The data, information and insights that Richard Overy musters in “Blood and Ruins” can occasionally seem overwhelming; but even the most expert reader will emerge knowing more
It makes more sense, Mr Overy argues, to think in terms of a “long” second world war that began in China in the early 1930s and ended there—and in South-East Asia, eastern Europe and the Middle East—only in the decade after 1945. The origins of the war, he says, lay in the zenith of European colonialism in the late 19th century; it became imperialism’s violent nemesis.
The Axis powers saw their imperial mission almost entirely in terms of looting resources, and of resettling new colonies at the expense of local populations, who were often regarded as less than human. Much like the Japanese in China and elsewhere in their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which was “built on warfare and ruined by war”, Hitler offered people in the occupied east only brutal subjugation, deportation or death.
There were, however, fantasies on the Allied side as well. No doubt victory for the Axis powers would, as Winston Churchill warned, have sunk the world into a new Dark Age; yet he was himself determined that the old European empires should endure—an outcome at odds with the liberal internationalism on which Franklin Roosevelt insisted, and which was spelled out in the Atlantic Charter of 1941.
Mr Overy gives as much weight to the Pacific and East Asia as to Europe. Within the overall conflict he discerns a number of different struggles—involving how belligerents mobilised, how they adapted economically, their use of civilians , and how they fought . And how they justified the ordeal: very few Germans or Japanese questioned the rightness of their cause, one reason they held on long after defeat was certain.
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