An absorbing and lengthy compendium of the major events of the Second World War (1939-45) focusing not just on the generals and leaders of the worst conflict in human history, but on the almost incomprehensible numbers of victims of concentration camps, mass killings, summary executions, and other human rights crimes of the Axis Powers. Also, atrocities carried out by Allied soldiers do not go unmentioned. The mass execution of nazi ss guards by American troops at the liberation of Dachau is only one horrific event I had not read about before reading Martin Gilbert's masterful book.

There are, of course, parts of the narrative devoted to leaders, especially Winston Churchill, for whom Gilbert was the official biographer, but also the deaths and deprivations of those who fought in the resistance and as partisans are recorded in detail, with special mention to those who fought hundreds of miles behind enemy lines and often never lived to see the end of the war. A terrible history all told, but one worth knowing to avoid ignorance or the romantizing of human conflict.

Relato extremamente detalhado da visão dos Aliados da Guerra, principalmente da guerra travada na Europa. Em alguns pontos, torna-se bastante repetitivo e cansativo, mas acredito não ser possível fazer um relato completo de outra forma.

O que não gostei foram das citações um pouco aleatórias durante o texto. Algo como "...em certo ponto, um soldado disparou uma rajada de balas contra uma família...". Apesar de horrível, acho que não adiciona nada à história da Segunda Guerra de forma macro.

Por fim, muitos erros de grafia e concordância na edição brasileira. Claro que revisar um livro desse tamanho não é tarefa fácil, mas os erros foram em excesso.

Resumo: recomendo para quem tem paciência. Também é possível dividir o livro e ler intercalado com outra coisa.

Um livro de referência para todos os aficionados da segunda guerra mundial. Detalhado, preciso e intuitivo.

"Apesar de a Segunda Guerra Mundial estar já longe no tempo, as suas sombras prolongam-se até aos dias de hoje e os seus pesados ecos não deixaram ainda de fazer-se ouvir. Como poderiam as coisas ser de outro modo perante um episódio que durou cerca de seis anos e no qual se misturaram tão profundamente a coragem e a crueldade, a esperança e o horror, a violência e a dedicação, o massacre e a sobrevivência?"

As others have noted, "complete" is probably not the most accurate word to describe this account of WWII. Rather, it reads like a daily news summary - written by a reporter with the ability to be everywhere in the world at once, access all information that would subsequently become known, and choose what stories of the day would be most relevant to the overall narrative of the war.

The constant drip of Holocaust death totals does get tedious after awhile, but that it in itself (probably by design) brings into focus the size and scope of Nazi atrocities, and I'm willing to accept the reminder.

The enthusiast who wants to know everything about a particular battle or theater of operations should look for another book. However, for the first-time WWII student or the reader seeking a solid overview that doesn't take five years to read, Gilbert's work is perfect. Once I got into it, I really couldn't put it down for long.

A solid overview of the war from start to finish. The author practically went day by day, inserting little vignettes of both horror and heroism. What amazed me at first was the toll of human lives this war took. I was distraught by the thousands of civilian lives lost in London as Britain held out against Germany alone. But as time went on, the casualty numbers and statistics would skyrocket. Where at the beginning of the book I was upset by thousands losing their lives, by the end I was unphased by the loss of hundreds of thousands or millions. The statistics of this war are truly mindnumbing, and only through exploring further personal stories and eyewitness accounts can one recapture the human element, and therefore the empathy that so easily gets lost in statistics.

A side note that this book hasn't really been updated since 1989. While this generally did not cause much of an issue, there was one instance where the author mentioned the Polish politician, Ignacy Jan Paderewski. The author mentioned that he died in the US in 1941, and that he would be buried in the US until Poland was free again. The author then said he was still interred in the US to this day. Turns out, his body was returned to Poland in 1992. My point being that this being written before the fall of the USSR has a limited perspective on some aspects of the war's effects.

I wasn't certain when I took this book on earlier this month that I would have the stamina to finish it. I'm glad I did. Reading a book like this around Christmas time seems a little strange, but if not now, then when?

I enjoyed the book a great deal. The author is correct; this is indeed a complete history. Notice his choice of words here: He called it a complete history. If you go into this thinking this will be a detailed history, you will come away from the back cover feeling extreme disappointment. The author doesn’t go into detail, nor can he. A detailed history would take multiple volumes and be more work than most people would want to put into the reading. But it is very much complete.

The book begins, as you might expect it would, with Hitler's invasion of Poland in September 1939. From there, you follow other battles as they occur chronologically. There are fascinating snippets here in which you get information about the lives of some of the individuals in the book. The author seems to almost obsess with the number of Jews who died during the war. Don't misunderstand. I'm not suggesting he gloss over that. Quite the opposite. But he does seem to place a rather significant amount of attention on the deaths of Jews in various locations, not merely the concentration camps. That doesn't detract from the book for me. But it certainly brought those deaths front and center in a rather vivid way.

This is worth your time if you can find a copy. It has been out a lot of years but considering its format and the fact that it is only able to do an extremely shallow surface scratch of the war, I suspect the scholarship hasn't changed enough to render any of the material outdated.

Setembro de 1939 a Agosto de 1945. Um conflito armado envolvendo cerca de cinquenta nações e que teve como desfecho final, não só uma reorganização no plano geopolítico mundial, como e principalmente uma imensa dor humana que, setenta anos depois, ainda se faz sentir.

Nunca será conhecido com precisão o numero total de vitimas. Têm sido feitos inúmeros cálculos dos mortos da Segunda Guerra e calcula-se que seis milhões de civis chineses tenham sucumbido às mãos dos japoneses. A União Soviética teve catorze milhões de soldados mortos, mais sete milhões de civis, num total de vinte e um milhões de mortos apenas no lado soviético. Os alemães calculam ter perdido cerca de quatro milhões de civis e mais três milhões e quinhentos mil soldados. Os japoneses, dois milhões de civis e um milhão de soldados. Na Polónia ocupada, seis milhões de civis polacos morreram sob a tirania dos nazis (três milhões eram judeus) e os judeus, de todas as nacionalidades europeia, constaram seis milhões de mortos, a grande maioria nos campos de concentração. No total, calcula-se que morreram cerca de sessenta milhões (70.000.000 !!!) de pessoas nos seis anos de guerra.

Foi o conflito mais violento de sempre. Cem milhões de soldados foram mobilizados e muitos perderam a vida ou viram-se seriamente feridos, sem sequer terem entrado em combate.

Este livro narra, passo-a-passo e de uma forma muito minuciosa, a guerra desde o seu inicio até ao seu epilogo e os anos consequentes.

Assente numa pesquisa exaustiva e em milhares de relatos de testemunhas, Martin Gilbert realiza um trabalho exemplar e fascinante, descrevendo todos os lados do conflito e as suas intenções e objectivos, sendo possível perceber-mos quais eram as motivações dos intervenientes.

Porém, não consegue ser totalmente imparcial.

Refere e insiste nas atrocidades cometidas pelos nazis e pelos fanáticos soldados japoneses, não se escusando de relatar episódios horríveis e macabros de puro terror, no entanto, sabe-se que os aliados, sobretudo os russos quando entram na Alemanha em perseguição do exercito alemão. cometeram várias atrocidades contra civis como forma de vingança das atrocidades alemãs, porém Gilbert omite esses factos. Aqui, os aliados surgem sempre como “os bons”, os que tratam bem os prisioneiros e que respeitam sempre o inimigo, enquanto que nazis e japoneses não deixavam ninguém vivo. Sei que parcialmente é verdade, que os japoneses raramente tinham misericórdia dos prisioneiros e que os nazis cometeram, talvez, o maior crime contra a Humanidade. No entanto, do lado aliado também se cometeram muitas barbaridades que nem sequer são aflorados por Gilbert, pese embora haja um ou outro episódio isolado.

Seja como for, é doentio ler tanta atrocidade e tanta violência gratuita, num fanatismo brutal e insano que levou à morte de milhões de seres humanos, muitos deles crianças que nem sabiam para onde iam. Nem há como classificar essa loucura.

“Não há duvida, de que se trata provavelmente do maior e mais horrível crime alguma vez cometido na história da humanidade, sendo praticado, além disso, por meios científicos e homens considerados civilizados, em nome de um Estado eminente e de um dos povos mais destacados da Europa. “
Churchill

“Na alegria entusiástica da vitória, é-nos fácil esquecer os mortos. Os que partiram não gostariam de ser uma mó de luta pendurada nos nossos pescoços. Mas entre os vivos há muitos que ficaram para sempre com a imagem, gravada a fogo nos seus cérebros, de cadáveres arrefecidos, disseminados pelas encostas e valas, ao longo das ravinas de todo o mundo. Homens mortos em massa, país após país, mês após mês e ano após ano. Homens que morreram no Inverno e homens que morreram no Verão. Homens mortos numa promiscuidade tornada tão familiar que chega a ser monótona. Homens mortos numa série tão monstruosamente alongada que quase chegamos a ter-lhes ódio”
Esboço de uma crónica de Ernie Pyle, popular correspondente de guerra, morto pelos japoneses meses antes do fim da guerra.

This book about the complete Second World War is, a worthy addition to the mountains of books that have come before it. I would of given 5*, I really would of done but, there is problem I know the Author is Jewish and he talks about in great detail the holocaust which is fine but he goes on about so frequently it gets annoying, it sounds bad but it is true I’m sorry to say.

n  n    “For those civilians who were fortunate to survive privation, deportation and massacre, similar scars, physical, mental and spiritual, remained—and still remain—to torment them. The greatest unfinished business of the Second World War is human pain.”n  n

I came into this book with absolute ignorance. I only took Canadian history in school, so I didn't know much about WWII and had always assumed it was only toward Jewish people. Martin Gilbert does an excellent job explaining the horrors of one of the most devastating events in history, and how it changed, and ended, the lives of many people.

Gilbert covers nearly everything, from the very first victim of the war, to the effect the war has on people nearly 50 years later. I wish he delved into certain topics a bit more, and some a little less, but it was a very haunting and terrifying view on what hatred can lead to.

Martin Gilbert's book of the Second World War is one of the best books about WWII, an detailed account of the camps of battle, with a vivid descriptions of concentrations camps, maybe is not analitical book, but he describes many facts of the conflict, the murderers of jews in Lithuania or Russian front.

One book well documented and written, definitively an interesting overview of the WWII. I recommend this book.

After reading this colossal account of the biggest, bloodiest conflict in history, you will want to compare every other book on the subject to it and you will fail. Martin Gilbert is one of the only historic authors who have ever been successful in conveying the massive scale of the genocide, industry' politicking, material destruction and general complexity of the second world war to the reader. This book was the only one that ever managed to scare the shit out of me.