The Cambridge History of the Second World War: Fighting the War: Vol 1

The military events of the Second World War have been the subject of historical debate from 1945 to the present. It mattered greatly who won, and fighting was the essential determinant of victory or defeat. In Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of the Second World War a team of twenty-five leading historians offer a comprehensive and authoritative new account of the war's military and strategic history. Part I examines the military cultures and strategic objectives of the eight major powers involved. Part II surveys the course of the war in its key theatres across the world, and assesses why one side or the other prevailed there. Part III considers, in a comparative way, key aspects of military activity, including planning, intelligence, and organisation of troops and matérial, as well as guerrilla fighting and treatment of prisoners of war.

John Ferris is Professor of History and Fellow at The Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary. He received an M.A. (1980) and a Ph.D. (1986) in War Studies from King's College London. He has published four books and one hundred academic articles or chapters in books, on diplomatic, intelligence and military history, as well as contemporary strategy and intelligence. His books have been published in Australia, Canada, France, Japan, Singapore, Turkey, the United States and the United Kingdom: they have been translated into French and Japanese. He comments in national and international media, on Canadian and American foreign and military policy. He has been Cryptologic Historical Scholar in Residence at The National Security Agency and Killam Residential Professor at the University of Calgary, and is Honorary Professor at the Department of International Politics, the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and Adjunct Professor at the Department of War Studies, Royal Military College of Canada. He has just completed a book on the theory of intelligence and is working on a study of Britain, Japan, the United States, intelligence, deception and strategy, and the outbreak of the Pacific War.

Evan Mawdsley is an international historian who has written extensively on the Second World War. Educated at Haverford College, Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, his work for many years dealt with twentieth-century Russian history, where he wrote and taught on the revolution, the civil war, the Stalin period and the nature of the Soviet-era political elite. His Russian Civil War, originally published in 1987, remains in print as a standard work on the subject. In the past fifteen years his research and writing have concentrated on the Second World War. Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941–1945 was published in 2005. After completing that book he moved in two quite different directions, producing a broad-brush treatment of the whole global conflict in the form of World War II: A New History (2009), and zooming in to examine a critical two weeks of the conflict with December 1941: Twelve Days that Began a World War (2011). He is currently writing an overall naval history of the war, as well as preparing a second edition of Thunder in the East. He was Professor of International History at the University of Glasgow and since 2010 has been an Honorary Professorial Research Fellow there.