cover image Struggle for Survival: The History of the Second World War

Struggle for Survival: The History of the Second World War

R. A. C. Parker, Robert Alexander Clark Parker. Oxford University Press, USA, $27.5 (30pp) ISBN 978-0-19-219126-7

In a comprehensive, instructive overview of the causes of World War II, the decisive incidents that determined its outcome and the postwar consequences, Parker analyzes unfolding grand stategies, explaining, for instance, how America's precision bombing of oil refineries and communications networks weakened the German war effort more effectively than British area bombing. He also shows how the Allied bombing campaign ironically strengthened German morale and why American B-29 raids over Japan had the opposite effect. The military campaigns are described straightforwardly, but Parker ( Europe 1919-1945 ) gives equal weight to the economic structures of the Allied and Axis powers, illustrating, for example, that Russian fighting strength was rooted in an economy greatly underrated by the Germans. There is a separate chapter on the Holocaust in which the author addresses the ``uniquely important historical question'' of how a handful of Nazis managed to turn irrational racial theories into mass murder on an unprecedented scale. Photos. (Feb.)