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Several reviewers here have suggested that Baker should stick to fiction. Unfortunately, he has. The number of misrepresentations and omissions render this work bankrupt of serious scholarship. What is so disheartening is to read how many positive reviewers on this site have had their world view changed by Baker's presentation of the "facts." Baker cites remarks by Churchill in March, 1940, on mining Norway's waters as provoking a German invasion. "There had been no plans in Berlin for an invasion of Norway; now there were." He describes how a month later Germany indeed did invade. First, it's laughable to think that the Germans put together an invasion plan in less than a month, and a cursory glance at the real history reveals otherwise. In October, 1939, Admiral Raeder had already broached the subject of a Norway invasion to Hitler, and by December, Hitler had activated the plan, known as Operation Weserubung, finalized in January and February of 1940. A little later, Baker writes that "On the night of April 22, the British bombed occupied Oslo, something the Germans had not done". Maybe because the Germans had already bombed Nybergsund, Namsos, Bodø, Elverum, Åndalsnes, Molde, Kristiansund, and Steinkjer, and had also threatened to level Copenhagen unless Denmark capitulated, a tactic they repeated with Rotterdam. As for Baker's contention that it was the British who bombed major cities first, Germany had already bombed Rotterdam, Warsaw, and Belgrade before the British bombed Mannheim. In fact, Baker's entire treatment of the Allied bombing campaign is puerile and shallow. Bombing for Churchill, he writes, was a "form of pedagogy". It was also Churchill's only offensive weapon at the time and a tempting choice after his country lost a million soldiers less than a generation before in World War 1. That is not to justify it. The slide from "precision" bombing to area bombing in World War II is one of the most troubling moral questions arising from the conflict and a subject worthy of serious investigation (see Hastings, "Bomber Command" and Crane, "Bombs, Cities, Civilians"), but this book does not offer it. Instead, Baker's intent is to characterize Churchill as bloodthirsty, fretting in 1940 that if Hitler went East, in Baker's words, "England would have no war to fight" Please see an expanded consideration of this in my comment to James Luckard's "Gorgeously written" review above). Churchill's true meaning was revealed a year later when he wrote Stalin that England would use air power to draw the Luftwaffe back off the Eastern front. German armies were less than 200 miles from Leningrad, and a German general would write: "Fuhrer is firmly determined to level Moscow and Leningrad to the ground, and to dispose fully of their populations, which otherwise we shall have to feed during the winter." At this point, Britain had still dropped half the bomb tonnage that Germany had on population centers. The balance would shift in 1942, prompting Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels to write, "Our cities have now to stand in 1943 what Britain had to stand in 1940." Baker's treatment of the Pacific is no less misleading. He cites the US sending aviation fuel to Vladivostok while bypassing Japan, writing "The Japanese Navy ignored the provocation." Or this: "my conviction deepened that Japan would not fight unless she was compelled to by the cutting off of her oil supply." Or this: quoting Japan's Gandhi, Kagawa, "there wasn't nearly as much talk about war amongst the people of Japan as he had encountered in the US." Readers might be shocked by these snippets, unless they knew that Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, China in 1937, Indochina in 1940, and would soon invade Malaya, Singapore, Borneo, the Dutch East Indies, and Korea, as part of its new Japanese Empire. And readers never learn of Japan's starvation and torture of prisoners, its enslavement and wholesale slaughter of other Asians, nor of its active biological weapons program in Manchuria. Which renders absurd Baker's outrage over the US sending arms and advisers to China to help them fight back. Considering Baker's attempt to make Churchill and FDR warmongers on a par with Hitler, his treatment of Nanking is also quite telling. He skims over it quickly (it's not even in the index), implying it happened only after the Chinese refused to accede to Japanese demands, writing passively, "rape and massacre followed." No, the Japanese COMMITTED rape and massacre resulting in between 50,000 and 150,000 deaths. And they would repeat this barbarism across Asia, resulting in civilian deaths numbering in the tens of millions--orders of magnitude more deaths than Allied troops were responsible for. The League of Nations had condemned Japan's civilian bombings, along with that of the Germans in Spain, as "contrary to principles of law and humanity." Baker sympathizes with the Jews' fate, and while not a Holocaust denier per se, his brand of revisionsm amounts to "Denial Lite." That is, Hitler may have massacred the Jews, but he never would have done it had not Churchill and FDR made him. Baker's endless talk of ships to Madagascar or trains to Siberia for relocating Jews as plausible alternatives to extermination if ONLY Churchill hadn't kept up his warmaking, is simply nauseating. Jews deported from Berlin? Churchill's fault, because Aryans made homeless by Allied bombing needed housing--a fact which Baker repeats no less than four times in case we missed it. Final Solution? What else could Hitler do if the West wouldn't take the Jews off his hands? In Baker's mind, every move by Germany or Japan was not the result of calculated militarism, but of Allied refusal to accept the invaders' demands. Baker posits the question in his afterword of whether the war helped anyone. Let's see: France capitulated to the Nazis and sent 90,000 innocent Jews to their deaths. Churchill's England fought back and sent none. Answer your question? That the New York Times would feature this book positively on the front page of its Book Review is stark testament to the state of historical knowledge in this day and age. Baker's attempt to refashion history in so irresponsible a manner should be cause for alarm for any thinking person.