Scorched Earth by Paul Thomas Chamberlin

Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II

By Paul Thomas Chamberlin

Basic Books, 2025

2025 marks 80 years since the end of the Second World War, and in the week of VE Day Basic Books gives us Paul Thomas Chamberlin’s utterly engrossing and amazingly tortured history of the conflict, Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II, that is in turns agonizing and electric.

Chamberlin tells us his target here is the “orthodox interpretation of the Second World War,”

. . .if we look more closely, we see that the reality of the Second World War was far messier than the prevailing good-versus-evil narratives have led us to believe. Most historians now agree that Hitler’s legions were defeated not by freedom-loving American and British soldiers on the western front but by the slaughter of millions of Soviet soldiers driven by brutal communist leaders across the killing fields of Eastern Europe. The Western Allies contributed to this victory less through pluck and democratic idealism than through savage firebombing raids and atomic attacks on Axis cities that incinerated hundreds of thousands of civilians.

A clear-eyed view of the Allied air campaign’s monstrous excesses scarcely requires one to become so irreverent as to punctuate an already sneering passage by effectively writing that ‘your grandpa didn’t defeat Hitler, he killed babies.’

No, the source of the intensity here is Chamberlin’s whole mistaken interpretation of the Second World War not as “the good war between democracy and fascism that history books often describe” but as “a massive, colonial race war marked by vicious atrocities and fought by rival empires across huge stretches of Asia and Europe.”

In adopting this reductionist thesis, he begins the process of balancing the belligerents’ culpability, considering them “in the longer sweep of history,” and stripping away the moral content in the necessity of smashing the Axis powers.

So the “the Axis bid for world power. . .marked the climax of five hundred years of colonial expansion,” and its origins

. . .lay in the very structure of the Versailles order itself: an unstable imperial system constructed around racial hierarchies and maintained through colonial violence. All of the key elements that would fuel the future Axis reign of terror were present in the interwar period. It should come as no surprise, then, that an international order built on empire, race, and violence would help to give birth to a new set of far-right regimes steeped in racist rhetoric and intent on staging violent bids to seize the mantle of empire for themselves.

In short, "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind."

Then, as the war progressed and the outcome became certain, Stalin’s logic came to the fore: “Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.” And thus,

The fires of war that raged across much of the industrialized world burned away a five-hundred-year-old colonial order and opened the way for humanity to build the world anew. The old colonial powers fought to the point of exhaustion only to be consumed by the colossal energies of the Soviet Union and the United States. These continent-spanning superstates, commanding seemingly unlimited resources and manpower, each worked to build new hegemonic orders on the ruins of a world devastated by war.

Chamberlin’s project does not succeed because it cannot succeed. The Second World War was not the product of colonial aspirations, but of recalcitrant nationalistic ambitions of autarky, twisted by ideology, and pursued by means of war expanded to suicidal levels by its own idiotic logic and momentum. 

Just because you can write that “. . .the citizens of London, Berlin, Leningrad, and dozens of other cities would experience the horrors of indiscriminate colonial violence already familiar to the residents of Addis Ababa, Jaffa, and Mukden” does not mean those things actually belong to the same genus of conflict.

While Chamberlin is on much better ground vis-à-vis Japan, to insist that “Tokyo sought nothing more than the same imperial privileges that the Western great powers had claimed for centuries” downplays the nature of its aggression and increasingly erratic, if not schizophrenic, foreign policy that put it on the road to ruin by mid-1941 when it advanced into French Indochina.  While this can more plausibly be characterized as a “colonial race war,” it is obviously better understood as war to subdue a system that had lost control of itself in an outward and violent manner – something the broader community of nations will never tolerate, colonies or no colonies, Japanese, German, or Italian (all of whom, although Chamberlin doesn’t mention it, signed the Kellogg–Briand Pact).

Yet, while it cannot succeed, this thesis also cannot completely fail, in part because it is so hopelessly oversimplified. There were “have” and “have-not” nations, the latter often did articulate their territorial aims in terms of the formers’, racism wasn’t exactly thin on the ground in the first half of the last century, Britain and the United States did have some incongruous aims, the Allies hardly fought an unambiguously moral war (that fantasy was never tenable because of the strategic alignment with the psychotic mass murderer Joseph Stalin), and the war did help forge the nature of the coming Cold War and its two superstates, as Chamberlin brilliantly puts it:

While the coming Pax Americana had been forged in the waters off Midway, Guadalcanal, and North Africa, the Soviet colossus had emerged from the burning ruins of Stalingrad. The dawn of the superpower age had arrived.

Chamberlin’s goal is to shoot a howitzer at a strawman: “the history of the war as a series of patriotic fairy tales designed to justify postwar ambitions.” An easy target, but he still manages to misfire, because what he has given is a wonderfully written, totally blinkered, pathetically cynical, and ultimately retaliatory account so prototypical of a certain kind of deplorable and monomaniacal 21st century thinking:

By ignoring the imperial dimensions of the war and the global order it created, we conceal the enduring legacies of violence and colonialism that formed the foundations of our contemporary world. . .the war did not end imperialism; imperialism ended the war.

Scorched Earth ranks as one of the most readable and stirring single volume overviews of the Second World War from an undeniable enthusiast of the subject; for those with a high degree of tolerance for claptrap there is plenty here.

David Murphy holds a Masters of Finance from the University of Minnesota.