The Second World War

Using the most up-to-date scholarship and research, and writing with clarity and compassion, Beevor assembles the whole picture of the Second World War in a gripping narrative that extends from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific, from the snowbound steppe to the North African Desert, to the Burmese jungle, SS Einsatzgruppen in the borderlands, Gulag prisoners drafted into punishment battalions, and to the unspeakable cruelties of the Sino-Japanese War.

The outbreak of war -- "The wholesale destruction of Poland" -- From phoney war to Blitzkrieg -- The dragon and the rising sun -- Norway and Denmark -- Onslaught in the West -- The fall of France -- Operation Sealion and the Battle of Britain -- Reverberations -- Hitler's Balkan war -- Africa and the Atlantic -- Barbarossa -- Rassenkrieg -- The "Grand Alliance" -- The battle for Moscow -- Pearl Harbor -- China and the Philippines -- War across the world -- Wannsee and the SS Archipelago -- Japanese occupation and the Battle of Midway -- Defeat in the desert -- Operation Blau -- Barbarossa relauched -- Fighting back in the Pacific -- Stalingrad -- Alamein and Torch -- Southern Russia and Tunisia -- Casablanca, Kharkov and Tunis -- Europe behind barbed wire -- The Battle of the Atlantic and strategic bombing -- The Pacific, China and Burma -- The Battle of Kursk -- From Sicily to Italy -- Ukraine and the Teheran Conference -- The Shoah by gas -- Italy -- the hard underbelly -- The Soviet spring offensive -- The Pacific, China and Burma -- The spring of expectations -- Bagration and Normandy -- Berlin, Warsaw and Paris -- The Ichi-gō Offensive and Leyte -- Unrealized hopes -- The Ard…