The rest of the book explores successively how resources were mobilised, military realities and developments, the organisation of economies, the justifications advanced for war, civilian resistance and political change sought, the psychiatric impact, war crimes and atrocities and finally, transition into a post-war world in which the Axis powers had failed in their objectives and in which the US was now the world’s most powerful country. Most of the first half is given over to the story of the war. Overy views the war, as it advances, from the standpoint of the rulers of the chief countries involved, building into the account their respective dilemmas, decisions, strategies and the reasons for these. Packed with facts and scholarly analysis, reinforcing his earlier works such as Russia’s War, its insights, clarity and objectivity are formidable. Follow-up footnote source references add another 75 pages or so. THE text of Richard Overy’s weighty new history of World War II runs close to 900 pages.
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