Blood and Ruins

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON MEDAL FOR MILITARY HISTORY
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GILDER LEHRMAN PRIZE FOR MILITARY HISTORY

''A masterpiece. It puts all previous single-volume works of the conflict in the shade'' Saul David, The Times

A bold new approach to the Second World War from one of Britain''s foremost military historians

Richard Overy sets out in Blood and Ruins to recast the way in which we view the Second World War and its origins and aftermath. He argues that this was the ''great imperial war'', a violent end to almost a century of global imperial expansion which reached its peak in the ambitions of Italy, Germany and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s, before descending into the largest and costliest war in human history and the end, after 1945, of all territorial empires.

How war on a huge scale was fought, supplied, paid for, supported by mass mobilization and m