The end of empires
Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War 1931-1945 by Richard Overy Allen Lane, 1040 pages. £40
In this ambitious new book, Richard Overy seeks to reshape our understanding of the Second World War. It was, he says, a single global conflict that began not, as conventionally narrated, with the German invasion of Poland in 1939, but far earlier, with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Many previous histories of the war have treated the European and Asian theatres of conflict separately. In Total War (1972), Peter Calvocoressi and Guy Wint each looked at one of the two theatres.
Gerhard L Weinberg’s (1994) made a valiant effort to
