Stone rightly puts the Eastern Front centre-stage in this book, pointing out that battles like that around Gomel in September 1941 are almost unknown in the West, yet he considers it "the greatest single German victory" of the war, in which Russia lost half a million men. He adds that the over a million Russians who died in the siege of Leningrad were more than Britain and the United States lost combined.

This book is full of excellent summations of character—Bernard Montgomery is described as "peppery, vain, and a man for endless detail"—and the sixth day of the Battle of El Alamein is described as "now hellish—a heat haze, in which flies gathered in huge black clouds over corpses, the wounded, the excrement, with shattered guns and burning trucks or tanks". The personal, human side of the conflict is never lost. Nor is humour ever far away: we are told of Operation Torch, the huge Anglo-American attack on Vichy France's North African possessions, that torcher in French means "to wipe a bottom".  

Not everyone will agree with all the conclusions—the author believes that the war could have ended a year earlier if the cross-Channel attack had been mounted in 1943 rather than 1944, for example, and that German cities should not have been carpet-bombed—but none will doubt that Norman Stone has proved yet again that he is one of the most original, witty and powerful British historians writing today. His father would have been proud, and his father's comrades certainly got their money's worth.