Armageddon: The Reality Behind the Distortions,: Myths, Lies, Illusions of World War II - Hardcover

Ponting, Clive

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679436022 ISBN 13: 9780679436027

Publisher: Random House, 1995

Synopsis

This fresh, revisionist examination of World War II covers its huge subject by categories, and debunks many of the convenient myths that have grown up about the conflict, using irrefutable statistics and facts garnered from a wide variety of sources. 5 maps.

About this title

About the Author:

Clive Ponting is a professor of politics at the University of Swansea, Wales.

From Booklist:

A British historian and politician promotes controversy with this factually fluent overview of the cause and course of the war. Take, for example, Ponting's critique of the popular impression of firm opposition to German hegemony, when in fact every country in the world, the conquered or yet-to-be, hedged their bets against which way the German cat would jump after its spectacular success in 1940. In each country Ponting surveyed, there was a range of resistant to collaborationist responses to Axis pressures, particularly in traumatized France. As the war engulfed the world in 1941, all the belligerents, recognizing a long struggle ahead, strained to wring the slack from their economies; Ponting offers a welter of numbers to support his view that home-front mobilization and brute productive output decided the outcome. Having expunged ingenuity and heroism from his version of the war, Ponting then dilutes Allied moral superiority with a concluding reminder of the incompleteness of retribution meted out to war criminals. A challenger to commonly held views, Ponting merits attention from the war reader who has, perhaps, grown too comfortable with this or that conclusion about the war. Gilbert Taylor

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0679436022
• ISBN 13: 9780679436027
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 376