Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/August 2012/Book reviews


 * By Nick-D

The Legacy of the Second World War is a series of inter-connected essays on the conflict by the distinguished American historian John Lukacs. It is mainly focused on the grand strategies of the main combatants (particularly Britain, Germany and the United States) and the relationship between World War II and the Cold War.

I hadn't read anything by Lukacs prior to this book, but based on his reputation I was expecting that it would provide good overview of the main issues in the war's historiography. However, I was greatly disappointed. The book's main flaw is that it reads like a transcript of a poorly prepared series of post-graduate lectures on the war; none of the chapters has a clear topic and material is frequently repeated. To make matters worse, the quality of the prose in the book's early chapters is often appalling - paragraphs and even individual sentences are frequently broken up with asides on different topics. The book is also very Europe-centric; the Pacific War is treated only in passing and is rather dubiously claimed to be a subsidiary theatre of the war in Europe.

While the book makes some interesting points, these are essentially under-prepared. I found the most interesting argument to be that Hitler was looking for a negotiated peace from late 1941 onwards, and his actions were more rational than is often thought (for instance, the Battle of Kursk was launched as part of an attempt to score a major tactical victory which could contribute to peace negotiations rather than in the expectation that it would lead to the collapse of the Soviet front lines). However, this argument is under-developed, as Lukacs never really squares how this action fitted in with the radicalisation of Hitler's policies towards the Jews and citizens of occupied countries over this period. The analysis of the relationship between the USSR, UK and USA in the war's last year is also quite good (and refreshingly clear headed compared to what often passes for commentary on this topic), though Lukacs' views on subjects such as whether Roosevelt was too deferential to Stalin and Churchill's actions in this period are confusingly expressed.


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