mission is precisely what the British, French and the Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and Belgians had done in the not-so-recent past and what American Manifest Destiny did to indigenous peoples in their turn. In other words the mentality behind brutality was created and shaped by what we think as the 'good guys' in the Second World War who could moderate their position only because their command and control (and brutality) had worked - it had created a resource base. The Japanese looked at China and thought that it was their right to own it before the Westerners could seize it. The Germans looked East, seeing Slavs as if they were African natives with the problem of the Jews a gross racial inconvenience. Italy wanted a slice of an Africa already carved up. It is undoubtedly true that Axis racism and brutality was of another order to that of the older empires (or at least the Axis brought their brutality closer to home and 'civilisation') but the mental map and attitudes would not be alien to British officials in India or French in Indo-China. The other victors too were lesser demons rather than angels. The hypocrisy of a deeply racist US in trumpeting the rights of man is well known as is that of the Soviet Union with its Gulag and its strategy of slaughtering national elites as it did in Katyn Wood. Of course, when war broke out, we see the conduct of Japanese troops (the rape of Nanking and the slaughter in Manila), of German troops (with the Wehrmacht willing war criminals ready to slaughter families) and of Italian troops murderous in their inept and blundering way. But, before too long, Churchill was complicit in the deliberate terror bombing tactics of Harris over Germany and Roosevelt in the equally vicious and deliberately terror-directed fire-bombing of Tokyo while Soviet troops raped their way across Prussia with complete tolerance back in Moscow. One officer who protested rape ended up in the Gulag for 'bourgeois humanism'. American intelligence officers had a tough time trying to get front line troops in the Pacific to take prisoners for questioning. This gets us back to the problem of our species. This is that we are not truly free individuals (or rather only some of us are). However, we are not a potential hive either as might be suggested in the nightmare post war fashionable liberal critiques of totalitarianism. What we are is something closer to a complex herd species, perhaps with a lemming quality. At a certain point, we all willingly coalesce into a social narrative not of our making and quite possibly personally harmful to us and our families and have done so certainly since the Greek city-state. As the international socialists crumbled within days of imperial-national war being declared in 1914 so did the churches in 1939 and 1941, despite all the cant of believing in the gospel of peace of Jesus Christ. Only the Jehovah's Witnesses showed courage and many died for that reason. Pacifists too represented very considerable movements of people in the 'free world' in the late 1930s but they too crumbled under social pressure quickly. Here we get to the heart of the matter - reality is socially constructed and war allows elites to construct that reality. The mechanism by which our herd species, allowed freedom in peace in the West at least, enslaves itself to imperial elites is what is not and cannot be covered in this book but the book is absolutely invaluable to the person who wants to start that process of understanding. It is an understanding that is vital because you can see the same mechanisms re-emerging even as I write this in the struggle for mastery between the latest iteration of imperial conflict, a process that goes back at least to the facing off of the Egyptians and Hittites at Megiddo (Armageddon). This time the now-cyclical nonsense is between the 'West' (actually the political class of the Western alliance) and the 'SCO' (the political elites in Moscow and Beijing). Once again, reality is being falsely constructed by both sides to get their herds moving in the right direction. For this reason, Overy's book is not just a history book, it is a book that gives us the raw data in a new form, without bias or loss of moral compass, that we need to understand our own situation - impotent as individuals before the mass and the State as manipulator of the mass. The social construction of reality under the command of elites is not a false reality or 'fake news', it is reality and that reality can quickly get out of control and unleash animal forces that are quite capable of mass rape, the murder of ordinary people and widespread destruction. And if you do not believe me - take a look at the atrocities on all sides in the current Tigrayan War in Ethiopia or the deaths, barely reported in the mainstream media, that took place in the Congolese Wars or the evidence of our own and French behaviour during decolonisation. The final chapter of Overy's book is the most cursory but in some ways the most revealing because it shows how the savagery of 1931 to 1945 did not end there but continued out of sight of the 'civilised', perpetrated by precisely those victors who had claimed the moral high ground. Nuremburg refused to deal with mass terror bombing or US unrestricted submarine warfare in the Pacific. Germany was never obliged to deal with the murderers of women and children in the East. Soviet crimes are self-evident. Dutch behaviour in Indonesia was unconscionable. The list goes on. Although the story of the Second World War is one we all think we know and there is much that is familiar, there is also much here that will be new to most of us and possibly awkward, supported by references that indicate a man who is in total command of his sources. Churchill may be regarded as a great war leader from the point of view of the homelander but he was a ruthless imperialist too. Stalin was a brutal leader but his troops were exhausted when they reached the Vistula and it would have been unreasonable to test them further to relieve Warsaw. The German military was highly effective in its early expansion but lost its edge not simply because of greater material resources on the opposing side but because the Allies learned by doing in the face of challenge in both theatres. This brings out another, perhaps more positive side of the socially constructed herd, its adaptability under pressure, its ability to learn rapidly and exploit its advantages and an understanding of the behaviours of the other side. No one has a workable system to win in the casino in the long run and no power can beat the house in the struggle between empires. The house is a matter of resources and control over populations, economics and that ability to construct narratives that enable power to be exercised. The Axis powers were doomed from the point that the United States decided to fight back and hard and the Nazis failed to push Stalin out of the industrial zones to the East and create the conditions for regime change amongst a discontented population. It was only a matter of time. But it was also only a matter of time before the triumph of the two new ideological powers unravelled the older empires as well and came into direct conflict. The blindness to this aspect of strategy is perhaps what is most unnerving about Axis and old imperial decision-making. Perhaps, despite the racism in the East (which had some reasonable origin in foul Japanese behaviour), the terror bombing of Japan and the hypocrisies, the nation that comes out of this best is the US which, for all its flaws, showed an anti-imperialist commitment to be commended. It can also be honestly said that it was least inclined to oppress its own people to undertake war and least inclined to atrocity. Its later history may have tainted its status as moral arbiter (as did the cowardice of elites towards popular racism) but it was easily the best of a bad bunch. Given just how evil war is, the act of perpetrating war for whatever reason should be a mark against a nation. Both the US (attacked at Pearl Harbour and with war on it declared by Germany) and the Soviet Union (attacked by Germany, noting its earlier occupations of others) come out best here. If the Axis empires are the prime aggressors, it has to be said that the British and French Empires escalated things by initiating declarations of war against Germany in 1939. We should fear today that alliances designed for defence may end up with our being dragged into things we may regret. Complex alliances to maintain the balance of power, neglect of homeland defence and failure to distinguish between wrongful imperial acquisition and legitimate unification of peoples are permitted because elites know that, ultimately, they can guide the herd. Our entire international system is based on some fundamental conceptual flaws - above all, that borders must be fixed eternally and externally rather than through democratic non-violent self-determination - and those flaws are going to see many small wars and some big ones to come. And the herd will follow as it always has done and always will, elites will countenance horrible crimes claiming existential necessity and ordinary people will once again become thieves, rapists and killers when they are unleashed on the world. And so it goes ...
I cannot praise this book enough. Eighty years since the battles of Guadalcanal, El Alamein and Stalingrad, Overy's 878-page masterpiece manages to cover much more than the canonical Second World War in one perfectly arranged volume. It is the new starting point for its study.
