The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War
By Andrew Roberts
Allen Lane £25, 680 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20

Hard on the heels of Masters and Commanders, Andrew Roberts’ major study of the Roosevelt-Churchill alliance during the second world war, comes a general account of the war itself.

The claim that The Storm of War is a “new” history might be a little overblown, though the book is replete with well-observed detail and the occasional new nugget of information. The story is by now a well-known one – yet once again Roberts tells it with characteristic flair and perception. It is nonetheless difficult to extract from the narrative thread any very clear line of interpretation or explanation.

The principal theme addressed in the conclusion is that the defeat of Hitler’s Germany (little is made of either of its Axis partners, Italy or Japan) was due to Hitler’s own misjudgments and the supine way that his military commanders carried on doing what he told them to do. Even Roberts would admit that there is not much novelty in that.

The body of the book deals with all the major phases of the war, but the subject has become so large, thanks to a ceaseless flow of new historical literature, that it is difficult to do justice to the whole span of conflict or to the many historical elements – political, social, cultural, military, scientific – that make up the wartime experience.

Roberts has opted for a narrative of the principal campaigns into which short passages on domestic issues or technology can be injected. He covers a large amount of ground, but inevitably there are shortfalls. Italy, as so often happens, gets pretty short shrift. As in so many accounts of the war in north Africa, Italian forces and commanders are overlooked once the German Commander Field Marshal Rommel is on the scene. And, to be fair, the British Empire forces facing Rommel also thought they now had a proper enemy to fight. The Pacific War and the Sino-Japanese war are also granted much less space than the conflict in Europe. The many issues of war on the home front are dealt with cursorily, as are the international politics and the pattern of economic war-making that shaped the whole conflict.

The central contention – that Hitler was his own worst enemy – is of course indisputable. His misjudgments, Roberts concludes, can be explained because in the final analysis, “He was a Nazi”. This is a peculiar assertion as it stands, and it downplays the fact that he was not just a National Socialist (he played a major part in shaping and defining what that was in the first place) but was, above all, Nazi Germany’s dictator. It was the nature of the structure of decision-making and the growing messianic pretensions that absolute power gave him which turned Hitler into a liability. Nor does it account for the fact that, by 1942, German forces were poised on the Egyptian frontier and deep in Soviet territory, with the conquest of most of continental Europe already behind them. Some things went right even with a Hitler at the top.

The problem with any Hitler-centred explanation for the outcome of the war lies in the extent to which this plays down the nature of the Allied effort. It was never enough for the Allies, as Roberts implies here, to possess large populations or more economic resources – and, by 1942, conquests in the Soviet Union had eroded much of the Allied preponderance. As he showed so clearly in Masters and Commanders, it was necessary for the Allies to turn those advantages into effective fighting power. How they did this in all major theatres depended on important changes in military organisation, military technology and tactics, and in harnessing domestic enthusiasm for the struggle against the Axis states. It is not enough to say that Hitler lost the war; it was also necessary for the Allies to win it.

To do justice to what is now known about the history of the war requires more than an answer to the questions of what the Axis did wrong or the Allies did right. It means exploring the rich veins of historical writing generated over recent decades in many different milieus. The multi-volume official history of Germany in the second world war, for example, is an indispensable tool in reconstructing the German side of the story, as well as demonstrating that the German defeat was due to many things other than Hitler. There is much very good writing on the Mediterranean and Italian campaigns by Italian historians; new literature on the Sino-Japanese conflict and the Pacific war is finally restoring this element of the war’s history to its proper place. These new sources are largely absent from Roberts’ account.

There is nevertheless a lively engagement with a great many lesser issues on which Roberts has original or provocative things to say. Some of them, however, can certainly be contested. His claim, for example, that the British would have fought with the same degree of fanaticism and brutality as the Russian population did, if Britain had been invaded, is a brave conjecture to make.

Similarly, the view that the destruction of Germany’s cities and the death of half a million civilians helped to burn out “the warlike instinct” from the German soul begs a great many questions. His insistence that Britain, thanks to the Commonwealth and Empire, was never “alone”, even in 1940, is well-made, but the value of the alliance with Greece, which he adds to the list of Britain’s friends abroad, is certainly open to question even on the most generous interpretation.

All this makes for a spirited read. Roberts is never dull and he has an instinct for getting a small fact or an amusing anecdote to do the work of sustaining the narrative economically and effectively. He will want to correct some of the errors that have crept into the detail – General Jodl was operations chief, not chief of staff; Operation Pointblank was ordered in June 1943, not at the Churchill-Roosevelt conference in Casablanca in January of that year; US bomber crew losses were roughly the same as the British; and Chamberlain famously said, of course, “peace for our time” not “in our time”; and so on. The question of whether Hitler was a sufficient explanation for German defeat will continue to be debated by historians. Roberts has made a strong case for the proposition.

Richard Overy’s ‘1939: Countdown to War’ is published by Allen Lane in September