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La Segunda Guerra Mundial (2012)

by Antony Beevor(Favorite Author)

4.31 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

849398633X (ISBN13: 9788493986339)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

PASADO Y PRESENTE

review 1: Every major step of the war is covered in detail with its significance to the overall outcome of the war. The author speaks with historical authority and corrects many misconceptions that I had about the war. The book is choke full of facts but the most pleasant part is for every major battle the author finds a diary or a letter from a low level participant and personalizes the engagement through the participants eyes.After having listened to this book, I can't even imagine listening to any other book about the second WW. He covers the material that well at both the big picture and the personnel level.
review 2: Discounting Shirer's 'Rise and Fall of the Third Reich', which I abandoned about 300 pages in, this is the first book I've read that deals with the Sec... moreond World War. There was much here that was new and fascinating. It is by no means comprehensive, nor an easy introduction to a newbie, but it manages to capture some of the complexity of this period in history and the characters who shaped it.As in any attempt to compress into a mere 780 pages a war that lasted six years and swept much of the globe, whose beginnings can be traced at least a quarter century before '39 to the WWI and whose ending carved up the continent of Europe along lines that would stay salient for decades till the end of the cold war, there are many editorial choices, some of which work well, and some others not so well. In the end, I'm willing to work with the author. Use this book as a sort of outline for your reading, and a bit of googling (what does a landing craft look like? how big is an aircraft carrier?), a few maps and a judicious mix of Wikipedia articles, and you'll have a fairly reasonable picture of the 'Good War' by the time you're done.The author chooses a chronological approach to telling the story, and his modus operandi is to plonk you in the middle of the action in one of the many battles that constituted this war, with various armies and their generals and tell you about the choices facing them, the terrain they're working in, who they're fighting, what their motivations are, and then just let the battle unfold. This provides him with some almost cinematic set-pieces, as he switches from the eastern front where soldiers lose limbs and life to the harsh winter, and are later in death covered by a thin sheet of ice as though 'lying in a glass sarcophagus', to the 'rock, scree and sand' of the Middle East, or the monsoons and the water-logged paddy fields of Burma and Indo-China, to the windswept countryside of Norfolk where Bomber command aircrew wait under grey skies in the cold weather to hear whether the clouds will allow the operation planned for the day to go ahead or not. Occasionally the author chooses to zoom out from the field of action as he follows the heads of state and army chiefs as they agonize over strategy, pore over maps, order divisions to retreat or attack, meet and treat with each other, glean intelligence, posture, threaten, preen, strut and decide the course of the battle based on considerations which include genuine concern for the lives of soldiers and civilians, megalomania, personal animosities, the need to prove points to enemies and to gain the trust of allies, among others. In short the author manages to convey the sense of a complex, chaotic system with actors who must make do with imperfect information and limited resources and how the push and pull of these various forces ended up giving us the outcome we got. The prose is direct and engaging. There are enough personal anecdotes to make the story compelling but not too many of them that you risk losing the thread of the larger narrative of war.On the minus side there is a definite shortage of maps. The ones given are generally helpful to understand the action better, except notably in the case of Operation Overlord where the map with a little tweaking could easily have included the Cotentin Penninsula and Cherbourg. These are mentioned as objectives the Americans set for themselves pretty much as soon as they landed in Utah Beach, so in effect the map of the landing beaches fails to be helpful almost as soon as the landings are done.There is a large cast of characters which is in itself daunting for a newbie. The author might switch from the Russian campaign to the Pacific and then back again, and then expect us to follow along with the names of the generals and the commanders he may have introduced the first time around several hundred pages ago, and then only by their names with no helpful personal descriptions (except in one case, where bizarrely, Admiral Spruance is introduced as 'a fitness fanatic', a characteristic that certainly stuck in my head, but unfortunately had no relevance to anything we see the good admiral doing in the book) or even indications of nationality. You are mostly left to deduce nationality from the names. In the end I got myself a Kindle edition whose 'search within this book' feature helped sort out whether this general I'm meeting is someone newly arrived on the scene, or someone I've met before and if so what he'd been upto before. In most cases, you'll have to resort to googling. In some cases, for example that of 'Desert Fox' Rommel the author fails to round off the story fully by telling you what happened to the character, although in the case of Rommel he died during the war itself, a forced suicide after his involvement in a conspiracy against Hitler came out. So you see Rommel playing an active and energetic role in the defence after Normandy, and then returning to Berlin for a holiday post which he suddenly disappears from the narrative completely. In other cases though, we definitely get a very well-rounded picture of the major characters, the ones we keep meeting throughout the book - Stalin, Churchill, Montgomery, Eisenhover, Roosevelt, Zhukov and Rommel among others.The aftermath of the war definitely deserved more than the 2.5 pages it got, but I suppose that's another editorial choice to prevent the book from getting more unwieldly than it already is.A note on editions: the Kindle's search inside feature makes sorting out the characters and events easier, as mentioned above, but the maps are low-resolution and even more useless than in the hard copy. less

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