Spirit Over Steel

The largest, most complex and most destructive war humanity has yet fought, the Second World War escapes easy description.

Spirit over Steel is more than just a chronology of the war's main events, it also weaves in hundreds of individual threads into the tapestry of the whole conflict and yet never loses sight of the overall picture. A useful reference, it still depicts the squalor and brutality and the courage and grace of the entire global conflict.

John Thompson was born into a Canadian Air Force family in 1959, served in the Canadian Army for 13 years, and was a researcher and commentator with the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies and Mackenzie Institute from 1985 to the present.

He currently still sits on the officer's association of his old regiment and is a member of the Royal Canadian Military Institute.