I'll keep them in mind because they look super interesting and seem like a very good read, thanks a bunch!

Oh thank you so much!

As a younger man seeking a comprehensive global history to begin to frame what I was learning, I got a lot out of Isaac Asimov's Chronology of the World. I am just a civilian....I don't have any clue what historians and historiographers think of this work.

Thanks a lot!

Condensed...no I do not...however I have been reading "The Story of Civilization" series by Will Durant for like 30 years...

Thank you so much! I'll look forward to getting them ✨️✨️

>Said that, some Allied Generals didn’t want to destroy Germany, they were much more preoccupied with Communist Russia than with the Germans.

A handful. But that was hardly the typical view. Unconditional victory over Nazi Germany was the overriding goal of all the Allies in top policy-making roles. George Marshall actually wanted to deindustrialize Germany so it would be a half-starved agrarian society for a generation or two.

I think absolutely not. Hitler didn't just conquer territory, he enslaved people and committed genocide. He brainwashed much of the German population into believing they were superior. He had to be eliminated.

As far as Japan goes, the US at least had to ensure that they were subjugated to the point they could not be a threat to the US again any time soon.

They had planned on it iirc but realized that they would be not have a strategically viable position because of their overextension and the threat from the US. I don't think it's easy to speculate what a IJA invasion of eastern USSR would look like. Would it take pressure off of Hitlers Wehrmacht? Or would it have pushed the US to strike first? The IJN surely would have been very upset about it, and had already thrown their weight around to get rid of Matsuoka in Jul 1941. Japanese military internal rivalry sabotaged a lot of strategic ground operations and planning. I think it would have been disastrous for Japan, regardless of the Soviet response.

There's a saying (can't remember by whom) that conquerors are like cannonballs in that they need to keep barreling forward. The moment they come to a halt, they're finished.

The Axis powers wouldn't have stopped. Japan would've continued trying to chomp away at China and eventually turned to India and Germany would've directed its attentions to Africa and the Middle East.

Not necessarily the right category but this brought to mind bill brysons 'a short history of almost everything' and its a great read anyway.

The what if I'm particularly curious about is if the Japanese attacked the Soviets instead of Pearl Harbor

Norman Davies, Europe: A History is a good read. Good overview to give you your bearings and context to more in depth works.

I actually never read that hitler needed Russias oil. It makes sense though.

I'd make the bolder claim that once it became evident that the Axis was facing a long-war, that the inevitability of their defeat were set. Nolan makes this argument in "The Allure of Battle". Both empires simply lacked the industrial and manpower capacities to sustain their combat losses against the Allies. I'd argue that even after the blitz of Poland and France, the events that followed were mostly inevitable due to the Axis' geopolitical posturing. They were victims of their own fanaticism and delusions of racial and cultural superiority.

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Susan Wise Baur attempted to do this in a trilogy; The History of the World. It has three volumes, and while it is a world history it's coverage of east Asia, Africa, and the Americas is lacking. It is however, probably the most condensed work to really try and tackle the entire world and tackle it without completely botching the effort.

Understand that many books cover a few hundred years of 1 place.

Covering the entire history of the entire planet is... It's a tall order. You won't find any work that does it excellently. Most of those that do exist suffer in fully accounting for Africa and the pre-Columbian Americas, which aren't helped by the lack of historical records for these places.

Historians unfortunately don't talk to archeologists as often as we should.

Basically this. Hitler had simply lied too much for anyone to believe him, and Germany desperately needed the oil in USSR territory, without which Germany would be hard pressed to even defend itself in the future.

It's also important to remember that Germany was influenced by its past: Germany had bled itself dry fighting France in WW1, so the idea that defeating France might be effectively irrelevant to the actual outcome of war was difficult to accept. It was much easier to tell themselves that Germany was on the brink of total victory, especially with North Africa and Barbarossa seeming to go so well...

There was a real mindset that once the US was in the war, victory was inevitable.

Your scenario would have been possible after the conquest of France and Acis victory at Dunkirk.

I think the UK's unwillingness to surrender was the key. Even if the USSR did not get invaded by Hitler (an unrealistic scenario given Hitler's ego), the UK would hold on with logistical support from the Anglosphere and material from the Americas. Germany would have had to escalate naval presence to prevent this, and that would provoke the US into involvement. I think had not Japan done Pearl Harbor, I believe it was only a matter of time before German u-boats and public outrage drew the US into active conflict with the Nazis. Escalation did really seem inevitable.

Without Stalin the USSR had much greater odds of breaking politically as the leadership lost nerve and/or control. He was a pivotal piece in that resistance, despite his MANY other flaws.

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As of the Casablanca Conference Jan 1943 the Allies via Roosevelt publicly announced they would not accept anything other than unconditional surrender. There were several reasons for this and possible dissention over the decision, but it would have been pretty hard to back down from it afterwards.

One of the main reasons for it was to preempt a WWI situation where Germany surrenders before Germany itself gets damaged and the resultant "stabbed in the back" mentality of the German people. It was also done to keep the Soviets in the war because if the Soviets negotiated a separate peace the U.S. and U.K. would not have been able to finish defeating Germany.

>have led to a truce being called during the war before axis lost

• Before Casablana, Hitlers death or overthrow by his own generals. * A defeat of the Soviets, like the capture of Moscow, Leningrad and the Baku oil fields and their withdraw from the war prompting the rest of the war into a stalemate and eventual peace.

>Would there have ever been any reality in which axis just decided they had conquered enough land and people and that point in time was a good time to quit?

Hitler didnt want to be at war with the U.K. Yes taking the entire Eastern portion of the Soviet Union would have been enough... for a while but eventually a new war would start. The Nazi economy was reliant on new conquests and not set up for a peace.

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Maybe if they didn’t attack Russia they could have forced UK to negotiate a peace ,that was Hitlers’a plan, but after the involvement of Russia was clear that the UK could endure longer, when the US got involved the Allies victory was a certainty, just a matter of time.

Said that, some Allied Generals didn’t want to destroy Germany, they were much more preoccupied with Communist Russia than with the Germans.

At the end of the war it was a mad rush to take as much territory as possible before the Russians.