Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II

Historian Chamberlin (The Cold War’s Killing Fields) offers a sweeping reassessment of WWII that situates the conflict within the longer arc of Western colonialism and imperialism. Not only were German and Japanese ideologies of racial superiority greatly influenced by the white supremacism inculcated for centuries by Europe’s colonial powers, according to Chamberlain, but both Hitler and Japan’s wartime leaders were directly inspired in their ambitions by European colonial expansion (Hitler’s plan to build a German empire across Europe was modeled on America’s westward expansion; Japan sought to replace the colonial empires in Asia with its own imperial “sphere”). The Allies’ war efforts, Chamberlain contends, were likewise shaped by imperial ambitions: the Russians intended to dominate Europe, the British to thwart the Russians (Churchill even considered allying with Germany to attack the Soviets), and the Americans to essentially rule the world. (The Allies also entertained racial considerations, Chamberlain writes, pointing to a U.S. State Department memo expressing concern that Japanese victories would reduce “the prestige of the white race.”) Chamberlain’s insightful and capacious study amounts to a provocative reappraisal of WWII as merely a particularly gruesome episode in a much longer imperial power struggle (the fact, as Chamberlain observes, that immediately after the conflict the Allies began to jockey over territory themselves does seem to put paid to the theory). It’s a magnificently contrarian take on the “good war.” (May)