The Historical Atlas of World War II (Henry Holt Reference Book)

Other than a mark on the upper text block, this is a clean, tight, and unmarked First Edition, First Printing. " The Second World War was the largest event in human history. During its course, an estimated fifty million people perished, and even today the scale of the mobilization it generated--involving human, financial, and industrial resources--is almost unimaginable. Millions across the globe fled war zones to be replaced by soldiers of all creeds and backgrounds. The recent opening of archives in Washington, London, and Moscow has thrown new light on certain events of the war--revealing, for example, just how close the Allies came to defeat in 1942 when the Axis armies were in ascendancy everywhere. Equally amazing was the growth of economic activity. The U.S. economy grew by 50 percent in five years, producing millions of weapons: an aircraft carrier every two weeks, a tank every forty minutes, a rifle every twenty-four seconds. Between September 1939 and September 1945, the world changed completely and forever. The technological revolution, which affected the progression from 200 mph aircraft used to defend Warsaw to the nuclear bomber sent to obliterate Hiroshima, was matched by the political upheaval. Ancient empires collapsed and were replaced by superpowers dominating the world for over forty years. The legacy of the Second World is still with us today. The Historical Atlas of World War II chronicles both the major and minor campaigns of the war in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific. It also provides the political, economic, and social background needed to fully understand the war. Consisting of more than one hundred specially commissioned full-color maps providing even greater detail, more than one hundred captioned color and black-and-white photographs, and an authoritative text by two leading military historians, this atlas is destined to become the definitive historical reference of the twentieth-century's most tumultuous event.-John Pimlott is Senior Lecturer in the Department of War Studies at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, England.- Alan Bullock served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford between 1969 and 1973 and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1967. "