People’s War

• Tomorrow at Dawn by J.G. de Beus
  Norton, 191 pp, £5.75, April 1980, ISBN 0 393 01263 8
• The Crucible of War by Barrie Pitt
  Cape, 506 pp, £8.95, June 1980, ISBN 0 224 01771 3
• Chindit by Richard Rhodes James
  Murray, 214 pp, £10.50, August 1980, ISBN 0 7195 3746 0
• The Chief by Ronald Lewin
  Hutchinson, 282 pp, £7.95, September 1980, ISBN 0 09 142500 X
• Special Operations Europe: Scenes from the Anti-Nazi War by Basil Davidson
  Gollancz, 288 pp, £8.50, July 1980, ISBN 0 575 02820 3

Soon, no doubt, some statistician of the absurd will tell us that the tonnage of books about the Second World War has finally exceeded the weight of ammunition expended in its course. On the face of it, the scope and variety of this literature is enormous. It ranges across much of the globe, from Normandy to New Guinea, from Tunis to Moscow. It recounts the exploits of the fighting men of dozens of nations and peoples: in Italy, for example, Maoris, Baluchis, Nepalese and Moroccans fought alongside Poles, Boers, Japanese Americans and Brazilians. It covers, moreover, an amazing variety of military activity, from the misery of the ordinary rifleman to the planning of an Army Group offensive, from bomber raids to armoured tactics, from the liquidation of collaborators to the most sophisticated mobile stage of guerrilla warfare.