War, Peace, and International Relations. An Introduction to Strategic History

Questions

1. Was there a decisive battle in World War II?


2. What were the strategic consequences of Germany’s failure to take Britain out
   of the war in 1940?


3. Why did the Soviet Union survive the German invasion?


4. Why did Nazi Germany perpetrate the Holocaust?

Further reading

J. Black World War Two: A Military History(London: Routledge, 2003).
P. Calvocoressi, Guy Wint and John Pritchard The Penguin History of the Second World War
(London: Penguin, 1999).
I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot (eds) The Oxford Companion to the Second World War(Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995).
D. M. Glantz and J. House When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler(Lawrence,
KS: University Press of Kansas, 1995).
D. J. Goldhagen Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust(London:
Abacus, 1997).
J. Keegan The Second World War(London: Hutchinson, 19 8 9).
B. H. Liddell Hart History of the Second World War(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970).
E. Maudsley Thunder in the East: The Nazi–Soviet War, 1941–1945(London: Hodder Arnold, 2005).
W. Murray and A. R. Millett A War to be Won: Fighting the Second World War(Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
S. C. Tucker The Second World War(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
G. L. Weinberg A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994).

142 War, peace and international relations

Key points

1. The war was a total struggle between societies.


2. The Russo-German War was the core of World War II. Its course decided the
   outcome of the war as a whole.


3. By remaining a belligerent into 1941, Britain ensured that American military
   power, once mobilized, could be projected into continental Europe.


4. The armed forces of Germany and its allies were not large enough to conquer
   the Soviet Union, a problem accentuated by the German lack of operational
   focus.


5. Stalingrad was a devastating blow to German pride and prestige, and did some
   damage to German military strength. But the defeat at Kursk in July 1943 was
   strategically more significant.


6. The Holocaust was strategically irrelevant to the course of the war. However,
   it was central to the values of the Nazi state.