The epic madness of World War II.

• Author: Thomas, Evan
• Position: 'The Second World War' - Book review

Antony Beevor, The Second World War (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2012), 880 pp., $35.00.

War is inherently dramatic, but military histories can be dull. Often written from the generals' viewpoint, many traditional accounts of famous battles and campaigns mire the reader in a blur of unrecognizable geography and confusing unit identifications (the Third Regiment of the Second Division of the Fourth Army, etc.). These tomes are somehow arid and lifeless as well as dull; they make death and suffering abstract.

In his 1976 book The Face of Battle, the great modern military historian John Keegan established a new standard. Keegan, who died recently at seventy-eight, set out to tell what battle is really like from the perspective of the combatants, from the lowliest foot soldier to the field commanders. Among other eye-openers, he documented that armies and navies often permitted--or encouraged--their men to drink a tot or two of alcohol before going into battle to bolster courage or at least numb fear. Keegan's in-the-trenches approach enormously influenced the telling of military history. Drawing from diaries and letters as well as official after-action reports, he showed that it was possible to be scholarly and analytical but also vivid and personal when writing about the conduct of war. Military historians now routinely describe the visceral sensations of combat, once considered unseemly--the terrible sights and smells, the human sensations of men engaged in mortal struggle, and the horrible toll imposed on the women and children caught in the middle.

An interesting question is whether these you-are-there books make war more or less seductive. In 2007, at an Aspen Ideas Festival, I watched with fascination as the novelist and writer Tobias Wolff struggled to explain why war continues to be appealing despite its ugliness, especially to young men uncertain about their manhood. In a memoir, In Pharaoh's Army, Wolff had written about his own decidedly unheroic experience as an army officer in Vietnam in the mid-1960s. Wolff tried to bring out the pettiness, meanness and tedium of his time as a combat soldier, occasionally in danger but more often engaged in morally dubious activities such as trading w sets for war souvenirs. But readers still found romance and bravery in his tale. "What is the weird attraction of war?" Wolff asked the audience in Aspen. He answered his own question: war has an "aesthetic quality," however grotesque, as well as undeniable narrative power. Wolff noted that whole generations of novelists have written antiwar books that overtly seek to tell young men, "Don't do this!" but end up subtly encouraging them to test themselves.

I thought of both Keegan and Wolff--and the lure of war, at once sordid and heroic, dull and pornographic--when I read Antony Beevor's The Second World War. At over eight hundred pages, Beevor's book is a doorstop. It is the third full-length treatment of World War II by a prominent historian in the past year. Max Hastings's Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945 is terrific, sweeping and engaging. So is The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, by Andrew Roberts. Do we really need yet another encyclopedic tour of well-trod battlefields? Beevor once studied under Keegan at Sandhurst, the royal military academy, and he served five peacetime years as an officer in the British Army's Eleventh Hussars. His previous works include compelling World War II battle narratives such as Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943; Berlin: The Downfall 1945; and D-Day: The Battle for Normandy. His avowed motivation for writing this new, vast treatise about such a familiar subject is modest and self-deprecating: "I always felt a bit of a fraud when consulted as a general expert on the Second World War because I was acutely conscious of large gaps in my knowledge, especially of unfamiliar aspects. This book is partly an act of reparation."

Beevor sells himself short. Perhaps he is being coy or practicing proper British understatement. (He is a public-school boy, educated at Winchester and married into a famous British family.) In his acknowledgment, he goes on to grandly but blandly say that his book is an "attempt to understand how the whole complex jigsaw fits together, with the direct and indirect effects of actions and decisions taking place in very different theatres of war." This all sounds very worthy and high concept, like those soporific volumes by military historians of old.

Actually, Beevor plunges us right into the heart of darkness. Taking his lesson from his former teacher Keegan, he makes the war intensely personal, even as it rages across several continents over a span of almost a decade. (Beevor dates the beginning of the...