Somewhere in the virtual world that is 2026 Whitehall, men, women and AI will doubtless be gaming how Britain should prepare for war. While it’s certain that the next war will not be the same as the last war, Collapse should be taken seriously by those who used to be dignified as “policymakers”. It is a book pitched at those living for real in the 2020s, not in the golden glow of “our finest hour”.
Jonathan Fennell is professor of the history of war and society at King’s College, London. Collapse builds on his earlier work, especially about the British and Commonwealth armies in the Second World War, but this is a truly transnational history, using sources in 14 different languages from more than 50 archives. It opens in 1931 with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria – the start of a 14-year struggle in which some 14 million Chinese people died and another 80-100 million became refugees. This volume is presented as the first of three that will take the story of global war and its repercussions up to 1949, with the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War and the creation of the People’s Republic of China. Taking China seriously comes more naturally in the era of Xi Jinping than in, say, the days of Mikhail Gorbachev, let alone Winston Churchill.
Fennell offers a challengingly holistic interpretation of the “culture of war” – blending people and politics, military and social history and illuminated by what he calls “some of the most significant documents yet to be incorporated into the study of the Second World War”. These are the morale and censorship reports compiled by the Allied and Axis authorities. He estimates that just the censorship reports he surveyed were based on a contemporaneous reading by the authorities of 200 million wartime letters. That in turn was made possible only because of the digitisation of much of this material (For Britain, see moidigital.ac.uk) and also the advent of translation software.
Collapse uses this prodigious, cutting-edge research to create a highly readable book. Morale is Fennell’s keyword. That, for him, is not some fuzzy state of happiness. It’s “the willingness of individuals and groups to do what is required of them” in war, namely, to fight and kill, to suffer and endure. That willingness, or its absence, lies at the heart of all wars. Fennell treats families and their correspondence as a kind of umbilical cord: “The front was sustained by the support of the rear, and the rear by the personal news that arrived from the front.” Where the events he cites are momentous and the correspondence is extensive, the personal stories offer vivid counterpoint to the political.
Take one celebrated turning point of the war. In May 1940 Hitler committed seven of his ten Panzer divisions to an audacious thrust along forest tracks in the Ardennes and around the flank of the Franco-British army moving into Belgium. The Panzers raced on to Dunkirk and the Channel, and the fall of France in six weeks guaranteed that this war would be fundamentally different from 1914-18. Fennell illuminates these chapters by episodes from the amorous entanglements of mind and body between Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Also featured is the epistolary relationship between Panzer commander Heinz Guderian and his wife, Margarete, as he drives his men onward imperiously: “Three days to the Meuse, on the fourth day across the Meuse!”
When we pick up the Guderians’ correspondence again, the mood is very different. Amid the frozen wastes of Russia in 1941, he slides into depression as it becomes clear how disastrously the Germans have underestimated Russia and the Russians. He can only “pray to God… that He spares us the fate of Napoleon”. At the end of October, husband begs wife: “Please write me a long, kind letter with some good news from you and the boys… Think of me a little and, if possible, something positive.”
At the same time, on the other side of the world, in New Zealand, Nancy Beckett is anxiously waiting for news from husband, Barney, serving with the British Empire’s Western Desert Force on the Libyan border. She knows from recent letters that he is expecting to go into battle soon. But the mail dries up during December. Nan (“living under the wireless”) hears reports of victory in the desert against Rommel’s Afrika Korps but also heavy New Zealand casualties. She makes herself keep writing, across a bleak Christmas, with an “awful ache inside”. Then, in the New Year, she finally receives a cable that Barney had sent on 7 December to “let you know I am still in the pink”. Weeping with relief, she reads the cable again and again: “I shall keep it for ever.”
Fennell’s distinctive conception of morale – as a mutual life-support system between home and front – helps to humanise war. But the prime aim of this first volume of the trilogy is to expose the “general global descent into barbarity” during 1941. The war of extermination waged by the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union was paralleled in north China where the Japanese army returned again and again to the same places to kill, loot and burn – thereby eliminating all means of resistance. These “cleansing operations” would continue for the next three years. China was an extreme case, but this “totalisation” of war affected all the belligerents.
By autumn 1941 the British Air Ministry had privately dropped any pretence that the bombing of Germany was aimed at purely military objectives: “The ultimate aim of the attack of a town area is to break the morale of the population which occupies it.” This was to be done by “destruction” and “the fear of death”.
Under what Fennell calls “the shadow of the apocalypse” by the end of 1941, the belligerents were reaching the “limits imposed by the logic of strategy”. The most desperate governments – imbued with fascistic ideology – embraced strategies that “abandoned the logic of limits”. For Hitler, that meant ending the deadlock in the West by trying to conquer the vast resources of the USSR. For the Japanese militarists, facing a narrowing window of opportunity as the US built a “Two Ocean Navy”, their high-risk game plan was to concentrate all six of Japan’s large aircraft carriers on the destruction of America’s Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. But more than that. Concurrently, five Japanese expeditionary forces would assault the vital outposts of Western power and resources across the Pacific and South-East Asia: the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies and the British colonies of Hong Kong, Malaya and Burma. Pearl Harbor mirrored Hitler’s gamble in the Ardennes, which had transformed the conflict in Europe, but now on a truly epic scale. Fennell calls these simultaneous offensives across 11,000km of land and ocean, spanning six different time zones, “possibly the most complex military operation the world had ever seen”.
Collapse is a relentlessly teleological book, dragging us into the abyss of “worldwide total war”: by the end of 1941, over 90 per cent of the world’s population lived in territories controlled by belligerent powers. The next two volumes of the trilogy will examine “the burning furnace” of 1942-44 and “A New World” emerging in 1944-49. It will be fascinating to see how Fennell maintains the momentum of this outstanding first volume.
If we want to understand the road to 1945, we must remember that the unholy alliance of the United States, the British empire and the Soviet Union managed to hang together, whereas Germany and Japan hung separately. As for the road to the polarised globe of 1949, that was prefigured in the way victory was won. The Soviets bore the brunt of the land war against Germany and thereby grabbed the bulk of the territorial spoils. World war became the chrysalis of Cold War.
David Reynolds’s most recent book is Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders who Shaped Him (HarperCollins).
Collapse: A Global History of the Second World War, 1931-1941
Jonathan Fennell
Viking, 752pp, £30
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[Further reading: America’s original biggest loser]
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This article appears in the 05 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Europe's shame
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Subscribe here to commentThe subheadline says “eight years on”. Eighty, surely.