If I were to recommend a highly perceptive and original book on the Second World War, it would be...

[NNadir]

Blood and Ruins, The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945 by Richard Overy

It's not a "good guys/bad guys" kind of book, not a book that focuses all that much on battles, but rather on the sinews of the war, it's origins and motivations, its mechanics, but most insightfully and incisively, the moral character and the lies that all of the participants, including the United States, told about for what they were fighting.

It's a massive book, a slow rich read, and pretty much every chapter, and the rather different structure - chronological telling is barely observed if observed at all - just rings with originality.

It is advertised on the cover as a "military history" but is anything but that. The observations are cutting and will go far in deconstructing the common accounts, stripping and exposing any triumphalism and denuding the participants, winners and losers, of any claim to morality, ripping apart any appeal to that war being a "Good War."

It points, decisively to the fact that "Good Wars" don't, and cannot exist.

[Bread and Circuses]

1. Thanks

Thanks. I’m going to get it from my library.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. Unlikely to have time to read it, but saving a link nonetheless ... nt

[NNadir]

3. I finally finished this book, cover to cover. I rarely read any history from cover to cover but this one was worth it.

I'm an excerpt reader, in general. For many books, I'll read some chapters, not others, particularly if I feel I'm fairly knowledgeable about a particular point in history.

At any given time I might have four or five history books being read, again, excerpts, and most I don't read from cover to cover, particularly one this long.

I read this one over a period of two months, a few pages at a time, but trust me, if you want to understand the Second World War from a moral perspective - at the risk of being dissuaded that there were any "good guys" - this is a book you will very much want to read. It's not very "military." It's about moral positions and moral evasions.