Not an academic work imo. A fair amount of inaccuracies exists, e.g, the part where the German military doctrine were influenced by B.H.L.Hart has been debunked a while back, but overall actually decent story telling.

This military history is a very informative overview of World War II. My knowledge of World War II has greatly increased after reading this book.

Succinct, easy to understand, and fascinating, but sometimes gets too caught up in details that I glaze over for a few pages at a time.

“If it is part of the sadness of the human condition that [the men and women of the free nations who fought WWII] could not solve the problems of their children’s generation, it is part of the glory of it that they so resolutely faced their own.”

My high school history teacher recommended this book during my senior year; I got it as a Christmas present during my freshman year of college, and I finally got around to reading it as a senior in college.

This was an even-keeled, comprehensive, as close as you can come to an unbiased telling of the events before, during, and immediately following WWII. The writing is sharp, never lacking crucial details of battles, strategies, or statistics, but never getting lost in those details either. It moves at a perfect pace: fast enough to cover the entire war in a reasonable page count, but slow enough to take in and learn about some of the lesser known (at least to me), yet equally important, stages of the war, such as the Norway invasions, the North African and Italian campaigns, and the retaking of the Philippines. A great overview of the defining moment of an entire generation, that points to and leaves room for even more research and stories to be told from the war that I can’t wait to find. If you are at all interested in learning about WWII, whether you know some, nothing, or a lot about it going in, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. This is a hidden gem.

One word, amazing. I loved every part of this book. I don't know why this isn't required reading for high school students. There was way more World history in this book than my entire college World History class.

I am still impressed with the lasting nature of the war on modern international relations. Maybe that's because I am naive, or just plain ignorant. Either way, amazing is still the word I would pick.

Great overview of the causes of the war, the war itself, and the aftermath. Covers various war topics (such as the Resistance, or submarine battles in the Atlantic) in their own chapters while also moving chronologically through the war itself.

Very readable overview. Superb book.

This is a good, concise history of WWII. Stokesbury talks about some of the 'what ifs' of WWII, but not nearly as much as I expected after reading the back. This is a good book to give an overall picture of the war. I listened to the Audio version, but I am looking forward to listening to Stokesbury's WWI book of similar title.

super boring, how you could make something as interesting as this so boring.

A great overview to cover the whole war. I read it in conjunction with "A War to Be Won" (Murray & MIllett, American perspective) and "The Second World War" (Keegan, British perspective) and those two books helped supplement some of the events that couldn't be discussed in detail.

I've always been interested in WWII history but new I'd never be able to get thru a long history book about it. This was pretty manageable and covered all the theatres of war with only a little overlap in terms of timeline. Very informative to learn about alot of battles in a concise way. Only negative was that its very much a military history and there's lots of info about troops moving from her to there and back, so its easiy to get bogged down on that a bit. But for a primer, its a pretty easy read.

Excellent explanation of the causes of the causes and consequences of World War II

The author neatly fits the many unique pieces of WWII, the factors leading up, and the consequences into a compressive picture. The evaluation of events have the reader feel they are sitting together over drinks. There are a couple aviation errors effecting when the book was written.