Contents

General World History

• "A Little History Of The World"
• "The No Nonsense Guide To World History"
• "Fifty Things You Need To Know About World History"
• "12 Books That Changed The World"
• "Speeches That Changed The World"
• "What If?
• "More What If?"

Second World War

• "Europe At War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory"
• "1943: The Victory That Never Was"
• "The Nazi Holocaust: Its History And Meaning"

"A Little History Of The World" by E.H. Gombrich

The origins of this work are fascinating. In 1936, 26 year old Ernst Gombrich was living in Vienna where he had a doctorate in art history but no job. He was asked to translate into German an English history book for children but told the intended publisher that he could do a better book himself. He was given just six weeks to do so and managed to produce a text that was so successful that it was published into many languages - but not English. Just before the Germans marched into Austria in 1938, the Jewish Gombrich moved to England where he spent the remainder of his life as a distinguished art historian.

Towards the end of his long life (he died in 2001 aged 92), he began work on a revision of the book and a translation into English. He had not finished the translation when he died but it was completed by his assistant Caroline Mustill and published in 2005. In the course of 40 short chapters occupying just under 300 pages, this immensely readable work covers the highlights of 5,000 years of human history in a style infused with insight and humanity (the Nazis regarded it as "too pacifist").

Starting with the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Babylonians and the Assyrians, moving on to the Greeks, the Macedonians and the Romans, and not forgetting the civilisations of the Indus and China, Gombrich takes us through the history of the ancient world before we reach what he titles "The Storm", the first of successive invasions from the east: the Huns, the Avars, the Magyars and the Mongols. He highlights critical turning points for European civilisation such as the defeat of the Arabs by Charles Martell in 732, the withdrawal of the Mongols from Breslau in 1241, and the failed Turkish asault on Vienna in 1683.

Exciting times like the Renaissance and the Enlightenment ("tolerance, reason and humanity - the three fundamental principles") are counter-balanced by the conquest of the New World ("This chapter in the history of mankind is so appalling and so shameful to us Europeans that I would rather not say anything more about it") and the seemingly endless European confrontations between Catholics and Protestants, so protracted we call one of them the Thirty Years War.

Gombrich offers an economic and social history as much as a military and political one, examining the emergence of the great world religions and underlining the importance of writing, printing, trade, cities, and technologies (although the Internet comes too late to be mentioned). What emerges is how the centres of civilisation and power move around and how the futilities of war and injustice keep repeating themselves.

The last chapter is entitled "The Small Part Of The History Of The World Which I Have Lived Through Myself: Looking Back". He metions his role in the Second World War - listening to German broadcasts and translating them into English - and, while not using the word Holocaust, insists: "although many years have already passed since it was committed, it is of the utmost importance that it should not be forgotten or hushed up". He lightlights "the most important change" in modern history, namely the population explosion from 2 billion at the end of the First World War to 4.5 billion when he was working on the final chapter (it is now approaching 7 billion).

"The No Nonsense Guide To World History" by Chris Brazier

Most of us obtain our knowledge of history from school and usually the history we are taught relates overwhelmingly to our country or region and frequently to particular periods or wars. I am a great believer that all knowledge, to be fully appreciated, requires context and connections. So we need an overview of world history that at least touches on all regions and all periods.

But such an overview would be excessively lengthy and exceedingly dull. Right? Well, no. The "New Internationalist" magazine [click here], as part of its "No Nonsense Guide" series, has produced a history of the world in a mere 40,000 words. Obviously this is impressionistic, but Chris Brazier - co-author of the "New Internationalist" magazine since 1984 - has produced a commendable work that is immensely readable and uttery fascinatin, ,, , the start of sucessive invasions of Europe from the eastg.

Yet Brazier does more than summarize our history; in many ways, he reinterprets it.

Above all, he breaks away from the Euro-centric narratives and interpretations that dominate Anglo-Saxon teaching of history. So he points out that:

• Humankind emerged in Africa around 5,000 BC.
• The first civilization appeared in Sumer - in what is now Iraq - about 3,500 BC.
• Virtually all the earliest civilisations were in Asia: Sumeria (Mesopotamia), Old Kingdom (Egypt), Harappa (Indus), Hittite (Turkey) and Shang (China) with only the Minoan (Crete) and Mycenae (Greece) in the Mediterranean.
• Most of the great civilisations of 1500 BC to 1500 AD were in what we now call Latin America - Maya, Moche, Nazca, Aztec, and Inca - or Africa - Yoruba and Zimbabwe.
• Islam was the leading civilisation of the western hemisphere for a thousand years after the birth of Muhammad.
• At the height of the T'ang dynasty in the eighth century, China was the most advanced country in the world and the capital Chang by far the largest city anywhere.
• At the end of the 17th century, the most powerful monarchs in the world were not Louis XIV of France or Peter the Great of Russia, but the Chinese emperor K'ang-hsi and the Indian Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.

Also, Brazier attempts to correct the view of history that accords no role to women. Therefore he emphasizes that:

• The dominance of man the hunter is a myth because early people would have eaten much more vegetable than animal matter and it was women who gathered the fruits, nuts and berries that sustained people most of the time.
• In the beginning, God was a woman. For at least 25,000 years, people worshipped the Mother of All Things and the Father God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam has been revered for only a tenth of that time.
• In pre-Islamic Arabia, a woman had the right to have more than one husband and to choose her husbands.
• In 1789, the riots against the French King Louis XVI, which led to the storming of the Bastille, were led by a woman, Theroigne de Mericourt.
• Yet, so often, the struggle for freedom has been about the rights of men, not women. New Zealand gave women the vote in 1893, but other democracies took much longer.

• In 72 BC, there was a revolt of the slaves against the Romans, led by Spartacus and resulting in 6,000 crucifixions.
• Peasant revolts occur frequently throughout the history of China - and with good reason.
• There were the Diggers and the Levellers in 17th century Britain and the Chartists in 19th century Britain.
• There were, of course, the revolutions in Russia and China at the beginning of the 20th century.
• Today there are powerful dissenting movements to the policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

One of the most remarkable features of Brazier's history is the seminal influence of slavery. Over the four centuries of the slave trade (mid 15th - mid 19th centuries), between 10-12M Africans were sold in the Americas and about 2M died along the way.

Brazier argues that: "African slavery fed the European economic growth that spiraled into the Industrial Revolution - as well as providing the United States with a kick-start it could never have hoped for by the sweat of its settlers' brows alone". Conversely he suggests that: "This removed not only those most able to have children but also those most able to work. The ground for development was undermined and Africa is still counting the cost today".

Is it possible to draw any broad lessons from such a history of the world? I believe that it is.

First, most regions of the world have had a period of cultural flowering and even leadership. Therefore, it is condescending and ultimately racist to believe that some peoples or cultures are inherently inferior or unimportant.

Second, all empires fall. Whether it is the Roman Empire of two millennia ago or the Soviet bloc of the 20th century, sooner or later all dominant powers eventually loose their pre-eminence. The current hegemony of the United States will not last forever.

Third, progress is not inevitable. In the last 100 years, some 150 million people have died in war, around 100 million have died in famines, a further 100m died as a result of government repression, and - most unsettling to any notion of 'progress' - there were 14 million victims of genocide.

To create a safer and fairer world we need to understand better our turbulent and multi-cultural history.

"Fifty Things You Need To Know About World History" by Hugh Williams

Following the success of "Fifty Things You Need To Know About British History" - which was both a television series produced by Williams and a book written by him - he has tackled the even more ambitious project of trying to find 50 events that summarize world history. It is an immensely readable book of some 400 pages because of the short chapters and lively style and the structure of the work is assisted by Williams chosing 10 events under each of five broad themes as follows:

Wealth:

• The building of the Via Ergnatia 146 BC
• The city of Chang'an 750 AD
• The travels of Marco Polo 1271-1295
• The Black Death 1348-1350
• The foundation of the Dutch East India Company 1602
• The invention of the Flying Shuttle 1733
• The foundation of Oil City, Pennsylvania 1859
• The Treaty of Versailles 1919
• The Model T Ford 1908
• The Credit Crunch 2007

Freedom:

• The revolt of Spartacus 73 BC
• The burning of Jan Hus 1415
• The American Declaration of Independence 1770
• The French Revolution 1789
• Ludwig van Bethoven's Ninth Symphony 1824
• The Zulu War 1879
• The Russian Revolution 1917
• Mao Zedong and the People's Republic of China 1949
• The fall of the Berlin Wall 1989
• The release of Nelson Mandela 1990

Religion:

• The “Epic of Gilgamesh” 2000 BC
• The “Mahabharata” 500-100 BC
• Plato 429-347 BC
• Buddha c.400 BC
• Confucius 551-479 BC
• The crucifixion of Jesus 33 AD
• The death of Mohammed 632 AD
• Martin Luther's 95 Theses 1517
• Charles Darwin's “On The Origin Of Species” 1859
• 9/11 2001

• Ozymandias (Ramses II) 1279-c.1213 BC
• Alexander the Great 356-323 BC
• The sack of Rome 410 AD
• The coronation of Charlemagne 800 AD
• Chinggis Khan and the Mongol People 1206
• The fall of Constantinople 1453
• The conquest of Mexico 1521
• The exile of Napoleon Bonaparte to St Helena 1815
• The Indian Mutiny 1857
• The bombing of Hiroshima 1945

Discovery:

• Archimedes of Syracuse 287-212 BC
• The Chinese invention of printing 7th century AD
• Leonardo da Vinci 1452-1519
• Vasco da Gama and the sea route to India 1498
• Sir Isaac Newton and the “Principia” 1687
• Australia's first colony 1788
• John Logie Baird and the first moving television images 1926
• The discovery of the structure of the DNA helix 1953
• The Apollo 11 landing on the moon 1969
• The creation of the world wide web 1990

"12 Books That Changed The World" by Melvyn Bragg

If you love books as much as me, you will have no problem with the idea of books changing people - but changing the world? Now that is a taller order; yet Bragg has little difficulty establishing that a number of seminal works - or at least the ideas in them - have truly changed our world. What is more controversial is his choice which is bound to be very subjective. Firstly, he has chosen to limit his selection to books by British authors. Secondly, he has adopted a rather elastic definition of what constitutes a book.

His selection then - in the order in which he examines them - is as follows:

• "Principia Mathematica" (1687) by Isaac Newton
• "Married Love" (1918) by Marie Stopes
• "Magna Carta" (1215) by members of the English ruling classes
• "The Rule Book Of Association Football" (1863) by a group of former English public school men
• "On The Origin Of Species" (1859) by Charles Darwin
• "On The Abolition Of The Slave Trade" (1789) by William Wilberforce
• "A Vindication Of The Rights Of Women" (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft
• "Experimental Researches In Electricity" (1839, 1844, 1855) by Michael Faraday
• "Patent Specification For Arkwright's Spinning Machine" (1769) by Richard Arkwright
• "The King James Bible" (1611) by William Tyndale and 54 scholars appointed by the king
• "An Inquiry Into The Nature And Causes Of The Wealth Of Nations" (1776) by Adam Smith
• "The First Folio" (1623) by William Shakespeare

"Speeches That Changed The World" with an introduction by Simon Sebag Montefiore

The publishers Quercus have certainly chosen an eclectic collection: a total of 55 speeches from 48 individuals (only seven of them women) starting with Moses and the Ten Commandents and Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount, taking in four early American Presidents (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Wilson), moving on to no less than 12 speeches around the Second World War, taking in more American Presidents (Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, and George W Bush), not excluding black speakers (Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Shirley Chisholm) and concluding with the likes of Chaim Herzog, Mikhail Gorbachev and Vaclav Havel.

Each speech is accompanied by an introduction that provides a brief biography of the speaker and an explanation of how the speech came to be made. Whether these really are speeches that actually changed the world must be debatable; more accurately these are speeches that marked special moments in history ranging from the departure of Napoleon to the arrival of radium, from the anger of Adolf Hitler to the indefatigableness of Winston Churchill, from the dropping of the atomic bomb to the destruction of the World Trade Center. Although all the events were momentous, not all the speeches are equally fluent. Notably brilliant for their oratory though are the speeches of Kennedy and King.

"What If?" edited Robert Cowley

Academic historians use the word "counterfactual" for what we lay persons would describe as the "what if?" question of history. In this absolutely fascinating book, a collection of mainly American military historians, edited by Robert Cowley, have considered which battles of the last 3,000 years were so decisive to world history yet simultaneously so susceptible to different outcomes from relatively minor factors. As one of the writers puts it: "The heaviest doors pivot on small hinges". Twenty chapters reassess "what might have been":

• What if, in 701 BC, the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem by the forces of Sennacherib had not been lifted following the death of a large part of the attacking army from a mysterious plague? Then Judaism would have disappeared from the face of the earth and the two daughter religions of Christianity and Islam could not have come into existence.

• What if, in 480 BC, the Greeks commanded by the admiral Themistocles had not defeated the Persians led by their emperor Xerxes in the critical naval encounter at Salamis? Then western civilisation would never have benefited from the enduring values of the Hellenic cultural tradition.

• What if, in 334 BC, at the Battle of the Granicus River, the second axe blow aimed at the head of the man to be known as Alexander the Great had not been blocked by his bodyguard Cleitus and Alexander had died at 22 instead of 32? Then the Greek and Roman empires and traditions would not have dominated the West.

• What if, in AD 9, in the Teutoburg Forest the Germanic chieftain Arminius had not halted the proposed Roman pacification of Germania when he ambushed and annihilated three Roman legions of some 15,000 men led by the unfortunate Publius Quinctilius Varus? Then the notion of Aryan supremacy that led ultimately to two world wars may never have happened.

• What if, in 378, the Romans under Emperor Valens had not been defeated by the Visigoths led by Fritigern at Adrianople, or, in (probably) 732, the Muslims commanded by Abd Al-Rahman had not been beaten by the Frankish army of Charles the Pippinid at Poitiers? Then either imperial Rome or imperial Islam would have prevented the descent of Europe into the so-called Dark Ages of 500-1000 which - even if historians now believe was not quite that 'dark' - was nevertheless an era of physical chaos and cultural poverty.

• What if, in 1242, the utterly ruthless and unstoppable Mongol hordes led by the military genius Sabotai had not turned round before defenceless Vienna because Ogadai - the head of the greatest land empire in history - had died and they had to return to elect a new khan? Then the world would have witnessed the annihilation of Christendom with no Renaissance and no Reformation.

• What if, the summer of 1529 had not been so wet that in the autumn the army of the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent moved so slowly and his heavy artillery had to be abandoned, so that he was unable to take Vienna? Then the Habsburgs would have been challenged internally and Henry VIII of England might have received papal blessing for his divorce from his Habsburg queen with no need to form the Anglican Church.

• What if, in 1519 and 1520, the Spanish adventurer Hernÿn Cortés had failed for any one of half a dozen identifiable and plausible reasons in his audacious campaign to defeat the Aztec society of Montezuma and take its capital city of Tenochtitlán (modern day Mexico City)? Then any re-conquest would have been much delayed, changing the nature of today's Mexico and perhaps the USA itself.

• What if, in 1588, the great Spanish Armada - a formidable naval force of 130 ships commanded by the duke of Medina Sidonia - had not been scattered by an English fireship attack off Calais, aided by a prevailing wind? Then the armada would have been able to transport the Spanish army waiting on the French coast and invade a poorly defended Elizabethan England, so that the country today might still be a Catholic nation and the British Empire, especially in the North Americas, might never have come to pass.

• What if, in the years that the American War of Independence was fought from 1775-1783, anyone of 13 identified events had turned out differently, including the time when the British Captain Patrick Ferguson had the American commander George Washington in the sights of his rifle but could not bring himself to shoot an unarmed enemy in the back? Then the United States would probably not have achieved independence from Britain any sooner than Canada and the whole nature of the new state would have been profoundly different.

• What if, in 1776, the wind and the fog had not allowed Washington to make a night-time withdrawal of his entire army from Brooklyn Heights where a superior British force was waiting to over-run them, an event described as the Dunkirk of the American Revolution? Then the Revolution might well have been finished almost as soon as it had begun.

• What if, in 1815, Napoleon had managed to beat Britain's Wellington and Prussia's Blücher at the Battle of Waterloo, which Wellington himself described as "the nearest-run thing you ever saw"? Then France would have dominated the continent of Europe and the rise of a 20th century militarist Germany might never have happened.

• What if, in 1862, a copy of the Special Orders of the Confederate General Robert E Lee had not been accidentally discovered and exploited by the Union General George B McClellan? Then the bloodiest day of the American Civil War, the Battle of Antietam, would probably have gone Lee's way and could have won ultimate independence for the rebel Confederacy.

• What if, in the years of the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865, each of five scenarios examined here had gone just a little differently as speculated? Then, the eleven Southern States could so easily have won their independence and the world would have had to live with a divided United States.

• What if, in 1914, the German invasion of France had followed exactly the infamous Schlieffen plan or Britain had decided not to join the war or - having joined - the British commander John French had been allowed to take his troops out of the line as he wanted? Then the war would have been over by Christmas, millions of lives would have been saved, the Germans would have won or at least achieved a stale-mate, the Russian Revolution would not have happened without German delivery of Lenin, the conflagration would never have become a world war, the USA would not have joined the conflict, the British Empire would have lasted longer, and there might never have been a Second World War.

• What if, in the summer of 1941, Hitler had not over-reached himself with the invasion of Soviet Union, but instead and more cleverly had either invaded the French-occupied Middle East or neutral Turkey, before striking out into the rich oilfields of Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia? Then the German Reich would have had all the fuel it needed and could have invaded Russia later from both the south and the west in a successful pincer movement that would have decisively won the Second World War.

• What if, in 1942, the Americas had not been able to de-code the Japanese Navy's signals and anticipate the attack on Midway Island, so destroying four first rank enemy aircraft carriers when the numerical odds were so against them? Then the Japanese would have taken Midway and perhaps Hawaii, lengthening the Second World War, not just in the Pacific but also in Europe.

• What if, on 6 June 1944, the weather in the English Channel had remained as bad as the day before, so that Operation Overlord - the Allied invasion of Normandy - had failed or been cancelled? Then it is possible that Stalin's forces might have occupied the whole of continental Europe or the northern-most part of Japan or that the use of atomic bombs would have been on Germany rather than Japan.

• What if, the so-called Cold War had not been "a kind of ideological permafrost", but had ignited over any number of incidents concerning Berlin, such as the Soviet blockade of the city in 1948 or the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961? Then, the imbalance in the conventional forces of the Warsaw Pact and NATO in the communists' favour would have meant the early American use of tactical nuclear weapons and the possibility of full-scale nuclear war.

• What if, in 1946, the Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek had not been persuaded by American pressure to halt his attack on communist-controlled Harbin, so allowing Mao Zedong's forces ultimately to take over all China except Taiwan? Then, without the support of a communist China, North Korea would not have dared to invade South Korea and communists would never have taken over Vietnam and Cambodia.

"More What If?" edited Robert Cowley

Following the success of "What If?" - a review of 20 military engagements published in 1999 reviewed above - the same editor two years later compiled this collection of 25 historical turning points, not all of them military with more of an emphasis on the 20th century (14 of the 25 events):

• What if, in 424 BC, in the battle of Delium when the the forces of Thebes routed the Athenian army, the forty-five year old philosopher Socrates had not managed to escape alive? Then Plato and Xenophon would not have been so influenced by Socrates' thinking and the course of Western philosophy and Christian civilisation would have been somewhat different.

• What if, in 36 BC, Mark Anthony had been successful in his campaign against the Parthians ? Then he might well have defeated Octavian at the crucial battle of Actium in 31 BC and there would have been a bipolar (Rome and Alexandria) world instead of Roman domination.

• What if Pontius Pilate had spared the life of Jesus Christ and there had been no crucifixion? Then Christianity might still have spread widely but taken on a much more Judaic form.

• What if, on 14 October 1066, that Norman arrow had not entered the eye of the half English, half Danish defender Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings ? Then England would have remained a key part of the northern Scandinavian empire instead of becoming an integral component of the southern Latin world.

• What if the Ming dynasty that sponsored the seven epic voyages of the Muslim eunuch Zheng He between 1405 and 1433, reaching across the Indian Ocean as far as the east coast of Africa, had not abandoned any such exploration but encouraged it to go further? Then not only would the history of India and the Middle East have been very different, but the African slave trade introduced by the Portuguese would not happened and possibly America would have been discovered by the Chinese rather than Columbus.

• What if, in April 1521, following the trial of the alleged heretic Martin Luther in the German city of Worms, the Emperor Charles V had not released Luther but had had him executed? Then Luther would not have had another 24 years to write and preach and the Reformation would have taken a totally different form.

• What if, in August 1641, King Charles I had not left London but had instead remained, contracted the plague that broke out just 100 yards from his home, and died together with his family? Then there would have been no English Civil War, the throne would have been taken by Charles's sister Elizabeth, and the historic struggle between crown and parliament would have taken a rather different direction.

• What if, in 1802, French military forces in Haiti had not been devastated by a yellow fever epidemic? Then France might well have held on to its 868,000 square miles of territory in Louisiana instead of the following year selling it to Thomas Jefferson's administration for the bargain price of $15 million (some 4 cents an acre) and the United States might not have had a civil war and would today have a very different social mix.

• What if, on 22 September 1862, President Abraham Lincoln had not taken advantage of the proclaimed Union civil war victory at Antietam to issue the Emanicipation Proclamation freeing the black slaves in the Confederate states? Then the American civil war might well have ended in a negotiated peace and the racial divisions in the United States would have worked themselves out in a very different manner.

• What if, in July 1870, France had not treated the Ems Telegram from Bismarck's Germany as a cause for war but simply ignored it? Then France would not have lost the Franco-Prussian war and surrended its provinces of Alsace and Lorraine; since these provinces would have remained French, there would have been no need for the First World War; since there would have been no Treaty of Versailles, there would in turn have been no Second World War and no Holocaust.

• What if, in August 1912, Theodore Roosevelt had won the Republican nomination instead of the incumbent President William Howard Taft in the USA (after all, he had won 10 of the 12 primaries)? Then America would have had a more interventionist President during the First World War and the conflict would probably have been brought to an end a year or so earlier than was the case.

• What if, in 1915, the German kaiser had over-ruled the objections of his chancellor Theobald Bethmann-Hollweg and used unrestricted submarine warfare to enforce an economic blockade against Britain? Then Germany might well have been able to bring the Allies to the peace table within a year and most of the deaths in the trenches would have been avoided but at the expense of significant territorial concessions to Germany.

• What if, in 1917, Germany had not tranported Lenin back to Russia (a country he had only revisited once in 17 years of foreign exile) in time to galvanise the Bolsheviks into leadership of the October revolution? Then, without Lenin's fanatical drive, the revolution would not have taken place and a social democratic regime may well have taken root, meaning that Stalin would not have come to power and Hitler could not have used the Red threat to mobilise the forces of Nazism.

• What if, on 15 February 1933, Italian immigrant Giuseppe Zangara had succeeded in assassinating American President-elect Franklin D Roosevelt? Then the US Presidency would have fallen to the utterly mediocre and reactionary John Nance Garner and the effects of the Depression would never have been counteracted by the imaginative New Deal.

• What if, in October 1938, the British and French had not forced the Czechoslovaks to accede to the Munich Agreement on the transfer of the Sudentenland to Nazi Germany? Then the Czechoslvaks would certainly have resisted a German invasion and put up a tenacious resistance and the French and the British would have been compelled to enter the Second World War a year earlier than was the case, but this would have been militarily and economically much more to the disadvantage of the Germans than the Allies and the war would have taken a different trajectory with the probability that the Holocaust would not have happened.

• What if, in May 1940, Lord Halifax rather than Winston Churchill had replaced Neville Chamberlain as the British Prime Minister? Then the speculation is that Britain might have used Italy to facilitate an immediate armistice with Germany, surrendering continental Europe to Nazism until the Soviet Union beat the Germans alone and itself then occupied all Europe except Britain.

• What if, in the period July to September 1942, Australian troops had not managed to block the advance of the Japanese along the formidably inhospitable Kokoda Trail in New Guinea? Then the Japanese would have been able to take Port Moresby and use it to launch an invasion on the unprotected north-eastern Australia.

• What if, in World War II, the Allies had not managed to break the codes used by the German Enigma machines? Then, among many possibilities, perhaps there would not have been sufficient information to enable the Allies to sink tankers taking fuel for Rommel's panzer corps in North Africa and this would have enabled him to win at El Alamein and go on to take Cairo.

• What if, in the summer of 1942, Pope Pius XII had issued to the world his draft protest against the Nazi deportation and slaughter of the Jews? Then, according to this estimate, as many as 90% of the Holocaust's actual victims could have been saved.

• What if, in the Autumn of 1944, the British General Montgomery or the American General Patton had been allowed to strike hard and fast into Germany instead of maintaining Eisenhower's 'broad front' approach? Then it is suggested that the Second World War would have ended many months earlier, saving many military and civilian lives and resulting in Berlin falling into the hands of the Allies with reduced scope for post-war communist domination of Eastern Europe.

• What if, on 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler had not committed suicide in his Berlin bunker? Then he would have been captured by Soviet troops, tried in Nuremberg with other Nazi leaders, and hanged a year and a half after the war.

• What if, in August 1945, atomic bombs had not been dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Then it is suggested the resistance of the Japanese and the difficulty of local logistics could well have resulted in the Pacific War continuing for another two to five years and invasion and/or starvation could have cost the lives of up to five million Japanese and a similar number of lives of other nationalities.

• What if, in July 1944, President Roosevelt had not reluctantly abandoned his support for his Vice-President Henry Wallace at the Democratic Convention? Then, six months later when FDR died, it would have been Wallace - socially progressive but overly well-disposed towards the Soviet Union - rather than Harry Truman who led the United States and the free world in the early years of the Cold War.

• What if, in the years 1947 & 1948, John Kennedy had died from the attack of Addison's Disease that struck him in Ireland, Richard Nixon had not had Whittaker Chambers' testimony on communist spies to launch his career, and Lyndon Johnson had failed to win the too-close-to-call Texas Democratic senatorial nomination race? Then the USA would not have had these three men as post-war presidents and the recent history of the United States would have been different.

• Finally, what if, in 1531-32, the Spanish conquistador Pizarro had not found potatoes in Peru? Then so many developments in world history could have been so different because the availability of potatoes enabled the feeding of the miners of Potosi who generated the silver on which the 17th century Spanish empire was based, the survival of the native Irish in the face of the settlement of Cromwell's troops, the resilence of the Prussian peasants during the Seven Years War (1756-63), and the subsequent rapid expansion of the population in Europe which fuelled both the industrial revolution at home and massive emigration overseas.

"Europe At War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory" by Norman Davies

This 500-page work written by the British historian Norman Davies covers a familiar subject in what is intended to be a fresh manner with a new emphasis. Less than 60 pages is devoted to a chronological narrative of the actual warfare. The rest of the book is thematic, examining the war through the position of politicians, soldiers and civilians respectively. Unusually more space is devoted to the civilian perspective than the military one with over 140 pages describing the experiences and suffering of the 500M people afflicted by what was total war as never before encountered in human history.

The main theme of this work is that the Western nations have failed to comprehend and acknowledge the scale of the battles and the deaths on the Eastern Front which are such as to require a balanced judgement to conclude that "the Soviet role was enormous and the Western role was respectable but modest". For instance, consider this table which sets out estimates of deaths in the major individual battles and campaigns.

Deaths in individual battles and campaigns

Operation 'Barbarossa': battles of Byelorussia, Smolensk & Moscow 1941	1,582,000
Stalingrad September 1942-31 January 1943	973,000
Siege of Leningrad September 1941-27 January 1944	900,000
Kiev July-September 1941	657,000
Operation Bagration 1944	450,000
Kursk 1943	325,000
Berlin 1945	250,000
French campaign May-June 1940	185,000
Operation Overlord 6 June-21 July 1944	132,000
Budapest October 1944-February 1945	130,000
Polish campaign September 1939	80,000
Battle of the Bulge December 1944	38,000
Warsaw Rising 1 August-1 October 1944 (exc civilians)	30,000
Operation Market Garden September 1944	16,000
Battle of El Alamein October-November 1942	4,650

The first seven of these campaigns were on the Eastern Front and, to give some kind of perspective, the death toll in Operation Barbarossa - the German invasion of the USSR - was 12 times that of the the opening phase of the invasion of Normandy by the Western allies. Controversially Davies opines: "All in all, the open-minded observer will be tempted to view the war effort of the Western powers as something of a sideshow."

He underlines his theme by setting out estimates of military war dead in Europe.

Military war dead in Europe 1939-1945 (estimated)

USSR	11,000,000
Germany	3,500,00
Romania	519,000
Yugoslavia	300,000
Italy	226,000
UK	144,000
USA	143,000
Hungary	136,000
Poland	120,000
France	92,000
Finland	90,000

Davies writes: "the most obvious conclusion stands out a mile: the war assumed a far grander scale in the East than in any of the fronts where the Western Allies were involved".

If the main theme of "Europe At War" is to acknowledge the size of the Soviet effort and sacrifice in the defeat of Nazi Germany, the second theme is to highlight that the political leadership and military forces of the USSR were guilty of aggression and barbarities that easily bear comparison with that of their enemy. Davies does not flince from making such a equation. Indeed he writes of "the central paradox of the Second World War in Europe" as being that: "The two principal combatant states, which fought a series of campaigns of unparalleled ferocity, were both engaged in systems of internal repression of unparalled inhumanity". He adds: "If one sits back and forgets one's ingrained reactions, one should be able to see that the war in Europe was dominated by two evil monsters, not by one. Each of the monsters consumed the best people in its territory before embarking on a fight to the death for supremacy".

He gives attention to:

• the infamous Soviet pact with Germany from 1939-1941 which led to the Soviet invasion of Poland at the same time as the Germans, followed by the massacre of 25,000 Polish officers at Katyn
• during the time of the pact, the unprovoked attack on Finland in 1939 and occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1940
• when in 1942-43, territory lost to the Germans was regained, the shooting of all males alleged to have collaborated and the gang-raping of women so suspected
• the incident at Nemmersdorf in 1944 when a Soviet raiding party massacred German civilians including the stripping and crucifying of women
• when Germany itself was occupied and especially when Berlin was attacked and taken, the mass rapings of around 100,000 women
• at the end of the war, when a million Soviet prisoners of war were repatriated, the shooting of the officers and the dispatch of the rest to slow death in the GULags.

"1943: The Victory That Never Was" by John Grigg

The thesis of this book is easily stated: the Western Allies could and should have invaded France in 1943, rather than 1944, which would probably have shortened the Second World War, certainly spared many lives and possibly have altered the course of the subsequent Cold War.

Grigg, a freelance journalist, first put forward this thesis in the original edition of "1943" published in 1980. The book was republished in 1999 with a preface in which the author states: "The text is unaltered from the original edition of 1980, because nothing that has appeared since...has drawn my attention to any factual inaccuracy, or caused me to feel less confident in challenging what is still the predominant view".

I only read the reissue of the book in 2000, as a result of a recommendation from my good friend Eric Lee. I found it immensely refreshing and stimulating to read a book about the war that is so strategic in its thinking, so comprehensive in its sources, and above all so willing to challenge traditional judgements.

Grigg asserts that the conventional wisdom on the timing of the invasion is "blind as well as bland" and brings a forensic judgement to bear on events and decisions so often regarded as almost inevitable.

His argument has many strands, the main ones being that Roosevelt and Churchill allowed themselves to be misled by key military advisers into placing far too much importance on the role of the Mediterranean theatre and that Churchill especially was wrong to believe that carpet bombing could break the Germans and wrong to marginalise the involvement of de Gaulle and the Free French.

He criticises Roosevelt's gratuitous and mistaken insistence on "unconditional surrender", Admiral King's obsession with the Pacific Theatre, the erratic and fanciful political thinking of Churchill, General Brooke's fallacious concentration on Italy, the brutality of Harris's bombing policy, and the excessive caution of Montgomery when boldness was needed.

He makes a moral, as well as an operational, critique on area bombing: "As a calculated policy for terrifying civilians of all ages into submission, it was a grave affront to those minimal standards of civilisation which a civilised country should respect, even when engaged in a life-and-death struggle - it was simply heinous".

One by one, Grigg addresses and dismisses the main counter-arguments to the view that the cross-Channel invasion should have been a year earlier.

“Impossible to land in 1943”. While the Germans were tied down on the Eastern Front, by the end of 1942 the American Army alone had 5,397,000 men trained and ready.

“Atlantic Wall too strong”. In fact, the Wall was much stronger when the invasion occurred that it was the year before.

“Not enough landing-craft”. The armada which set sail for Sicily in July 1943 was larger than that which set sail for Normandy in June 1944.

“Technical resources inadequate”. The remarkable 'Mulberry' artificial harbours, used at Arromanches and (less successfully) at 'Omaha', could have been produced in 1943, if there was the pressure to manufacture them then.

Grigg believes that the invasion victory of 1944 "seems almost ridiculously cheap". He contrasts the 10,00 casualties, of whom about 2,500 were killed, with the 60,000 casualties, 20,000 of them killed, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

As for "the victory that never was", he writes: "By not invading until 1944 the Western Allies prolonged Europe's agony and condemned a multitude of heroes and innocents to death".

Grigg writes extremely well and his arguments are cogent and (seemingly) compelling. So often, historians benefit from hindsight, but one of Grigg's strengths is that he uses the information and the arguments available at the time.

Therefore it is difficult to find fault with the cold logic of his case, but of course war - like life - is not logical.

As Grigg himself recognises all too well, a successful invasion in 1943 would have required a clear and determined strategy to that effect in 1942. However, the psychological effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in late 1941 and the German victories in North Africa in early 1942 meant, I believe (and I have written a book about the war centred on 1942), that at this time the Western Allies simply did not believe that they could mount a successful cross-Channel attack so soon.

"The Nazi Holocaust: Its History And Meaning" by Ronnie S Landau

In the first 15 or so years after the Second World War, no single expression was deployed; by the early 1960s, the term increasingly used has been 'Holocaust'; other expressions that have been utilised are 'Churban', 'Shoah' and 'Judeocide'. All refer to the Nazi slaughter of the Jews between 1941-1945, an event that Ronnie Landau (a couple of whose lectures I have attended) argues in the first chapter is both unique and universal - unique as an entire event in terms of its scale, methods and purpose, but universal in the sense that so many component elements manifest themselves too often in both history and the present.

In fact, he devotes only three of his ten chapters to the history of the Holocaust itself, dividing the period into three segments:

• 1933-1938: An account is given of the various legislative and administrative measures that the Nazi regime took progressively to restrict the citizenship and livelihoods of the Jews in Germany, approximately 150,000 of whom managed to emigrate. Landau points out: "These policies were by no means coherent, consistent or without contradiction. And they were certainly neither predictable nor inevitable."

• 1938-1941: From Kristallnacht in Germany to ghettoisation in Poland, the denigration and dehumanisation of the Jews became worse and worse with the failure of 32 governments to act at the Evian Conference of 1938 and the 'compliance' of the various Jewish Councils both proving immensely controversial. On the role of the Councils, Landau opines: ""More recent research and thinking reveals that there is a colossal danger of overgeneralisation and of the passing of simplistic moral judgements."

• 1941-1945: Eight key developments leading to the so-called 'Final Solution' are reviewed and the debate between historians who believe that Hitler planned this from the beginning (the 'Intentionalists') and those who feel that it was esssentially an improvisation (the 'Functionalists') is examined. As for Hitler's personal involvement, Landau asks: "... did Hitler, who committed very few important directives to paper, simply give the order orally? Most historians who understand the internal workings of the Nazi government and, particularly, Hitler's style of leadership favour this ... view".

Numbers of Jews murdered in Europe (estimated)

Poland	2,800,000
USSR	1,500,00
Romania	425,000
Czechoslovakia	260,000
Hungary	200,000
Germany	170,000
Lithuania	135,000
France	90,000
Holland	90,000
Latvia	85,000
Greece	60,000
Yugoslavia	55,000
Belgium	40,000
Austria	40,000
Italy	15,000
Bulgaria	7,000
Others	6,000
Total	5,978,000

Put in words rather than numbers, this death toll represented - in Landau's language - "more than one third of all the Jews in the world, more than one half of all the Jews in Europe, and and more than two thirds of all the Jews in the Nazi sphere of influence"

In fact, the majority of Landau's clear, concise yet compelling book is spent not on the narrative of the Holocaust itself but on attempting to provide meaning to what Winston Churchill called "probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world". Meaning is aided by both context and perspective.

In terms of context, three positionings are offered:

• The context of Jewish history with Landau giving the reader a quick overview from about 300 BC to around 1700. He points out: "Before the growth of Christianity as a major force in Europe, discrimination against Jews in the Diaspora was virtually unheard of". However, between 1000-1500, there were a whole series of national expulsions.

• The context of European history and the position of the European Jew. In the 'Pale of Settlement' - an area encompassing the western-most provinces of the huge Russian Empire - the Jewish population quadrupled in the 19th century but then, starting in 1881, came the progroms.

• The context of German history with Landau taking us from national unification in 1871 up to Hitler's accession to power in 1933. He writes: "Hitler assumed the reins of government only with the assistance of the old conservative elites, who naively continued to believe that Hitler would pay them deference."

• The perspective of the perpetrators: Landau examines the cold cult of professionalism, the crude prejudice of the killers and the moral blindness of the leadership, noting: "A recurring motif is what can only be described as a kind of 'shut-off mechanism' which allowed them to become almost totally blind to the essential humanity of the victims and the reality of the pain they were inflicting".

• The perspective of the victims: Although he lists various occasions of armed resistance and acts of defiance, Landau offers eight major factors explaining why the Jews could not mount an effective resistance, including the cultural tradition of passivity. He points out: "Suffering may have been part of the Jewish cultural tradition, but so had survival".

• The perspective of the bystanders: Landau looks in turn at the position of the ordinary Germans, the various churches, and the Anglo-American allies. He admits: "The question of whether the Allies were truly in a position to save Jewish lives is extraordinarily complex militarily, politically and logistically".

All reviews by ROGER DARLINGTON

Last modified on 25 February 2012

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