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    No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939-1945
    No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939-1945
    No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939-1945
    Audiobook20 hours

    No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939-1945

    Written by Norman Davies

    Narrated by Simon Vance

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    If history really belongs to the victor, what happens when there's more than one side declaring victory? That's the conundrum Norman Davies unravels in his groundbreaking book No Simple Victory. Far from being a revisionist history, No Simple Victory instead offers a clear-eyed reappraisal, untangling and setting right the disparate claims made by America, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union in order to get at the startling truth.

    In detailing the clash of political philosophies that drove the war's savage engine, Davies also examines how factors as diverse as technology, economics, and morale played dynamic roles in shaping battles, along with the unsung yet vital help of Poland, Greece, and the Ukraine (which suffered the highest number of casualties). And while the Allies resorted to bombing enemy civilians to sow terror, the most damning condemnation is saved for the Soviet Union, whose glossed-over war crimes against British soldiers and its own people prove that Communism and Nazism were two sides of the same brutal coin.

    No Simple Victory is an unparalleled work that will fascinate not only history buffs but anyone who is interested in discovering the reality behind what Davies refers to as "the frozen perspective of the winners' history."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 20, 2007
    ISBN9781400174683
    No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939-1945
    Author

    Norman Davies

    Norman Davies is the bestselling author of Europe: A History; The Isles: A History, Rising ’44 and Europe at War. He is also the author of the definitive history of Poland, God’s Playground, and several books on European history. Born in Bolton, Lancashire in 1939, Davies is a graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford and the University of Sussex. He is a Supernumerary Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford and is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and Professor Emeritus of London University. He lives in Oxford and Krakow, Poland.

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    Reviews for No Simple Victory

    4.5/5

    13 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A comprehensive account of the war that cannot be called a military history. As much historiography as history, Norman Davies examines the terms used to recount the events to a greater extent than the events themselves. Giving the majority of his time to events on the Eastern Front as the greater of the fronts, he includes details not normally included by a work of such a scope. A must read for any serious student of the Second World War.
    • 3/5
      Multi-faceted study of the war in Europe with a number of interesting observations. NOT a straight military history. Some facts may be in error but a worthwhile read for those interested in something other than a general history.
    • 4/5
      Norman Davies posits that the standard Western narrative of "how WWII was _won_" demands a closer look. Many, many mistakes were made in the West's approach, unnecessary and unconscionable death and destruction was visited upon many innocents, and the Wests motives were not as pure as standard history books would have one believe.
    • 3/5
      It was a relief to finish this - I might have given it more than 3 stars if it'd been 200 pages shorter. I enjoyed the first 3 chapters, and his perspective about the relative contributions of the parties and their motives made me think. He repeats his main points about the Soviet Union over and over, so I won't forget them any time soon...but I won't be reading any more Norman Davies books for a while. I gave up on his Warsaw Rising book a few years back so should have known this'd be a struggle!
    • 3/5
      Davies’ extensive history of WW2 is divided into five subject areas: military, politics, soldiers, civilians, and media. Each area is explored chronologically, so that we go back and forth, five times, sometimes over the same material.Throughout, several themes predominate: 1. Western powers aggrandize their roles in WW2. To the contrary, the most important battles were in the East, and the 1945 victory in Europe was “above all” Stalin’s. These facts are obscured by “relentless Western publicity pursued to the greater glory of Western interests….”2. Most histories of WW2, looking through Western conceptual lenses, see Hitler’s Germany as the “most” evil. America’s “war-time love affair with the USSR” put Soviet atrocities out of focus, and romanticized the role of “the Russians.”3. The USSR was multinational, not just Russian; Ukrainians and Byelorussians suffered more than any other group;4. Stalin was way more evil than westerners give him “credit” for; and5. Poland got screwed by all parties (including the allies) big time.These points are important and well-taken, but Davies tends to beat them to death in this extremely detailed overview. Some of his observations are nicely crafted. E.g., in describing Britain’s situation after March 1941 when Lend-Lease started, he suggests that Britain became an “island aircraft carrier, to which U.S. military assets could be transferred as the need arose.” Some of his observations are questionable. Hitler was “only human” if, albeit, “obnoxious”?!!! David Irving displayed “the wrong shade of opinion”?!!! Ariel Sharon “alleged” there were Jews who fought with the Allies?!!! Some 150,000 “Jews” fought with the Wehrmacht?!!! (N.B. This number actually represents the number of “mischlinge” or those who were designated as Jews only because of Hitler’s insistence in going back to the fourth generation past for racial purity. Most of these men were born and raised Christians and were ardent German patriots.) Oddly, in spite of Davies’ anti-Soviet, anti-Stalin bias, he doesn’t make a strong statement about Roosevelt’s pandering to Stalin. He does opine that Roosevelt was much more wary of Churchill as an “old imperialist” than of Stalin. Yet later in the narrative he avers (speaking of the Tehran summit) “Roosevelt was inclined to humor Stalin.” Davies’ world of the Gulag, the Katyn Forest, Sobibor and its ilk seems so alien from our current reality that it is hard to come away with useful lessons for the present. Tony Judt, in the New York Review of Books (May 1, 2008) (writing about WW2 historical treatments generally), charges that “teaching the War through vectors of the suffering of particular groups” (as does Davies) only serves to make us feel separate from other groups’ sufferings. Thus we lose a sense of a shared past in favor of au courant atrocities. The underlying message is that these “Historical Horror way stations” are past us, and “we may now advance…into a different and better era.” I’m afraid one of my biggest criticisms of this book is rather fuzzy: that is to say, in my opinion this book lacks “background music.” Davies’ long delineation of particulars is cold and lifeless, even with, and in spite of, the inclusion of many inspiring stories. As Saul Friedlander observes in “Reflections on Nazism,” language can establish emotional distance by “showing that all the chaos and horror is, after all, coherent and explainable.” Thus Davies evokes nothing with his recitation of numbers of war dead – not even understanding, since the numbers are beyond rational understanding. And of the cultures that were lost, there is not a word. I believe one can learn more about the pain and loss of WW2 from listening to the music of Kreisler than by reading Davies’ neutralized analyses.My husband loved this book; but he would much prefer lists of tanks and planes to evocations of life and love. I would have preferred to see Davies advance his theories in a nice long article in The Atlantic or The New Yorker, rather than a 560-page book. I give this book three stars; he would give it five. His review follows....(JAF)This is a far better book than my wife gives it credit for being. It is as much a book of historiography as a work of history. It points out how both popular and scholarly works in both the West and East (Soviet) have skewed their perceptions to promote the political preconceptions of their audiences. Davies emphasizes how Western historians have poorly expressed the comparative magnitudes of the war in the East with the war in the West, in which only about one fifth of the troops were employed and only one tenth of the fatalities occurred. He also shows that both Eastern and Western historians have underestimated the criminality of the Soviet behavior in the war. The Germans were not the only barbarians who fought the war. In his reassessment of the writing about the war, Davies observes that the Holocaust and the plight of the European Jews has had an enormous share of the ink spilled on the period. If this were the only book written about WWII, one would say that Davies greatly underestimated the enormity of the Nazi treatment of the Jews. But that is not his point. He is starting from a position in which there exists an enormous corpus of Holocaust literature, and remarkably little about the plight of the Serbs, the Gypsies, the Ukrainians, Bylorussians, and the entire Polish people. Moreover, little is written about the fate of 10 million Germans, mostly women and children, who were uprooted, many of whom were raped, and 2 million of whom perished during the Red Army's final thrust into the Reich. Davies's choice of organization does cause some repetitive treatment of some events, as he analyzes them sequentially from the respective coigns of vantage of military, politics, soldiers, civilians, and media. Nonetheless, I think that is necessary since he makes some fairly controversial assertions, and he must martial his authority on each contentious point. A sampling of Davies' observations and conclusions indicates how inaccurate was the general account of the war given by western media: 1. The first campaign of the war was a joint invasion of Poland by both Germany and the Soviet Union. 2. Russians composed barely more than 50% of the population of the Soviet Union. The Germans conquered only about 10% of the land mass of the Soviet Union, and most of the occupation covered the USSR's western republics, Ukraine and Byelorussia, not Russia proper. 3. The countries of Western Europe had no intention of giving up the colonial empires they held before the war. 4. The communists "proved to be incompetent at almost everything except espionage, deception and war." 5. The western allies needed a coherent rallying message, but the best they could come up with (and still include the Soviets) was "anti-facism." 6. Roosevelt's entourage was riddled with fellow travelers who proved incapable of grasping the nature of Stalin's regime. 7. The Soviets maintained larger concentration camps with more inmates than the Germans did. 8. The Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939 was as blatant as Germany's invasion of the USSR in 1941. 9. Forcible repatriation to the USSR involved millions who were being sent to their deaths or to long prison terms for the "crime" of not fighting to their deaths against the Germans. 10. The victory of the USA and Britain was at best only partial, leading to 45 years of the cold war, a military standoff with the co-victors and the imposition of a totalitarian tyranny in the Soviet zone of Europe. The book may not thoroughly original, but it is the best comprehensive reevaluation of our perception of the most significant event of the twentieth century that I have encountered. (JAB)
    • 5/5
      This was extremely interesting and certainly casts a "new light" on interpretations of World War 2. The author puts forward the theory that the war was won on the Eastern front and that D-day etc were mere sideshows. He debunks the view of the "good" versus "evil Nazi " empire by suggesting that the Nazis and Soviets were both criminal enterprises led by 2 evil monsters Hitler and Stalin.Furthermore the end of the war brought misery and enslavement for Eastern Europe.He points out that huge injustices were meted out to the Poles in particular and prolonged suffering to many millions over Europe.This book is a masterpiece of Historical research and delivers a mighty punch.