1942
When World War II Engulfed the Globe
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A penetrating history of the year World War II became a global conflict and humankind confronted both destruction and deliverance on a planetary scale, “offering an intriguing perspective on a world at war” (Richard Overy, New York Times–bestselling author of Blood and Ruins)
By the end of the Second World War, more than seventy million people across the globe had been killed, most of them civilians. Cities from Warsaw to Tokyo lay in ruins, and fully half of the world’s two billion people had been mobilized, enslaved, or displaced.
In 1942, historian Peter Fritzsche offers a gripping, ground-level portrait of the decisive year when World War II escalated to global catastrophe. With the United States joining the fight following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, all the world’s great powers were at war. The debris of ships sunk by Nazi submarines littered US beaches, Germans marauded in North Africa, and the Japanese swept through the Pacific. Military battles from Singapore to Stalingrad riveted the world. But so, too, did dramas on the war’s home fronts: battles against colonial overlords, assaults on internal “enemies,” massive labor migrations, endless columns of refugees.
With an eye for detail and an eye on the big story, Fritzsche takes us from shipyards on San Francisco Bay to townships in Johannesburg to street corners in Calcutta to reveal the moral and existential drama of a people’s war filled with promise and terror.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This sweeping account from historian Fritzsche (Hitler's First Hundred Days) pinpoints 1942 as the year WWII became "the greatest cataclysm in human history," with the conflict touching the lives of half the globe's two billion inhabitants through displacement, interment, murder, and mobilization. The year opened with massive Japanese and German campaigns in the Pacific and Russia respectively—triumphs that proved ephemeral by year's end, when the Japanese were checked by the Americans at Midway and Guadalcanal, and the Germans by the Russians at Stalingrad. Fritzsche attributes this shift in fortunes to burgeoning Allied superiority in manpower and armaments, but also sees a change in the war's nature, from a coherent narrative of Axis advance and conquest to a shapeless metastasis of violence. Much of the book explores this rising tide of destruction, from the first British firebombing of a German city, Cologne, to the acceleration of the Holocaust as the Nazis established death camps in Poland. Fritzsche interprets this chaos as fitting within a globalized rubric of fanaticism and race war, in which vast, solidaristic national mobilizations entwined with hysterical animus against ethnic outsiders (not just on the Axis side—he cites the internment of Japanese Americans). Fritzsche's rich commentary blends political narratives with discussions of popular culture, from Nazi propaganda to Dr. Seuss's anti-Japanese political cartoons. The result is an elegant and expansive analysis of the cultural life of total war.
