The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, By Andrew Roberts

The Nazis lost the war for the same reason they started it, argues this enlightening new history

With the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War looming this autumn, a glut of books about that conflict – good, bad and indifferent – is to be expected in the bookshops. One of the earliest offerings is Andrew Roberts's The Storm of War, which presents a "new history" of the hostilities in a single manageable volume.

In essence, this is a straightforward narrative account of the war – from the Gleiwitz incident of August 1939 to the bombing of Nagasaki six years later. Roberts tells his story with considerable brio, covering all the salient events and confrontations, with informative asides, digressions and potted biographies along the way.

His overarching thesis is also comparatively straightforward, but no less insightful for that. He argues that Hitler's ideological obsessions were paramount, not only in starting the war, but also in deciding its course, and determining its ultimate outcome. "The reason why Hitler lost the war," Roberts concludes, "was exactly the same one that caused him to unleash it in the first place: he was a Nazi." This deceptively simple conclusion is actually rather profound, and at a stroke cuts through much of the "what if" and "if only" theorising so beloved of many historians and armchair strategists. The Nazis did what they did, Roberts argues, and made the mistakes that they made, because of their ideology. They really could not do otherwise.

Stylistically, Roberts has always been very strong, and this book is happily no exception. He segues effortlessly between theatres and events, weaving a complex yet admirably comprehensible tapestry of the conflict. He also has an excellent eye for the ironies and peculiarities that serve to bring his story most vividly to life. The Storm of War is, in fact, a seductively easy read. You could open it at any page and it would not fail to draw you in. Indeed, if you take this with you to the beach this summer, beware of sunburn.

Despite that literary ease, however, the book is certainly not bland and is in turns moving, thought-provoking and occasionally amusing. Never afraid to give an opinion, Roberts can be refreshingly honest, even brutal, in his assessments. Field Marshal Keitel, for instance, is derided as a "pathetic excuse for a senior officer"; de Gaulle, meanwhile, is described as "a weirdly angular giraffe of a man". (The French regularly seem to attract the author's ire.) Neither is Roberts shy of pronouncing on more controversial or morally thorny issues, such as the Allied air war or the use of the atomic bomb.

The result is that the book is shot through with balance, fairness and solid common sense, and as such is a welcome antidote to much of the fashionable moralising and relativising that has accompanied many recent studies of the Second World War. Indeed, readers will soon find themselves looking forward to the author's pithy end-of-section summaries. Hitler's legendary and supposedly encyclopaedic knowledge of military minutiae, for instance, is dismissed with the following memorable analogy: "Because a train-spotter can take down the number of a train in his notebook, it doesn't mean he can drive one."

There are, perhaps, two caveats. The first is that aficionados of the history of the Pacific War will feel a little hard done by. Though The Storm of War purports to be a global history of the conflict, its coverage of the eastern theatre appears rather on the cursory side, with only three of its 18 chapters devoted to the war against Japan.

The second is that, though the book claims to be a "new history" of the war, there appears to be precious little genuinely new about it. Much is made in the dust-jacket blurb, for instance, of access to a previously unseen private archive and of the author's extensive battlefield visits. But, for all their undoubted value, these activities do not seem to have translated into much in the way of novel insights or interpretations.

Yet, despite those grumbles, The Storm of War is nonetheless an expert retelling of the story of the conflict. Either as a primer for those new to the subject, or as a refreshing synthesis for those revisiting more familiar ground, it is an exceptionally rewarding and enlightening read. Rest assured – very few of the new crop of books on the subject will be as good as this.