1941: THE WAR BECOMES GLOBAL: THE SECOND WORLD WAR A Seven-Volume History VOLUME THREE

1941: THE WAR BECOMES GLOBAL The Second World War, Volume Three

The world caught fire in 1939. In 1941, the fire became a furnace.

In twelve months, the Second World War is transformed beyond recognition. A compact German general steps off a transport in Tripoli and begins rewriting the rules of desert warfare. Three million men surge across the Soviet frontier in the largest land invasion in human history, and behind them come the killing squads. On a quiet Sunday morning in Hawaii, the last great power on earth is dragged into the flames. By December, the war has consumed Europe, North Africa, the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the vast interior of the Soviet Union. It has become, at last, a world war in every meaning of the phrase.

This third volume in Quentin Drummond Anderson's acclaimed seven-volume narrative history follows 1941 chapter by chapter through its cascade of defining moments. Rommel arrives in Africa with two divisions and reverses six months of British victories in three weeks. The Hood — symbol of British naval supremacy — is destroyed in eight minutes. Barbarossa sends three million men across the Soviet border into one of the most savage campaigns in military history. And at Pearl Harbor, the United States is pulled into a conflict that will reshape the world for generations.

But 1941: The War Becomes Global does not flinch from the darkest material. The Einsatzgruppen — the mobile killing units that followed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union — are not a footnote here. They are part of the story of Barbarossa, inseparable from it. The military history and the history of the Holocaust are not parallel stories in 1941. They are the same story.

Written with the narrative drive of the finest military fiction and the rigour of serious scholarship, this is history lived from the inside — through the soldiers in the snow outside Moscow, the sailors on the Arctic convoys, the aircrews over Pearl Harbor, and the civilians in the cellars of Leningrad.

© 2026 Quentin Anderson (Lydbog): 9780466197056

Udgivelsesdato

Lydbog: 13. juni 2026