No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939-1945

Impossible to compare this book with others. The first 55 pages were enough to say this. I believe others (some British) cannot deal with the truths previously unpublished. Such "raw" truths and newly revealed Allied failings, intended and otherwise. REMARKABLE BOOK!

A ground breaking piece of work. If you have not digested this piece of historical research, you have probably never truely understood nor put in perspective the event labelled "World War II." Plus it is an excellent read. Five stars, no question.

Norman Davies aims for two large goals in this powerful book that reframes the Second World War in Europe. The first goal is to "re-center" (my words, not his) the war in Europe. Americans, for instance, usually view the Normandy landings as the war's crescendo, with the invasion leading to victory and liberation. Davies re-centers that view in two ways. He re-centers the war geographically, demonstrating that its center of gravity was on the Eastern Front. He also re-centers it in time, moving the critical hours forward in time to 1942 and 1943. In his account, the battle of Kursk marks the tipping point. This first goal, re-centering, is largely argued in the second and third sections of the book, "Warfare" and "Politics." The second goal is to force readers to look beyond the national narratives they have absorbed and see the war as a whole. This is the challenge -- indeed the moral imperative -- for the next generation of historians, he says. He makes the case for this second goal in the sections on "Soldiers," "Civilians," and "Portrayals." He takes on many "untenable myths and legends." He urges readers to face the fact that the war was mainly a struggle between two murderous dictatorships. Subsections of these three chapters are uneven. Some are well fleshed out with themes, historical and moral propositions, and the outline of a narrative. Other sections are little more than a string of suggestive anecdotes. The lapses and gaps disappoint, but they suggest how much more there is to think through even though the war is now more than 60 years in the past. Davies usefully suggests looking at the campaigns of the war using our present-day maps, especially to disaggregate the wartime Soviet Union and see the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, the Baltic republics, and other areas separately. He is impatient with the usual characterization that it was "the Russians" fighting on the Eastern Front. His focus on Poland -- his own specialty -- is intended to demonstrate the need for a new look. In covering a subject so vast, every reader will find errors of fact. Sometimes Davies' chronological rendering seems forced to make a point. On the other hand, he is the master of the anecdote that tells a larger story, and there are many lively turns of phrase. Davies' recentered history bruises much conventional wisdom, inherited narrative, popular history, and national feeling. Different readers will feel different bruises. The sections on "Victims" (pp. 423-424), "Bystanders" (pp. 371-372), and "Collaborators" (pp. 377-379) provide examples. His treatment of the Holocaust in earlier books sparked a sharp scholarly debate, and comments about David Irving's scholarship in this book are likely to cause more. Similary, American readers may find his criticism of the strategic bombing campaign discomforting. Those whose grandparents fought in the Battle of Britain, the Battle of the Atlantic, or the North Africa campaign may take offense w

Perhaps there is no reason to refer in this brief comment to a review of another person (one star). After all, there is nothing wrong with an occasional disappointed reader. I guess it forces us to reexamine our own views and positions. However, one would expect certain fairness towards the author (any author, not just Davies as in this case). It would take too much space to try to correct one reviewer's corrections (or "corrections"), but a few points should be made. One of the reasons for Norman Davies' book is to bring to our attention things that have been misrepresented, unknown, omitted, etc in our learning about World War. Whether it was a history class, a Hollywood production, or a television show, we have been getting somewhat biased and incomplete picture of the war in Europe and on the Eastern front in particular. It is interesting that the author of that one review tries to `correct' certain points back to the unknown and stereotypical view of the war in Europe. The role of the Bolsheviks expansionism in the early 1920s is minimized and the Soviet devastating policies in the Ukraine are denied. What is strong and valuable about Norman Davies' book is that he doesn't try to balance evils of Stalin's policies by the enormous sacrifice of the Red Army in gaining victory (or vice versa). The point is to understand the complexity of the situation. Yes, the Soviet war effort and casualties were incomparable with anything else (except the Germans, of course), but also that there is no reason to deny that a large part of the casualties were self-inflicted by idiotic policies and by political terror. And yes, there was a famine in Ukraine, the Soviet part of Ukraine, and it was caused by the Soviet policies. Whether one wants to use "man-made" or replace it with some euphemisms, the result is the same. Although nothing compares to Stalin's and Nazis' crimes, Davies talks also about the record of the western allies that is not necessarily spotless. One example is the case of maltreatment of German prisoners in the U.S. military ran camp near Dusseldorf in 1945. The complaints from that one reviewer about supposed errors in Norman Davies' numbers (casualties etc) are missing the point about the difficulty in getting the right numbers. For example, Davies writes that even the most accurate sources can differ in estimating Soviet casualties by as much as 1,000,000 (if I remember correctly). He illustrates these difficulties by another case: "At the Battle of Monte Cassino in May 1944 1,150 men of General Ander's II Corps were killed. They were Poles... By international law they were citizens of Poland. Yet, since eastern Poland had been annexed to the USSR in 1939, by Soviet law... they were citizens of the USSR. And at the same time of their deaths, they were members of the British Eighth Army..." Were they Poles, Soviets, or British? I repeat, Norman Davies is not beyond critique and perhaps there are even some minor error

Towards the end of his book, Norman Davies quotes Chou En-lai's response in the 1950s to a question about the effects of the French Revolution. "It's too early to say." This, in a nutshell, is the central thesis of No Simple Victory. World War II is simply too recent for historians to properly evaluate without being influenced by politics, patriotism, and propaganda. As an example, Davies points out that American scholarship generally focuses on the years 1941-1945 (witness Ken Burns "The War"), ignoring the fact that the conflict had already been raging in Europe and Asia well before that. More a historiography than a history, No Simple Victory lays out the key problems in WWII scholarship and provides a broad outline of what future historians should be looking at when enough time has passed that all of the issues can be considered more objectively than is currently possible. Davies is not so much concerned with laying out all the exact details of any particular episode or aspect of the war as he is with identifying the areas of research that are crying out for a larger amount of attention. In this respect, reviewers who quibble with some of the details are missing the entire point of the book. Whole books have been written about episodes that take up just one sentence in this book. The goal of this book is to pose the questions, not necessarily to answer them. Davies wrote this book as an extension of an article entitled "Ten Forms of Selectivity" in which he identified the following sources of the shortcomings in the current scholarship on WWII : political propaganda, personal prejudices, parochial perspectives, stereotypes, statistics, special interest groups, the procedures of professional historians, Victors' History, History of the Defeated, and moral selectivity. For example, the biases of Western historians have led them to focus on the Battle of Britain and on the Normandy campaign, ignoring the Eastern Front, which consumed a much greater share of the Germans' resources and manpower throughout the conflict. Similarly, the crimes of the defeated powers are (rightly) decried, but the crimes of the victors are swept under the rug, in an effort to depict the war as a "Good vs. Evil" fairy tale. An alternative framework is offered by Davies, suggesting that the focus of scholarship should be heavily weighted towards the Eastern Front, which he depicts as a conflict between two gangster regimes, neither of which should be granted a moral high ground. Too little is known in the English-speaking world of some of the largest battles the world has ever seen including Kursk, Bagration, and Stalingrad. Too little is known of the GULag and the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. Too little is known of the partisans of occupied Europe, who often were rewarded with a trip to the GULag for their efforts in fighting the Nazis. Too little is known of the post-war expulsions of millions of ethnic Germans from eastern Europe, sacrificed to Stalin's d

"Europe at War" aims to be a revisionist history of the Second World War in Europe. Davies argues that most Western historians tend to overly focus on battles like El Alamein and the D-Day landings while almost ignoring the much larger battles on the Eastern front, which Davies argues was the truly decisive front for the European war. Similarly, there tends to be an appropriate emphasis on the many crimes of the Nazis, but there is no similar assessment of allied crimes, especially by the Soviets. Davies asks why historians disregard the Soviet Gulag system when talking about "concentration camps" or why the invasion of Poland in 1939 by Germany and the USSR is so often described as simply "the German invasion". Davies aims to provide a broad and balanced view of the war, stepping beyond a simple narrative history of the battles. The book is organized under five main themes, focusing in turn on: * the military campaigns * the politics, before, during and after the war * the experiences of the soldiers * the experiences of civilians * the media portrayals of the war Davies emphasizes that WWII wasn't a simple fight between Good and Evil. There were three players: the Western democracies, the Axis powers, and the Soviets. Davies characterizes both the Nazis and the Soviets as "gangster" powers and Hitler and Stalin as dueling monsters. In an accident of history, the Western democracies became the allies of Stalin, but Davies argues forcefully that this does not mean we should overlook his crimes. Davies emphasizes the horrific scale of Stalin's repressions before WWII. In 1939 the Soviet Census Bureau rather unwisely published an article saying that 17 million people were unaccounted for and then, Davies reports, in a regrettably predictable response "the census takers themselves were shot". There was no relaxation either during or after the war. The NKVD operated more and larger concentration camps ("the Gulag") than the Nazis. The Nazis and the Soviets oppressed both occupied countries and their own citizens in surprisingly similar ways. (The invading Soviets quickly reused liberated German concentration camps for their own victims.) Davies argues that if you were an unfortunate Pole caught in the middle, there wasn't much to chose between them. Davie argues that we need to step back from an overly Western focus and apply even-handed reporting and analysis across the whole of WWII. Battles and campaigns should be covered in proportion to their true overall scale and impact. War crimes and crimes against humanity should also be assessed evenly across all participants, not just the Axis powers. "Europe at War" is a good step in following those rules. Davies clearly aims to be provocative, but he makes his case well and in doing so he also presents a very vivid multi-dimensional view of WWII in Europe.