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on the war, at least until the time of publication, might look at J. Zeigler’s World War II: Books in English, 1945-65 (Hoover Institution Bibliographical Series: 45, Stanford, 1971). A smaller work is L. Morton’s Writings on World War II (Washington, 1967). The official histories vary in length, quality, and readability; one cannot get very deeply into World War II without them, but it is more convenient to list the series here than to try to refer to individual volumes. Most complete is the series entitled The United States Army in World War II (Washington) which runs to well over a hundred volumes, with some still appearing, and covers all aspects of the army’s activities during the war. Rather more concise, and the most popularly written of all of them, is S. E. Morison’s History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (Boston, 1947-62, 15 vols.). W. F. Craven and J. L. Cate edited The Army Air Forces in World War II (Chicago, 1948-58, 7 vols.). The British have also put out an extensive series of official histories, in a somewhat convoluted sequence of titles. The most important are the several volumes in the Grand Strategy series, by different authors, and the most useful in a purely military way is probably C. Webster and N. Frankland’s The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany (London, 4 vols., 1961). There are also histories of the different campaigns, and then a second group that are written in a more popular style, and some of these will be referred to below.

In a war as wide-ranging as World War II an atlas is indispensable, and the best is volume II of V. J. Esposito’s West Point Atlas of American Wars (New York, 1958). This will be a useful place to mention general treatments of the war. There are several of these, and among the best are V. J. Esposito’s A Concise History of World War II (New York, 1964); L. L. Snyder’s The War: A Concise History, 1939-45 (New York, 1965); and B. H. Liddell Hart’s History of the Second World War (New York, 1972). The approaches taken in these vary from the strictly factual, as in Esposito, to the highly interpretive, as in Liddell Hart.

THE PREWAR PERIOD. For general surveys of this period there are H. S. Hughes’ Contemporary Europe (Englewood Cliffs, 1961), D. Thomson’s Europe Since Napoleon (New York, 1958), and R. A. C. Parker’s Europe, 1919-1945 (New York, 1969). On naval disarmament, E. B. Potter’s The United States and World Sea Power (Englewood Cliffs, 1955) is useful. Later revisions of this standard work have appeared under the authorship of E. B. Potter and Admiral C. Nimitz entitled Sea Power.

France and its weaknesses in the interwar period have been dealt with at length by a large number of writers. A useful survey is P. Ouston’s France in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1972). Books that deal both with the fall of France in 1940 and as well extensively with the background to that event are Alastair Horne’s To Lose a Battle: France, 1940 (London, 1969), and William L. Shirer’s The Collapse of the Third Republic (New York, 1969). The best-known book on the French Army between the wars is Paul Marie de la Gorce’s The French Army (New York, 1963). Aidan Crawley’s De Gaulle (Indianapolis, 1959) is a readable account of this towering French leader. Many works aside from Shirer and Horne deal specifically with the collapse of 1940, and those will be mentioned later.

On Great Britain between the wars the latest volume in the Oxford History of England, A. J. P. Taylor’s English History 1914-1945, came out in 1965. It is Professor Taylor who takes the line that World War I was good for Great Britain. General studies of the period are A. F. Havinghurst’s Twentieth Century Britain (London, 1962), and C. L. Mowat’s Britain between the Wars, 1918-1940 (London, 1955). This is as good a place as any to mention Winston Churchill’s monumental and indispensable six-volume History of the Second World War (Boston, 1948-53), the first part of the first volume of which deals with the background to the war. Though the work is indeed indispensable, one is constrained