Bourke J. The Second World War: A People's History

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. — IX, 270 p. — ISBN: 0-19-280224-0.The Second World War surpassed all previous wars in the sheer cost of many millions of lives, most of them civilian. It left a world reeling from physical destruction on a scale never experienced till then, and from the psychological traumas of loss, of imprisonment and genocide, and permanent exile from home. In this short, uncompromising book, Joanna Bourke turns an unblinking eye on the events and outcomes in the vast number of places in which the War was fought: throughout Western and Central Europe, on the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union, in the Pacific, in Africa, in Asia. She shows where the strategic decisions came from and how they were implemented, but she also shows, through diary entries and recorded oral history, how ordinary people felt when they witnessed or heard of events, from the declaration of war on the radio to the mass murders carried out by Nazi soldiers in Russian villages.The Declaration of War in Europe
Occupied Europe
Battle of the Atlantic
War in China, Burma, and India
War in South-East Asia and the Pacific
Italy, the Balkans, and the Desert
The Eastern Front
The Holocaust
Liberating Europe
Hiroshima
Aftermath
The Memory of War