1942: When World War II Engulfed the Globe

A penetrating history of the year World War II became a global conflict and humankind confronted both destruction and deliverance on a planetary scale

By the end of the Second World War, more than seventy million people across the globe had been killed, most of them civilians. Cities from Warsaw to Tokyo lay in ruins, and fully half of the world’s two billion people had been mobilized, enslaved, or displaced.

In 1942, historian Peter Fritzsche offers a gripping, ground-level portrait of the decisive year when World War II escalated to global catastrophe. With the United States joining the fight following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, all the world’s great powers were at war. The debris of ships sunk by Nazi submarines littered US beaches, Germans marauded in North Africa, and the Japanese swept through the Pacific. Military battles from Singapore to Stalingrad riveted the world. But so, too, did dramas on the war’s home fronts: battles against colonial overlords, assaults on internal “enemies,” massive labor migrations, endless columns of refugees.

With an eye for detail and an eye on the big story, Fritzsche takes us from shipyards on San Francisco Bay to townships in Johannesburg to street corners in Calcutta to reveal the moral and existential drama of a people’s war filled with promise and terror.