1942: When World War II Engulfed the Globe

This sweeping account from historian Fritzsche (Hitler’s First Hundred Days) pinpoints 1942 as the year WWII became “the greatest cataclysm in human history,” with the conflict touching the lives of half the globe’s two billion inhabitants through displacement, interment, murder, and mobilization. The year opened with massive Japanese and German campaigns in the Pacific and Russia respectively—triumphs that proved ephemeral by year’s end, when the Japanese were checked by the Americans at Midway and Guadalcanal, and the Germans by the Russians at Stalingrad. Fritzsche attributes this shift in fortunes to burgeoning Allied superiority in manpower and armaments, but also sees a change in the war’s nature, from a coherent narrative of Axis advance and conquest to a shapeless metastasis of violence. Much of the book explores this rising tide of destruction, from the first British firebombing of a German city, Cologne, to the acceleration of the Holocaust as the Nazis established death camps in Poland. Fritzsche interprets this chaos as fitting within a globalized rubric of fanaticism and race war, in which vast, solidaristic national mobilizations entwined with hysterical animus against ethnic outsiders (not just on the Axis side—he cites the internment of Japanese Americans). Fritzsche’s rich commentary blends political narratives with discussions of popular culture, from Nazi propaganda to Dr. Seuss’s anti-Japanese political cartoons. The result is an elegant and expansive analysis of the cultural life of total war. (Sept.)