On the morning of 1 September 1939, the guns of an old German battleship opened fire on a small Polish garrison at Westerplatte - and the deadliest war in human history began.

The Storm of 1939 tells the story of the Second World War, complete, in a single volume: from the failed peace of Versailles and the rise of the dictators, through the Blitzkrieg conquest of Europe, the Battle of Britain, the titanic struggle on the Eastern Front, Pearl Harbor and Japan's lightning offensive across the Pacific, to the great turning points at Stalingrad, El Alamein, and Midway, the liberation of Europe from D-Day to the fall of Berlin, and the atomic dawn over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But this is more than a chronicle of battles. The book pauses to confront the Holocaust and the machinery of genocide; follows the resistance fighters, codebreakers, and spies of the secret war; brings to life the home fronts where whole societies were mobilized; and gives full weight to the women who ran the factories, flew the aircraft, and buried the dead. It closes with the reckoning: the staggering human cost, the Nuremberg trials, the birth of the United Nations, the descent of the Iron Curtain, and the end of the European empires - the making of the world we still live in.

Written in flowing, accessible prose and anchored in the best modern scholarship - with a detailed timeline, a who's who of the war's leading figures, and a full glossary - The Storm of 1939 is the one book to read to understand the whole war: how it happened, how it was fought, and how it remade the modern world.