Content area
Full text
A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II. By Gerhard Weinberg. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Maps. Bibliography. Notes. Index. Pp. xix, 1178. $34.95.
This is a monumental book--in size, scope, and achievement. Building upon his two-volume work on National Socialist foreign policy in the 1930s, Weinberg lucidly traces and analyzes (in over nine hundred pages of text) the origins, course, and outcome of the Second World War. Although he argues that it is impossible to find a single unifying theme behind the complex events of 1939-45, by repeatedly demonstrating the interconnectedness of the European and Pacific Wars and their outcomes, he convincingly shows how and why the Second World War, unlike its 1914-18 predecessor, was a truly global conflict.
In Weinberg's account Adolf Hitler remains the architect of the Second World War. He rejects the arguments of revisionists of all stripes, including those who have suggested that Hitler did not really want war with England. Europe did not stumble into war in 1939 but was forced into it by Hitler. Meanwhile, the Japanese government had embarked on a policy of forceful expansion in the far east. What linked the...