Book Review: Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931–1945

Professor of history at the University of Exeter and a prize-winning author, Overy makes a convincing, new, and somewhat controversial argument that the desire for imperial expansion drove the belligerents to fight and was a core consideration in how they waged war. [...] Overy also does the literature of World War II a service by attempting to shift the conventional, Eurocentric start of the war from Poland in 1939 to the war in China. [...] Overy points to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 as the start of the Asian war that eventually merged with the 1939 war in Europe, when Imperial Japan attacked the United States and the imperial holdings of the British, French, and Dutch in Asia. [...] Conversely, he uses the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 7, 1937, the more typically accepted starting point of the Second Sino-Japanese War, as the starting point of World War II. [...] The views and opinions expressed in Parameters book reviews are those of the reviewers and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.