In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order.

In Scorched Earth, historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin dispatches the myth of World War II as a good war. Instead, he depicts the conflict as it truly was: a massive battle beset by vicious racial atrocities, fought between rival empires across huge stretches of Asia and Europe. The war was sparked by German and Japanese invasions that threatened the old powers' dominance, not by Allied opposition to fascism. The Allies achieved victory not through pluck and democratic idealism but through savage firebombing raids on civilian targets and the slaughter of millions of Soviet soldiers. The Soviet Union and the United States emerged as hyper-militarized new imperial powers, each laying claim to former Axis holdings across the globe before turning on one another and triggering a new forever war.

Dramatically rendered and persuasively argued, Scorched Earth shows that World War II marked the culmination of centuries of colonial violence and ushered in a new era of imperial struggle.