Book Review: Unknown Conflicts of the Second World War: Forgotten Fronts

Archives

by Chris Murray, editor

New York: Routledge, 2019. Pp. x, 236. Gloss., notes, biblio., index. $140.00. ISBN: 1138612944

Overlooked Corners of a Global War

A former Canadian naval officer and associate editor of Defence Report London, Dr. Murray has collected a dozen essays by scholars from nearly as many countries, that look, for the most part, at rather neglected aspects of the Second World War.

So we have essays on subjects ranging from British recruitment in Nigeria to the postwar search for Polish children kidnapped by the Nazi occupiers, the complex politics of war and neutrality in the southern Cone of South America and in Finland, irregular warfare in the Baltic states, Burma, Yugoslavia, and Italy, the war in the Indian Ocean, British fear of a “Fifth Column”, and collaboration and resistance in North China. All of the essays throw new light on often neglected corners of the war, but several are particularly valuable, perhaps most notably those on the Indian Ocean, Red guerrillas in the Baltic, and the Italian civil war.

Naturally, many other aspects of the war still remain largely unexamined (e.g., the Republican insurgency in Francoist Spain, pro-Axis sabotage in the United States, Ethiopian resistance to Italian occupation, Siam in the War, etc.), Unknown Conflicts of the Second World War, a volume in the Routledge series “Studies in Second World War History”, despite a lack of maps, is a valuable read for anyone with an interest in truly global aspects of the Second World War.

 

Note: Unknown Conflicts of the Second World War is also available in several e-editions
 

StrategyPage reviews are shared with The New York Military Affairs Symposium

 

---///---

Reviewer: A. A. Nofi, Review Editor   


Buy it at Amazon.com

X

ad

Help Keep Us From Drying Up

We need your help! Our subscription base has slowly been dwindling.

Each month we count on your contribute. You can support us in the following ways:

  1. Make sure you spread the word about us. Two ways to do that are to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
  2. Subscribe to our daily newsletter. We’ll send the news to your email box, and you don’t have to come to the site unless you want to read columns or see photos.
  3. You can contribute to the health of StrategyPage.
Subscribe   contribute   Close