The Second World War: A People’s History

Joanna Bourke0-19-280224-0, 9780192802248

The Second World War surpassed all previous wars in the sheer cost of many millions of lives, most of them civilian. It left a world reeling from physical destruction on a scale never experienced till then, and from the psychological traumas of loss, of imprisonment and genocide, and permanent exile from home. In this short, uncompromising book, Joanna Bourke turns an unblinking eye on the events and outcomes in the vast number of places in which the War was fought: throughout Western and Central Europe, on the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union, in the Pacific, in Africa, in Asia. She shows where the strategic decisions came from and how they were implemented, but she also shows, through diary entries and recorded oral history, how ordinary people felt when they witnessed or heard of events, from the declaration of war on the radio to the mass murders carried out by Nazi soldiers in Russian villages.

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Table of contents :
Front Cover
……Page 1
Copyright Info
……Page 5
TOC
……Page 6
List of Figures
……Page 8
List of Maps
……Page 10
1 – Introduction……Page 12
Total War
……Page 13
Telling War Stories
……Page 16
2 – The Declaration of War in Europe
……Page 19
Origins of the European War……Page 20
Appeasement
……Page 25
America, Japan, and the European War……Page 29
3 – Occupied Europe
……Page 36
Crushing Poland
……Page 37
The Fall of France and Dunkirk
……Page 42
The Battle of Britain
……Page 47
Occupation
……Page 48
Persecution of the Jews
……Page 49
Resistance in Western Europe
……Page 51
4 – Battle of the Atlantic……Page 58
‘Wolf Packs’……Page 59
Effect of the Campaign……Page 63
5 – War in China, Burma, and India
……Page 66
Japan’s Attack on China
……Page 67
Chinese Resistance……Page 69
Burma, India, and Support from the Western Allies……Page 73
Atrocity
……Page 78
Civil War
……Page 82
6 – War in South-East Asia and the Pacific……Page 85
The Japanese Offensive in South-East Asia
……Page 86
Collaboration and Resistance
……Page 93
The Pacific War: ‘Island Hopping’……Page 99
The Effect of the Conflict
……Page 106
7 – Italy, the Balkans, and the Desert
……Page 111
The Italian Saga in Greece
……Page 112
The Invasion of Yugoslavia……Page 115
The Germans Attack Greece
……Page 119
The Western Desert and North Africa
……Page 123
Italian Occupation and Liberation
……Page 126
8 – The Eastern Front
……Page 130
Operation Barbarossa
……Page 131
Soviet Victory
……Page 140
Resistance
……Page 143
Revenge
……Page 145
9 – The Holocaust
……Page 148
One Victim
……Page 149
Nazism
……Page 150
The ‘Final Solution’
……Page 153
The Perpetrators
……Page 162
Knowledge about the Holocaust
……Page 167
Jewish Resistance
……Page 168
Freeing the Camps
……Page 171
10 – Liberating Europe
……Page 173
Bombing Germany
……Page 174
Operation Overlord
……Page 179
The Defeat of Germany
……Page 182
VE Day
……Page 183
The Bombing Campaign in Japan
……Page 186
The Atomic Bomb
……Page 189
Controversy……Page 197
12 – Aftermath
……Page 201
Displacement
……Page 202
Politics and Empires
……Page 207
Myths of Social Solidarity……Page 212
Destroyed Economies
……Page 215
War Crimes Trials
……Page 219
The War’s Legacy
……Page 225
13 – The Memory of War
……Page 227
2 – The Declaration of War in Europe
……Page 238
3 – Occupied Europe
……Page 239
5 – War in China, Burma, and India
……Page 240
6 – War in South-East Asia and the Pacific……Page 241
7 – Italy, the Balkans, and the Desert
……Page 242
8 – The Eastern Front
……Page 243
9 – The Holocaust
……Page 244
11 – Hiroshima
……Page 245
12 – Aftermath
……Page 246
13 – The Memory of War
……Page 247
Chronology
……Page 248
Further Reading
……Page 258
Index
……Page 262