The Storm of War

Andrew Roberts's central argument is that Nazi Germany's defeat wasn't primarily a matter of Allied industrial superiority or numerical advantage arriving late in the war, though those factors mattered. It was that the ideological core of Hitler's regime, its racial obsessions, its contempt for supposedly inferior peoples, and its refusal to treat war as a rational, resource-constrained enterprise, produced catastrophic strategic choices no sound general would have made. The invasion of the Soviet Union, the treatment of conquered populations, and the declaration of war on the United States all flowed from ideology rather than strategic calculation, and each one sealed the regime's fate well before Allied strength alone would have.

This matters because it complicates the tidy narrative of the war as simply the bigger side eventually winning. Roberts insists the eventual Allied victory required a considerable amount of German self-sabotage, and that understanding fascism's defeat means understanding how its own defining beliefs made it structurally incapable of winning a long war it might otherwise have contested far more effectively.

Who should read it

Readers wanting a single-volume narrative history of the Second World War's major campaigns, and anyone interested in how ideology can override even a militarily formidable state's own strategic self-interest. It suits general readers as well as those looking for a readable synthesis before diving into more specialized military histories.

About the author

Andrew Roberts is a British historian and biographer known for works on Napoleon, Churchill, and the Second World War, and a frequent commentator on military and political history.