Rating: 
Summary: Balanced, better military angle
Review: This puts the obese and British-biased Penguin History on my shelf to gather dust.
Succinct, fair and filled with more military analysis and less of the pet theories about politicians and world leaders you find in others.
A very good one volume place to start.
Rating:
Summary: The Best One Volume Military History of World War II
Review: Without a doubt, "A War To Be Won" is an impressive achievement from a historian's perspective. It is quite simply the best one volume military history of World War II that I've come across, and one which will be regarded as the benchmark to be measured against by others in the future. Authors Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett offer succinct, insightful analyses of the major land campaigns. Their analysis of naval battles is splendid too, though not covered in as much depth as those on land. I greatly appreciate their assessment of major Allied and Axis military commanders; US General Omar Bradley is shown in a rather unflattering light as a cautious commander who wasted his troops' lives on the battlefield; US General Douglas MacArthur is portrayed accurately as an egotistical prima donna whose leadership qualities were vastly inferior to those shown by Generals Eisenhower and Patton. This book benefits from much recent scholarship from hitherto unknown primary sources in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Those in search of a splendid one volume military history of World War II need look no further.
Rating:
Summary: What does it take to win a war?
Review: `In the course of the twentieth century, no war looms as profoundly transformative or as destructive as World War II. Its global scope and human toll reveal the true face of modern, industrialized warfare.'Thus begins the volume `A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War' by Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett. Murray, a fellow at the Institute for Defense Analysis, and Millett, professor of Military History at Ohio State University, has collaborated to produce a volume that looks at the World War II in almost exclusively military terms, with detailed (if not always precisely accurate) analysis of battlefield plans and progresses, logistical situations and problems, and (to a lesser extent) political and economic considerations behind the military decisions. Murray and Millett are very direct in this focus: `In this book, we have concentrated on the conduct of operations by the military organizations that waged the war. We have not ignored the strategic and political decisions that drove the war, but what interests us most are the issues of military effectiveness.' Perhaps more true than anywhere else, on the battlefield those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, and, in fact, are most likely doomed to failure because the enemy most likely has consulted history. This book looks at the origins of the war (chapter 1 and chapter 7), follows the military progress through the European, African, Atlantic, and Asia-Pacific theatres of warfare, and concludes with two broader chapters, one entitled `Peoples at War', which examines civilian efforts toward the war in areas of industry, labor, civil defence, and basic food-production; and a second entitled `The Aftermath of War', which looks very briefly at issues of resettlement, reparations, war crimes, and the political state of affairs after the war. The opening chapters are very telling regarding preparedness in the face of a potential adversary -- the state of British and French forces at the outset of the war, even in the face of an only-somewhat rearmed Germany made their position difficult, and indeed they were thoroughly routed in short order. However, the fault was not merely technical or logistical, but also involved poor planning and preparation on the part of officials who could or would not grow beyond then-traditional methods of warfare, most having derived from the experience of World War I. Despite its attention to all theatres of war, this remains a very Euro-centric book. The true starting date of World War II in increasingly under debate -- not all scholars subscribe to the September 1939 invasion of Poland as the beginning of the war, but rather the beginning of the European theatre of events. Japanese forces had been at work in Asia prior to this -- indeed, one could say that the first and last shots of World War II were fired in the Manchurian plains. This is a relatively minor point, however, and one that will most likely not occur to most Western readers who are accustomed to the portrayal of World War II in this manner. The chapter on the conclusion of the Asia-Pacific war addresses, but not in detail, the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan; more detail in the proposed invasion planning of Japan would have been helping here -- the recent book `Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire' by Richard Frank does an excellent job at showing the difficulties that faced the Americans and other Allied forces as they contemplated a full-scale invasion of Japan, including the misperceptions of Japanese strength on the island that would have made the battle the most costly in human terms in all of history. This book, however, is a good survey of the military aspects of World War II, and fills in many gaps for those of us who have concentrated primarily on the political issues and only peripherally on the military engagements.
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