The anniversary edition of multi-million copy bestselling author Max Hastings’s seminal one-volume history of World War Two, published for the 80th anniversary of the end of the war. This is a study of the greatest and most terrible event in history, which shows its impact upon hundreds of millions of people around the world – soldiers, sailors and airmen; British housewives and Indian peasants; SS killers and the citizens of Leningrad; Japanese suicide pilots and American carrier crews. This is the ‘everyman’s story'.

It is an attempt to answer the question: ‘What was the Second World War like?'