The Storm of War, Andrew Roberts History of the 2WW: Six killed every minute - it's the numbers, not the prose, that make this book important.

The prose is fine, but it is not as elegant as Jan Morris', nor as crisp as Paul Johnson's. There is too much use of the dash, and some sentences are simply too long, well over fifty words. One was nearly a hundred. But it's not the prose that makes this book important, it's the numbers.

Every major incident of the narrative is studded with statistics: one fifth of the pilots in the Battle of Britain were not British, `145 Poles, 126 New Zealanders, 97 Canadians' and the list goes on till we get to one Jamaican. 90,000 Germans surrender at Stalingrad, but only 9,626 returned home; at Kursk the Germans `shot 15,000 people, transported 30,000 for slave labour in Germany, destroyed 2,000 buildings...'; then at the battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history, the Germans lost half a million men, `as well as 3,000 tanks, 1,000 guns, 5,000 motor vehicles and 1,400 planes; of 21,000 Japanese defending Iwo Jima only 212 were left when they finally surrendered to the Americans, who had landed 30,000 - and lost 6,891 in the battle. At the end Roberts does some sums for us. The numbers speaks more than a thousand words: over fifty million human beings were killed during the 2WW - six every minute.


This focus on numbers is important as it drills into our minds the horrific carnage of this conflict which towers over all the casualty figures of other wars since then. It is these numbing numbers of the Second World War that surely spurred Washington on to set up her 'soft' hegemony around the world, and makes the Pentagon invest more in military hardware than any of its rivals. It is these numbers then that are the grim backdrop to 'Pax Americana' from which the vast majority have benefited, especially Europeans. In this context all the liberal anti American sniping with its simplistic chants about oil seem out of of place. It is the Second World War that explains the US bases around the world, the saving of the world from war, not mere oil. Certainly mistakes have been made, but Roberts has helped us remember of how grim the world can become when evil men feel free to unleash the dogs of war.