With the development of the B-29 Superfortress in summer 1944, strategic bombing, a central component of the Allied war effort against Germany, arrived in the Pacific theater. In 1945 Japan experienced the three most deadly bombing attacks of the war. The firebombing of Tokyo in March burned the city's most densely populated sector, killed some 85,000 residents, and left more than one million homeless. The attack was part of a months-long campaign of incendiary bombing that destroyed almost two-thirds of Japan's cities. The two atomic blasts in August killed hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most of them civilians. The bombing brought a destabilizing devastation that, combined with a declaration of war by the Soviet Union, induced Japan, as they put it, to terminate the war.

Many at the time and since have credited American air power, and especially the two atomic bombs, with Japan's surrender. But Richard Overy tells a different, more dimensional story. Drawing on his expertise on the war and its bombing campaigns, he delivers a precise recounting of these aerial attacks, and a balanced, informed assessment of how and why they occurred. Overy is astute on the Allied decision-making, and, notably, integrates the Japanese leadership as well. He ably navigates the dramatic endgame of the war, which featured factional infighting within the Japanese cabinet, a scramble by American officials to formulate an acceptable version of unconditional surrender, and the crucial role played by the emperor, Hirohito. The atomic bombing emerges as impactful but not decisive in this rich, multilayered history

Richard Overy is not the first scholar to take up the title question. In 1931, at the request of the League of Nations, Albert Einstein asked Sigmund Freud to collaborate on a short work examining whether there was a way of delivering mankind from the menace of war. Published the next year as a pamphlet entitled Why War?, it conveyed Freud's conclusion that the death drive made any deliverance impossible--the psychological impulse to destruction was universal in the animal kingdom. The global wars of the later 1930s and 1940s seemed ample evidence of the dismal conclusion.

A preeminent historian of those wars, Overy brings vast knowledge to the title question and years of experience unraveling the knotted motivations of war. His approach is to separate the major drivers and motivations, and consider the ways each has contributed to organized conflict. They range from the impulses embedded in human biology and psychology, to the incentives to conflict developed through cultural evolution, to competition for resources--conflicts stirred by the passions of belief, the effects of ecological stresses, the drive for power in leaders and nations, and the search for security. The discussions show remarkable range, delving deep into the Neolithic past, through the twentieth-century world wars, and up to the current conflict in Ukraine. The examples are absorbing, from the Roman Empire's voracious appetite for resources to the impulse to power evident in Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Hitler. The conclusion is not hopeful, but Overy's book is a gift to readers: a compact, judicious, engrossing examination of a fundamental question.

A penetrating and compassionate book on the most gigantic military struggle in world history.--The New York Times Book Review

An extraordinary tale... Overy's engrossing book provides extensive details of teh slaughter, brutality, bitterness and destruction on the massive front from the White Sea to the flank of Asia.--Chicago Tribune

The Russian war effort to defeat invading Axis powers, an effort that assembled the largest military force in recorded history and that cost the lives of more than 25 million Soviet soldiers and civilians, was the decisive factor for securing an Allied victory. Now with access to the wealth of film archives and interview material from Russia used to produce the ten-hour television documentary Russia's War, Richard Overy tackles the many persuasive questions surrounding this conflict. Was Stalin a military genius? Was the defense of Mother Russia a product of something greater than numbers of tanks and planes--of something deep within the Russian soul?

Monumental... [A] vast and detailed study that is surely the finest single-volume history of World War II. Richard Overy has given us a powerful reminder of the horror of war and the threat posed by dictators with dreams of empire. - The Wall Street Journal

A thought-provoking and original reassessment of World War II, from Britain's leading military historian

A New York Times bestseller

Richard Overy sets out in Blood and Ruins to recast the way in which we view the Second World War and its origins and aftermath. As one of Britain's most decorated and respected World War II historians, he argues that this was the last imperial war, with almost a century-long lead-up of global imperial expansion, which reached its peak in the territorial ambitions of Italy, Germany and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s, before descending into the largest and costliest war in human history and the end, after 1945, of all territorial empires.

Overy also argues for a more global perspective on the war, one that looks broader than the typical focus on military conflict between the Allied and Axis states. Above all, Overy explains the bitter cost for those involved in fighting, and the exceptional level of crime and atrocity that marked the war and its protracted aftermath--which extended far beyond 1945.

Blood and Ruins is a masterpiece, a new and definitive look at the ultimate struggle over the future of the global order, which will compel us to view the war in novel and unfamiliar ways. Thought-provoking, original and challenging, Blood and Ruins sets out to understand the war anew.

Overy's book is easily the best account of Europe's descent into...death and destruction. --Evening Standard (London)

A brilliantly concise narrative of the days leading to the outbreak of history's greatest conflagration, 1939 takes readers hour by hour through the nail-biting decisions that determined the fate of millions. Richard Overy, a leading historian of the period, masterfully recreates the jockeying for advantage that set Europe's greatest powers on a collision course. Would Stalin join Hitler in a bid to divide Poland and flout the West? Would Britain and France succeed in forcing Germany to reason? And how far would a defiant Poland push its claim to exist? In the summer of 1939, the course of events was anything but assured, as this exceptionally absorbing book drives home.

Originally published in 1980 and still the best one-volume aerial history of World War II, Richard Overy's classic work remains profound and highly origi-nal. Far from just an account of the various air battles, Professor Overy treats the air war as a complex and fascinating historical web, woven out of grand strategy, economic mobilization, the recruitment of science, and the nature of leadership and training. Analyzing the achievements and failures of the aerial component of the war, he places it in perspective by explaining the role aviation played in the overall conflict. He points out that while the Axis powers tended to limit their use of air power to one major role, such as support of ground forces, the Allies exploited all aspects of aerial doctrine: air defense, strategic bombardment, air-naval cooperation, and ground support. He also demonstrates how aircraft ensured that the Second World War became a people's war and how success in the air war was, in a very real sense, a test of a nation's modernity. The air war was won and lost not only in the skies but also in the factories and the research institutes. Finally, the author dispels many popular myths and in particular reveals that although air power in the form of strategic bombing by itself did not deter-mine the war's final outcome, its use dramatically illustrated the complexities of managing modern war. Richard Overy's The Air War thus deepens our under-standing not only of World War II but of military history in general.

Richard Overy's bold book begins by throwing out the stock answers to this great question: Germany doomed itself to defeat by fighting a two-front war; the Allies won by sheer weight of material strength. In fact, by 1942 Germany controlled almost the entire resources of continental Europe and was poised to move into the Middle East. The Soviet Union had lost the heart of its industry, and the United States was not yet armed.

The Allied victory in 1945 was not inevitable. Overy shows us exactly how the Allies regained military superiority and why they were able to do it. He recounts the decisive campaigns: the war at sea, the crucial battles on the eastern front, the air war, and the vast amphibious assault on Europe. He then explores the deeper factors affecting military success and failure: industrial strength, fighting ability, the quality of leadership, and the moral dimensions of the war.

An essential part of the literature of World War II. --Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

From acclaimed World War II historian Richard Overy comes this startling new history of the controversial Allied bombing war against Germany and German-occupied Europe. In the fullest account yet of the campaign and its consequences, Overy assesses not just the bombing strategies and pattern of operations, but also how the bombed communities coped with the devastation. This book presents a unique history of the bombing offensive from below as well as from above, and engages with moral questions that still resonate today.

Published to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day (May 2020) and Victory in Japan Day (August 2020), this first of two volumes is an outstanding concise history of WWII from the Munich Crisis to the Battle of Kursk.

This first of two volumes begins in the period when the Axis powers reigned supreme. In little more than two years Germany, Italy, and Japan had conquered much of mainland Europe, moved east into the Soviet Union, and pushed the Allies out of the Far East and Pacific. From defeat on the beaches of Dunkirk and the jungles of the Philippines, this compelling history moves forward to victory in the North African desert, the snow-covered Soviet plains, and the Pacific island of Guadalcanal. It ends just as the Allies start to turn the tide against the Third Reich, with the extraordinary dramas of the Battle of the Bulge, D-Day, and the race to Berlin still to come.

Bind-up ofSecond World War Experience: BlitzkriegandSecond World War Experience: Axis Ascendant.

Thought-provoking and illuminating...Overy's study of British culture between the wars is absorbing and unexpectedly moving.
-The New York Times Book Review

Original, entertaining, and ever-surprising, The Twilight Years tells the story of how an abiding fear of war influenced English life in the aftermath of World War I. Britain had become a laboratory for modern thought and experimentations, from eugenics to Freud's unconscious. And drawing upon these innovative ideas and concepts, intellectuals, politicians, scientists, and artists-among them Arnold Toynbee, Aldous Huxley, and H.G. Wells-grappled with a creeping fear that the West was staring down the end of civilization. The Twilight Years speaks to the frightening power of ideas in a rapidly changing world.

If the past century will be remembered for its tragic pairing of civilized achievement and organized destruction, at the heart of darkness may be found Hitler, Stalin, and the systems of domination they forged. Their lethal regimes murdered millions and fought a massive, deadly war. Yet their dictatorships took shape within formal constitutional structures and drew the support of the German and Russian people. In the first major historical work to analyze the two dictatorships together in depth, Richard Overy gives us an absorbing study of Hitler and Stalin, ranging from their private and public selves, their ascents to power and consolidation of absolute rule, to their waging of massive war and creation of far-flung empires of camps and prisons. The Nazi extermination camps and the vast Soviet Gulag represent the two dictatorships in their most inhuman form. Overy shows us the human and historical roots of these evils.

The battle of Britain pitted the Hurricanes and Spitfires of the Royal Air Force against the Messerschmitts of Hitler's Luftwaffe in the skies over England in 1940. It was immortalized in Churchill's words, Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few, but it has since been debunked by revisionists as an inconclusive and even strategically flawed encounter for the British. In this assessment of the battle, Richard Overy restores the historical balance. He delivers shrewd judgments on the critical elements for both sides, from strategy to leadership, command organization, communications, and training to the technology of fighters, bombers, and radar. Overy shows that even if the popular myth overshoots the mark, the significance of the battle remains undiminished in the light of realistic judgments. A necessary battle, it marked the end of Germany's string of victories, forestalled a German invasion, and kept Britain in the war.

bHistories you can trust./b

World War Two was the most devastating conflict in recorded human history. It was both global in extent and total in character. It has understandably left a long and dark shadow across the decades. Yet it is three generations since hostilities formally ended in 1945 and the conflict is now a lived memory for only a few. And this growing distance in time has allowed historians to think differently about how to describe it, how to explain its course, and what subjects to focus on when considering the wartime experience.

For instance, as World War Two recedes ever further into the past, even a question as apparently basic as when it began and ended becomes less certain. Was it 1939, when the war in Europe began? Or the summer of 1941, with the beginning of Hitler's war against the Soviet Union? Or did it become truly global only when the Japanese brought the USA into the war at the end of 1941? And what of the long conflict in East Asia, beginning with the Japanese aggression in China in the early 1930s and only ending with the triumph of the Chinese Communists in 1949?

In The Oxford History of World War Two a team of leading historians re-assesses the conflict for a new generation, exploring the course of the war not just in terms of the Allied response but also from the viewpoint of the Axis aggressor states. Under Richard Overy's expert editorial guidance, the contributions take us from the genesis of war, through the action in the major theatres of conflict by land, sea, and air, to assessments of fighting power and military and technical innovation, the economics of total war, the culture and propaganda of war, and the experience of war (and genocide) for both combatants and civilians, concluding with an account of the transition from World War to Cold War in the late 1940s. Together, they provide a stimulating and thought-provoking new interpretation of one of the most terrible and fascinating episodes in world history.

Formally inaugurated in Potsdam in 1933, the Third Reich was regarded by Hitler as the greatest in a line of might German empires. His mystical belief that this empire would last a thousand years proved unfounded, but not before a world war which resulted in the loss of at least 70 million lives.

This atlas charts the rise and fall of Hitler's Nazi state, from the first mass meeting of the NSDAP in Munich in 1920, through the relentless territorial aggression and anti0Jewish atrocities of World War II, to the execution of war criminals in Nuremburg in 1946.

The Historical Atlas of the Third Reich offers penetrating insights into the seemingly inexorable rise of National Socialism and examines the nature of Hitler's power structures both within his party and within Germany as a whole.

Published to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day (May 2020) and Victory in Japan Day (August 2020), this second of two volumes is an outstanding concise history of WWII from the invasion of Sicily to VJ Day.

This second volume in the landmark series about WWII examines the Allies' long struggle for victory against the once-unbeatable Axis powers. Starting with the Allied invasion of mainland Europe and ending with the explosion of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it takes us through the gripping events that finally resulted in victory and peace. Here are some of the war's most dramatic moments: the use of so-called V-weapons by the Nazis to maximize civilian casualties; the unforgettable story of D-Day and the battle for Normandy; the Battle of the Bulge, which finally broke Axis power in the West; and the indescribably bloody and brutal race to Berlin that finally extinguished the Third Reich.

Bind-up of Second World War Experience: Turning of the Tide and Second World War Experience: The Struggle for Victory

Now in its fifth edition, The Origins of the Second World War explores the reasons why the Second World War broke out in September 1939 and why a European conflict developed into a war that spanned the globe.

This book argues that the global conflict was not just 'Hitler's War' but one that had its roots and origins in the decline of the old empires of Britain and France and the rise of ambitious new powers in Germany, Italy and Japan who wanted large empires of their own. Richard Overy covers the origins of the war from its background in the First World War to its expansion to embrace the Soviet Union, Japan and the United States by the end of 1941. Creating a comprehensive and analytical narrative while remaining a succinct overview of the subject, this book takes a thematic approach to the complex range of events that culminated in global warfare, discussing factors such as economic rivalry, rearmament and domestic politics and emphasizing that any explanation of the outbreak of hostilities must be global in scope. This new edition includes more discussion of the role of empire and the imperial background to the war.

Containing several new primary source documents alongside a glossary, a chronology of key events and a who's who of important figures, this book is an invaluable introduction for any student of this fascinating period in history.

Published in the Bloomsbury Revelations series and featuring a new preface by the author, this classic biography by acclaimed historian Richard Overy takes the reader on a chilling journey into the heart of Hitler's inner circle.

Hermann Goering was Hitler's most loyal supporter, his designated successor and the second most powerful man in the Third Reich. One of the main architects of the Nazi regime, he was also instrumental in the creation of the Gestapo and directly ordered the Final Solution. But who was the man behind the carefully-constructed mask? Self-indulgent and ruthless, sybaritic and brutal, egotistical yet capable of self-effacement, weak-willed yet fiercely calculating, Goering was a contradictory, complex and often bufoonish character. He styled himself as the 'Iron Man' but was known to wear togas, fur coats and faux-medieval hunting outfits. A brilliant World War I fighter pilot, military leader and mercurial Luftwaffe commander, he also loved the opera and took a perverse pride in his ill-gotten, infamous art collection.

Richard Overy illuminates the many facets of Goering's personality and charts his story from his golden days as Hitler's most trusted commander to his failures and loss of power after the Battle of Britain, his sensational trial at Nuremberg and his ignominious death by suicide on the eve of his execution.

This compact, masterful work by an outstanding historian marks a pivotal moment in military history: the birth of Britain's Royal Air Force. Writing with great clarity, Richard Overy shows how the RAF emerged from the deadly stalemate of trench warfare during World War I. With German bombers attacking British cities by 1917, Prime Minister David Lloyd George and his minister of munitions, Winston Churchill, navigated the organizational breakthrough that made the RAF an independent force in spring 1918. The RAF would prove highly influential in the development of air power around the world.

The Inter-War Crisis is a concise yet analytical overview of the rapidly-changing world between 1918 and 1939, covering the political, economic and social instability that resulted from the First World War and the eventual descent towards the fresh upheaval of the Second World War.

Revised throughout and containing a new range of illustrations, this third edition covers topics such as the Russian Revolution, the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the concepts of the 'end of civilization' and the decline of the West, cultural and scientific responses to an age of anxiety and fear, and the ways in which dictatorship came to replace democracy across so much of Europe. Global in focus, it offers thematic discussions, close analysis of a range of case studies and a clear over-arching narrative structure that guides the reader from the close of one war to the beginning of the next.

Also including a selection of over thirty primary source documents, maps, a chronology of events, a glossary of key terms, a Who's Who of important figures and an extensive and updated guide to further reading, this book is an essential introduction for students of the inter-war period.

Now in its fifth edition, The Origins of the Second World War explores the reasons why the Second World War broke out in September 1939 and why a European conflict developed into a war that spanned the globe.

This book argues that the global conflict was not just 'Hitler's War' but one that had its roots and origins in the decline of the old empires of Britain and France and the rise of ambitious new powers in Germany, Italy and Japan who wanted large empires of their own. Richard Overy covers the origins of the war from its background in the First World War to its expansion to embrace the Soviet Union, Japan and the United States by the end of 1941. Creating a comprehensive and analytical narrative while remaining a succinct overview of the subject, this book takes a thematic approach to the complex range of events that culminated in global warfare, discussing factors such as economic rivalry, rearmament and domestic politics and emphasizing that any explanation of the outbreak of hostilities must be global in scope. This new edition includes more discussion of the role of empire and the imperial background to the war.

Containing several new primary source documents alongside a glossary, a chronology of key events and a who's who of important figures, this book is an invaluable introduction for any student of this fascinating period in history.