More or less what it says on the tin. It felt like quite a long book - around 40 hours of audio - but at the same time, more or less every section didn't feel long enough: I wanted to know more.

AB has several other WW2 books out, and I guess that several of the chapters in this book are more or less distilled from whole books (e.g. on Berlin, Stalingrad, the Ardennes, D-Day and Crete). So I aim to read those as well.

It felt a bit like listening to an extended version of "The World at War" - the narrator had a similar grim-sounding voice. Most of my notes are of the "I never knew that" variety:

• the thing on the Stuka dive bomber that made a noise was the "Jericho Trumpet", deliberately designed to terrify people on the ground. But in fact, Stuka's weren't that fantastically brilliant as aircraft
• When Russians came into Poland they rounded up intellectuals and put them in prison camps, then when those people wrote letters home, they used the addresses on the envelopes to find where the families lived, and rounded them up too
• the chapter about German attack on Crete was really gripping. Especially as I didn’t know how it ended and wasn’t sure who was going to win. At the end, the book says that the Germans decided after the battle that using paratroopers was too risky a strategy to use again, but the British decided that using paratroopers would be a good idea. I definitely want to read his Crete book.
• Two things in the Italy battle: an allied ship with a secret cargo of mustard has to be used in case the Germans started using chemical weapons was bombed in the harbour and loads of people got poisoned but the doctors weren’t told what the cause was

  And the Germans, when retreating, deliberately flooded an area that had previously been reclaimed and introduced mosquitos which caused 50,000 cases of malaria over the following year. This was the Pontine Marshes

• Churchill doesn't come over as being that great. Americans frustrated with him for having what they seem to see as mercurial hare-brained schemes to do things which aren't strategically sensible. Also he sucks up to Stalin (maybe look up the bit where he has a meeting with Stalin, with only interpreters present) where he shows his Naughty Document that proposes dividing countries up post-war between soviet and allied control
• in the section on Ardennes he talks about a US unit which was bombed by US airforce 13 times. Contributed to Germal saying "if it's the British, we duck; if it's the Americans, everybody ducks. If it's the Luftwaffe, nobody ducks"
• he frequently calls out the misguidedness of Arthur Harris "The Luftwaffe had killed many more, including an estimated half a million civilians in the Soviet Union alone, but that is still no excuse for Harris's utterly wrong-headed conviction that Bomber Command could win the war on its own simply by smashing cities"
• "the planning which went into Operation Neptune - the Channel-crossing stage of Overlord - was extraordinary in its detail. On receiving their orders, which ran to several hundred pages, the 3rd Canadian Division dubbed it 'Operation Overboard'
• as Tony mentioned, Stalin was quite callous about the Poles "Stalin clearly wantewd the rising to fail. The more potential Polish leaders the Germans killed, the better it was for him"
• "The US air force bombed Iwo Jima from the Marianas for seventy-six days. Then, at dawn on 16 February, the Japanese saw from their bunkers and caves that the invasion fleet had arrived during the night. The naval task force of eight battle ships, twelve escort carriers, nineteen cruisers and forty-four destroyers anchored offshore began to bombard the island, map square by map square [...] but when the amphibious assault began on 19 February, most of Kuribayashi's artillery was still untouched."
• "At the end of the war, their Japanese captors had kept the Indiant alive so that they could butcher them to eat one at a time. Even the inhumanity of the Nazi's Hunger Plan in the east never descended to such levels. Because the subkect was so upsetting to families of soldiers who had died in the Pacific War, the Allies suppressed all information on the subject, and cannibalism never featured as a crime at the Tokyo War Crimes tribunal in 1946."
• "The 334 Superfortresses carpet-bombed Tokyo, sparing neither residential nor industrial zones. More than a quarter of a million buildings went up in flames spread by strong winds. Houses made of wood and paper caught fire in seconds. Altogether 83,000 people died and another 41,000 were severely injured, a far greater toll than when the second atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki five months later."

Since finishing the book, I re-watched "Band of Brothers" which had a lot of placenames that were familiar after reading this book. I've got "The World at War" lined up next.

Completed : 18-Mar-2019 (audiobook)