The Second World War: A Complete History

Martin Gilbert's The Second World War: A Complete History is a major work by one of the most prolific and respected historians of twentieth century Britain and the war era, drawing on extensive archival research and Gilbert's own long career documenting the period, including his work as Churchill's official biographer. Its authority rests on that documentary depth and Gilbert's established standing among historians of the war. As a single-volume complete history covering the entire global conflict, it necessarily moves at a synthesizing pace through events that specialist monographs on any single campaign or theater treat in far greater depth, and readers wanting fine-grained analysis of one specific episode are pointed by the breadth of Gilbert's own citations toward that more focused literature.