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)

A view of World War II as the child of colonialism and the father of superpower neo-imperialism. "The last time that a world leader launched a war to dominate Eastern Europe and a rising Asian power sought to challenge American power in the Pacific, it led to the bloodiest war in human history." So, with an eye on the present, ventures Columbia University historian Chamberlin in closing his sweeping survey of World War II. Fittingly, that narrative begins with World War I and its antecedent conflicts in Africa, where the European colonial powers and the U.S. tested techniques and strategies that would come to full fruition a generation or two later: concentration camps, poisonous gas, aerial bombardment of civilian populations. In this regard, Chamberlin dismantles the "good war" narrative so cherished by celebrants of the "greatest generation": World War II had "overarching moral clarity," but it had plenty of ignoble aspects. One, Chamberlin notes at the outset, was contingency planning on the part of the U.S. and Britain to immediately rearm German soldiers and go to war with the Soviet Union; another was the prewar expansion of American power deep into the Pacific, the result of a racist view that assumed that it was the white man's role to lead the world (Japan, an allied power, was explicitly denied racial equality in the Treaty of Versailles). In the end, Chamberlin argues, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the European fight, losing millions of soldiers, while the U.S. bore the brunt of the Pacific War but relied on technological superiority to bomb Japan into submission. The outcome: a postwar world order dominated by those militarized superpowers and their satellites, "forced to prepare for perpetual warfare and the prospect of nuclear annihilation." A fresh, closely argued interpretation of a global conflict that continues to reverberate. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.