The Oxford Companion to The Second World War

As its name suggests, The Second World War reached all over the world, and penetrated into every aspect of existence for almost all the people then alive in it. In the remotest parts even of the New World the war brought dislocations galore, of society, trade, methods of work and play; and from the New World fighting men travelled by millions to the Old, where it had begun, to share in the dangers. It was a war that shaped the world of yesterday, and even those born after it ended have had their fates moulded by it. Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Stalin: the names of wartime leaders have assumed mythic proportions, while the memories of Auschwitz and Hiroshima offer haunting reminders of horrors still relevant in our modern age. Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of VE Day, The Oxford Companion to the Second World War is the most wide-ranging and balanced work on the Second World War, the ultimate reference on the subject. Its 1,750 alphabetically-arranged entries vary from brief definitions and one-line signposts to major pieces of description and analysis of several thousand words. They cover every aspect of the Second World War, from strategy, politics, tactics, and weaponry (in 1940 the action at Taranto was won by single-engined biplanes with a top speed of less than 250 kph; by the end of the war supersonic rockets, and jet aircraft with top speeds touching 800 kph were in action), to logistics, political and military leaders, economics, and the effects on society (sex, outside marriage, usually thought shocking in the 1930s, had become commonplace by the 1960s; partly because the war had helped to make it so; partly because the war had stimulated research into birth control). The Second World War often divides the views of historians today as much as it divided combatants at the time (whether BARBAROSSA, the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941, was delayed by the Balkan campaign, for instance, is still a matter of dispute). To refl