Stone is at his best when making sweeping generalisations that seem like glib aphorisms until looked at more closely, when they turn out to be insightful and true. "Poland was the martyr of the Second World War, as Great Britain was the hero, and the United States the victor," he writes. "As with many martyrs, Poland invited her fate." The other martyr, the Soviet Union, even more enthusiastically embraced its fate with its suicidally stupid Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed in the early hours of August 24, 1939. "The last train bearing the goods with which Stalin proposed to placate Hitler trundled with a whistle on the railway bridge over the River Bug at Brest-Litovsk at 2am on June 22, 1941," this book notes. "The German attack came at 3am. A German soldier with a Communist background swam the river and warned the Russians what was coming. He was shot." 

As for the other would-be martyr of the conflict: "The French tiptoed from the Maginot Line, and when fired upon, tiptoed back." The initial contribution from the British was hardly more impressive, as Stone notes: "As in 1914, there would be a skirling of pipes at the gangplank in Boulogne, and a few Scottish regiments would arrive with the regimental mascot, a terrier, and a colonel smoking a pipe." It was only after Dunkirk that the British realised how serious the situation had become, before that "it was a very British start-of-a-war muddle".

When the crisis came, however, in the words of General Sir Edward Spears: "The British middle classes were not scared, whereas the French bourgeoisie was gibbering with fright." The demoralisation of Third Republic France didn't start and end with the bourgeoisie, however; Stone describes the rank and file poilus as "dirty, sullen, cigarette-chewing, and smelling of cheap wine (of which the average Frenchman got through three litres a day, though in fairness it should be added that half of them were peasants, and the water was not reliable)". They surrendered in droves, and when General Heinz Guderian's tanks ran out of fuel, they got "gasoline from abandoned French garages, his men milking distressed and abandoned French cows". 

A master of the illustrative fact, Stone tells us that in aircraft production, "the Germans for once suffered from having been first off the mark, had many competing agencies, and even 17 different research laboratories", and that when the first jet fighter was ready at Munich in 1945, it "had to be towed onto the field by oxen, to save fuel". He points out that in the Messerschmitt factory in southern Bavaria, aluminium was used to make ladders for civilian use, whereas it was used in Britain to lighten fighters and give them longer range. This book is studded with surprising and illuminating facts such as these, making it the best short primer on the war written in the last 20 years.

"Hitler was a provincial figure, and had shot far beyond his natural level," Stone writes of the Führer's initial victories during Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia. "Success like this turned his head. A Bismarck or a Churchill could control success of this order, a Hitler could not." He believes that it was the sheer backwardness of Russia, largely due to Communism-Russians didn't eat at pre-revolutionary standards again until 1952-that slowed down the German advance. Whereas "Europe had roads, villages, churches, peasant customs, small provincial towns" through which the victorious Wehrmacht could move, Russia was just "after one white plain, another white plain", as Victor Hugo said of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. There were certainly no abandoned garages at which to refuel.