1939: THE WORLD CATCHES FIRE

1939: The World Catches Fire The Second World War: A Seven-Volume Series, Volume One Quentin Drummond Anderson

The last summer ended on a September morning. By nightfall, the world had changed beyond retrieval.

In the opening volume of his landmark seven-volume narrative history of the Second World War, Quentin Drummond Anderson — author of War Beneath the Waves, The Fearless Fifteen, and Warriors of the First Nations — brings the year that started everything to devastating life. From the final, luminous weeks of an uneasy European peace to the closing days of a winter in which Finland was holding back the Red Army against all probability, 1939: The World Catches Fire tells the full story of how the world stumbled into the most destructive conflict in human history.

Poland is destroyed in thirty-five days. The Atlantic opens as a killing ground. A pocket battleship hunts the South Atlantic and meets its end with a grace that the war it belongs to does not deserve. A garrison of 182 men holds a peninsula for seven days against everything Germany can throw at them. Codebreakers take their posts in a Victorian mansion in Buckinghamshire. Refugees run for borders that are closing faster than they can reach them. And in the chancelleries and the war rooms and the ordinary streets of a dozen nations, men and women try to understand what has happened to the world they were living in last summer.

1939: The World Catches Fire is history written at the pace of events — immediate, authoritative, and deeply human. Drawing on the full range of primary sources, from the diaries of Churchill and Guderian to the testimony of Polish survivors and Finnish ski troops, Drummond Anderson delivers military history at its highest: the grand strategic sweep and the individual life, held in the same hand, illuminating each other.