Inferno, The World At War, 1939-1945 by Max Hastings

This is the single most comprehensive war chronicle of WWII that I'm reading as part of my study of this epochal event.  It surveys the entire war in all of its theaters, from beginning to end, with an emphasis on the actual battles themselves.

What strikes me is how truly global the war was, vastly larger in scope, complexity and geography than any prior war.  WWI pales in comparison.

What also strikes me as an American is our basic ignorance on the degrees to which each participating country suffered.  Naturally I was raised with an understanding that WWII was fought primarily between the U.S. and the Axis, with a dash of England and France thrown in for good measure.

As I learned from the biography on Hitler, his primary objective was the defeat of Bolshevism/communism and the Soviet Union to free up land for the German people.  His designs lay east of Germany, not west.  Hitler actually believed the U.S. and/or England might side with Germany as a foil to the rise of communism.

But this book laid bare the truth of the USSR's losses.  By most estimates 60 million people died as a result of the war.  Almost 30 million of them were Russian, less than 500,000 were American.

Even more surprising, most of those Russian deaths were civilian, not military.  So much of the war, the largest, most devastating battlefields were on Russian soil, devastating the homeland.

Also mentioned in the book, although not detailed, was that another 15 million (approximate) perished in China, mostly from the Japanese invasion and occupation that started in 1937, fully five years before the U.S. began military operations in the war.

The U.S., of course, did contribute greatly, mostly in arms, weapons, ships, planes and loans to England and Russia.  And the U.S. Navy and Marines did play the biggest role by far in pacifying Japan across the Pacific theater. 

D-day and the liberation of France, taught across America as the defining moment of the war, took place long after Germany had any chance of actually winning.  Russia had already taken the brunt of the losses and played by far the largest military role in the defeat of Hitler.

So with this military history under my belt I can now dive into more biographies of the key players (FDR, Stalin) and richer narratives besides the battles themselves.