Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931–1945

Monumental, provocative, original, a masterpiece . . . these are words of praise that appear frequently in the reviews of Overy's book. Indeed, this is a masterpiece and probably the most comprehensive single-volume history of World War II. Overy, an alumnus of Caius College, Cambridge, taught at his alma mater and several other prestigious scholarly institutions, including King's College in London. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the British Academy, he spent over forty years working on the history of the twentieth century, particularly on the era of World War II. One of the most distinguished British historians, he authored or co-authored about thirty widely acclaimed books, including such classic titles as The Origins of the Second World War, The Dictators, and The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe, 1940–1945.The book under review, a summary of Overy's life-long research, appeared first as Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War, 1931–1945 in 2021. Writing the history of World War II, Overy applies a global and long-term approach. He shows that all the war fronts were connected and dedicates space to them, proportionately to their importance. He argues that World War I resulted from global conflicts—clashes between colonial empires that tried to divide the world. Yet World War I did not solve the problem of imperial conflicts and aspirations. Some empires disintegrated, but others blossomed after 1918, during a short accommodation period, and prepared themselves for a new quest for territories and wealth. The Great Depression collapsed the world economy, divided markets, stimulated nationalism, and reorganized international blocks. A new period of imperial wars started and morphed into a new global conflict known as World War II. The first part of this conflict, to Overy, the real beginning of World War II, was the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931–32. The Italian aggression in Ethiopia in 1935 and Albania in 1939 followed. Finally, Hitler attacked Poland in 1939. He did not want a global war and believed that France and Great Britain, with their guarantees for Poland, were bluffing (p. 82).“The war against Poland,” writes Overy, “can better be understood as the final stage in a largely uncoordinated movement to found new territorial empires in the 1930s, rather than the conventional view that seeks it as the opening conflict of the Second World War” (p. 67). He continues: “The Second World War was a result of decisions taken in London and Paris, not in Berlin. Hitler would have preferred to consolidate his conquest of Poland and complete the German domination of Central and Eastern Europe without a major war against the two Western empires” (p. 68).After this provocative argument, Overy presents two chronological chapters. The first, “Imperial Fantasies, Imperial Realities, 1940–43,” shows how the three aggressive empires, Germany, Italy, and Japan, imagined a new world order and tried to execute their colonial fantasies. In “The Death of the Nation-Empire, 1942–45,” Overy describes the peak of the aggressors’ success in the summer of 1942 and the following three turning points: the battles of Guadalcanal, El Alamein, and Stalingrad, leading to the Allied landings in Africa and Europe and the final struggle of Japan and Germany.The subsequent chapters are thematic. “Mobilizing a Total War” presents World War II as a “war of mass mobilization” and a “watershed in the evolution of mass mobilization” (p. 378). It encompassed shockingly large segments of the fighting societies, and “the mobilization of women was of primary importance” (p. 420). “Fighting the War” concentrates on the military innovations in World War II—“force multipliers” such as electronic warfare, massive usage of highly developed tanks, airplanes, and landing craft necessary for amphibious operations, radio, radar, and sophisticated “human intelligence.” “War Economies: Economies at War” analyzes the military production of the belligerent states. The chapter shows one of the primary reasons for Germany's defeat: “The German system of war production remained stubbornly decentralized, with different elements of the administration operating in isolation” (p. 542). In 1941, to Albert Speer's deputy, German military production appeared “completely unrationalized” (p. 543). Overy shows the importance of Lend-Lease while “There was very little direct technical or scientific aid between the three Axis powers” (p. 548). Most readers would not know probably that “Throughout the war, the Japanese economy produced just 10 percent of the amount of war goods produced in the United States” (p. 535).In “Just Wars? Unjust Wars?” the author discusses definitions of these terms, their popular understanding, and their usage as justification for the war. The Western Allies claimed they defended democratic freedoms. Many people, also within the anti-Nazi coalition, were skeptical. The war resulted in a visible increase in Black activism in America and hardened white intransigence (p. 619). Colonial liberation movements strengthened, but the winning colonial empires did not plan to change their policies. Also, German antisemitism and the Holocaust did not alter the Allied prewar views on the so-called “Jewish question.” The chapter “Civilian Wars” discusses the issues of resistance and fratricidal conflicts in the occupied countries. “The Emotional Geography of War” deals with the psychological consequences of war violence and the problem of maintaining “morale.” “Crimes and Atrocities” examines the “laws and customs of war,” war crimes, crimes against humanity, gender violence, and “race crimes.”The last chapter, “Empires into Nations: A Different Global Age,” concludes the book. The end of the war brought the liquidation of the Axis empires, but it “was swiftly followed by the final death throes of the older empires that the Axis had sought to supplant” (p. 827). Overy describes the desperate attempts of France, Britain, and Holland to restore their colonial domains and the dramatic failure of this effort. “The colonial ‘wars after the war’ provided a messy and violent coda to the era of new territorial imperialism that began in the 1870s, peaked in the 1940s, and collapsed by the 1960s” (p. 854).Overy's almost thousand-page masterpiece is like an encyclopedia containing an overwhelming number of dates, facts, and names. Unavoidably, one can find some things that could be improved, mainly when the author writes about Poland and Ukraine. Yet there are more significant issues to debate. Some will discover Overy's interpretation of Soviet activities controversial. In many places, the author suggests that the United States and the Soviet Union constituted an anti-imperial group in opposition to the imperialist Axis states, France, Britain, and Holland (pp. 38, 184, 870). “Three out of the four major victors in 1945—the United States, the Soviet Union and China—were opposed to the survival of imperial power and colonial possession” (p. 836). Overy writes that “Stalin deplored colonialism” (p. 870) and that “The denomination of the Soviet Union and the United States as ‘empires’ is evidently not straightforward” (p. 872). He defends this point on the following two pages and concludes: “Did this amount to a Soviet empire? There are clear arguments against the claim” (p. 874). In my opinion, Overy's reasoning is unconvincing and unfortunate, just like the change of the book's subtitle from “The Great Imperial War, 1931–1941” in the 2021 edition to “The Last Imperial War, 1931–1945” in the 2022 version.Also, Overy's coverage of the Holocaust is debatable. It is not presented as one “unit.” Several aspects of the Holocaust appear in various chapters devoted to resistance, war crimes, propaganda, “race crimes,” and ideologies. True, one sub-chapter describes the murder of the European Jews, but it is relatively short and includes disputable statements (“An Empire ‘Cleansed of Jews,’” pp. 217–233). Overy writes about the Romanian and Croatian “autonomous mass killing of Jews” and concludes: “The extension of Jewish persecution was from this perspective pan-European and not straightforwardly German. Hitler's Germany mattered because it provided the opportunity for other states to solve their ‘Jewish question,’ if they chose to, by feeding their Jewish population into the German Moloch” (p. 225).Overy extends the history of World War II to the disintegration of the British, French, and Dutch empires in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Perhaps, he should lengthen this period to 1989–1991, when the largest colonial empire, run from Moscow, collapsed. Now it does the same as the French did in Algeria and Indochina, the British in Africa, and the Dutch in Indonesia. We are witnessing an imperial war now. Most likely, not the last one.

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