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Summary: Maps, Dictionary, and Aspirin
Review: I applaud Keegan for his knowledge of this war and also his style of writing that makes one want to keep reading and turning the pages. However, it is quite obvious that Keegan's intentions were also to impress his peers as one will find the need for a good dictionary as his word usage is overly sophisticated. In addition, the inferior maps used in this book are an insult to the reader. I have seen and heard Keegan speak on the History Channel and although he is very well spoken, his diction does not reflect that of his book.
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Summary: Great one volume summary of WWII
Review: I must have read and reread my copy 50 times now. It makes it possible to begin to grasp the wars in Europe and in the Pacific, and where the individual battles and campaigns that are often discussed in fact fit in. But the part I especially liked was the coverage of the Normandy breakout and the battle of the Falaise Gap. I had no idea that such a rout had occurred.
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Summary: Great Introduction to WWII
Review: I read this book as part of a university WWII history class, and I actually couldn't bear to sell it back! It was interesting throughout, even for someone who isn't inspired by detailed battle descriptions!
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Summary: Best WW2 History
Review: I remember great things about this book even though I read it almost 10 years ago. This is a much finer history of the Second World War than any book I was issued at West Point. The book is very easy to read, and Keegan avoids the rote history narrative, and applies great analysis. The absolute best part of this book is the section on arms production. If you're not proud to be an American after reading that chapter nothing will! (The US outproduced all the other warring nations combined.) Keegan's analysis of partisan warfare during WW2 debunks the myth of the French Resistance.
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Summary: What Mattered and What Did Not
Review: John Keegan has carved himself a distinctive place in the literature of warfare. He's serious and well-informed, without having fallen play to the kind of celebratory cheerleading that you get from so much battle reporting. At the same time he conveys compassion for the suffering that warfare inflicts, without letting himself become shrill. The combination allows him to claim a kind of relevancy for his subject that either of those rejected extremes might forbid him. Wars happen, and they matter, and they are fought well or badly. And - this is perhaps a point of special urgency - they could have happened differently. For surely it is easy to forget just how chance a business war can be - as the Second World War surely was. Keegan gives you a hundred ways to play the game of what might have been. If the Americans had been more alert to the possibility of attack at Pearl Harbor; if Hitler had not shown such sentimental foolishness as to throw in his hand with his Japanese allies; if Stalin had not liquidated all his own best generals - and this is only the beginning. Keegan is also enlightening - or at least thought-provoking - in his assessment of relative roles. Partisan warfare was full of heroes and martyrs, but it didn't amount to much - think of the butchery at Warsaw, or in the high planes outside Grenoble. "Dirty tricks" - OSS spy games and suchlike - provide the stuff of good movie plots, but they counted perhaps even less. Code-breaking, by contrast, counted for a great deal, perhaps most in the run-up to Midway, itself surely the most important naval battle of the war. In the end, why did the Allies win? A thousand reasons, perhaps, but in the end the good ones are dull and obvious. Good organization, good (not perfect) generalship, good logistics and support (Overy, Why the Allies Won (1997) develops this theme). And - perhaps most of all - massive industrial productive capacity, mostly in America, but significantly also in the Soviet Union, where the desperate race to move factories beyond the advancing Nazis in 1941 paid huge dividends in 1944. How could it most easily have gone otherwise? On the record, Keegan himself might nominate the various battles of the North Atlantic, including the dreaded U-Boat campaign. Superior American productive capacity prevailed over the Nazis in the early rounds, but technical innovations later began to shift the balance. Had the War not been won when it was on land, Keegan suggests, a renewed sea battle might well have swept the tide back the other way.
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Summary: All you need in one handy volume
Review: John Keegan has written what may be the best one-volume survey of WWII. Among others, I've read works on the subject by B.H. Liddell-Hart, Martin Gilbert, A.J.P. Taylor - and even Churchill - and though all of them have their merits, I always return to Keegan's history. Being a military historian by trade, Keegan naturally devotes much of his attention to strategy and tactics, but he gives enough attention to other important aspects of the war (politics, experience of soldiers and noncombatants, etc.)to make his work better rounded than most. In short, he knows his subject very, very well; moreover, he offers keen insights that many others have not. An added plus is his very reader-friendly bibliography.
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Summary: Excellent one-volume history
Review: John Keegan is an authority when it comes to military history. Well-known for THE FACE OF BATTLE.
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Summary: Wonderful snapshots of the people, places and times!
Review: John Keegan's "The Second World War" is a masterfully written dissertation of WWII. While Keegan certainly doesn't cover every aspect of the war - he in fact explains that he will not attempt to do this in his Prologue - he does do an admirable job presenting the War contextually for readers. His separation of the War into blocks of time and space is especially critical in making this an encompassing book. Also Keegan places significance on the why's of the War - why would Germany go to war? Why did the US resist coming into the war? Why did Japan act differently than germany to it's occupied peoples? All of these questions place the battle in perspective. The battles - Keegan deals with the major ones brilliantly. I have read many WWII books but I have to say that I still learned a lot from Keegan's book - both new things and tweekings of things already learned. "The Second World War" is certainly now part of my Must Read collection. I think this book would make a wonderful starting point for someone just showing interst in the genre, but also should be required reading for serious long-term students of WWII history. Can't recommend it highly enough!!!!
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Summary: A tricky overview of WW2
Review: John Keegan's book on WW2 would be more honestly titled The Official Western Allies View of WW2. Like many famous historians today he suffers from a Cold War hangover which seeks to give more credit to the Western Allies ground war than the actual facts warrant and thus minimize the enormous contribution of the Soviet Union. There are 114 pages about the Eastern Front and 163 about the ground war in the West, never mind that until 1944 the war in the West was a sideshow and that 9 million of the 11 milion German casualties in WW2 occured in the East. Keegan also is confused about Stalin and Hitler- he claims that Stalin totally micro-managed the Soviet effort (the opposite was true: after the winter of 1941-2 he left the war to his great generals) and he claims that Hitler left the war to his generals when, again, the opposite was true. Just as S. Ambrose is a propagandist for a 1950s American point of view Keegan is a propagandist for the British professional officer's point of view. The skirmishes in North Africa are given the same weight as the enormous struggle in Russia. He sneers at the resistance movements of various countries as if their lack of complete success made resistance a waste of time. There is a paragraph on page 508 where the hideous intervention on the part of the British to help pro-Nazi Greek paramilitaries leads to "a tragic cost in British lives" , justifying the pathetic Churchillian grasp for Empire even at that late date. And finally, the absurd description of the fiasco at the Falaise Gap as possibly the biggest tank battle of WW2 I read with wonder, in disbelief. Be wary of this book if you want an accurate idea of what happened in WW2, better books have been written on why the Allies won; you'll get only the Sandhurst version here.
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Summary: The Greatest Conflict of All Time
Review: John Keegan's, "The Second World War," is a detailed overview of the greatest conflict in history. The author gives his readers a behind the scenes view of deliberations conducted at the highest levels leading up to the major battles in each theatre. He then analyzes the combatant's preparations and schemes of maneuver and provides sound analyses of both the outcomes and the long-term implications of each campaign. The result is one of the most thorough reviews of World War II ever written. Keegan begins with an overview of the factors that led to the outbreak of a second world war only 21 years after the, "war to end all wars," ended. The economic devastation caused by harsh surrender terms gave rise to crime, unemployment and rampant inflation. Paramilitary groups, composed of frustrated young men desperately looking for leadership and a means of avenging their national honor, sprang up and flourished in the post war chaos. Also, promises made to nations to entice their participation in World War I went unfulfilled leaving some former allies, disillusioned and bitter. These factors combined to open the way for despots such as Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo. The world would pay a heavy price for these mistakes beginning in the 1930's. Keegan then narrates the major conflicts in each theatre. He reviews the grand strategies and tactical actions of the commanders involved and dispenses praise or condemnation solely on the results achieved. Allied and Axis commanders are glorified or condemned based on their generalship alone in one of the most completely objective accounts ever. Professor Keegan recounts most world leaders agreed, at the end of the First World War, the lethality of 1918 vintage weapons had made war invalid as an instrument of foreign policy. In 1945, the devastated cities of Europe and Russia reaffirmed those findings. Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan emphatically confirmed the analysis with mushroom shaped exclamation points. Yet, the alliances that evolved from World War II made nuclear holocaust a distinct possibility for the next 45 years. Fortunately, the lessons learned in World War II kept this from occurring. Second World War is an outstanding analysis of the major campaigns fought in World War II. My only advise is unless the reader is as well versed in world geography as the author, he would do well to keep an atlas at his side to help visualize the schemes of maneuver described. Never the less, the book deserves a place in the library of every serious student of this, the greatest conflict of all time. 5 stars!!
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