The History of World War II: Six Fronts, One

Everyone knows the tank battle at Prokhorovka destroyed the German armoured spearhead at Kursk. Luftwaffe reconnaissance photographs taken over the field afterwards show about five German tanks written off, and about 235 Soviet ones. The Soviets still got what they came for: the attack stopped, and it never restarted.This book covers 1939 to 1945 on six fronts at once - Europe, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and Africa, the Eastern Front, the Pacific, and the China-Burma-India theatre that most single-volume histories quietly drop after 1941. Written by an accountant rather than a historian, it treats the war as a problem of output, tonnage and arithmetic. Where the sources disagree, both figures are given, and the reader is told who said what.Inside, you'll find: - Lend-Lease at $50.1 billion, of which the Soviet share was 22.5 percent - and 427,284 trucks, which is close to a third of every truck in the Red Army by 1945.- The Butt Report of 1941: of the crews that claimed to have bombed a target, one in three had put its bombs within five miles of it.- Bomber Command losing 55,573 of the 125,000 aircrew who served, a 44 percent death rate - worse than a British infantry subaltern's in 1916.- German armaments output rising every month through the heaviest bombing of the war, and 1,110,900 people standing on the guns that were supposed to stop it.- Chinese war dead at 3.9 million and at 19.6 million, from the same historian, counting two different things - and why both numbers are correct.It is for readers who want to know how the thing was actually run: what it cost, who built it, and where every number came from. No military background is needed, and none is assumed.Six fronts, one war, and someone was counting.