Phoenix

The Great War should have been the War to End All Wars. The Treaty of Versailles was supposed to end war forever. Instead, all the treaty did was add fuel to the smouldering embers of a war that, in many people's minds, had yet to end. How did the world manage to snatch war from the jaws of peace? How could an insignificant event in 1889 come to affect the life of a boy 690 miles away and 54 years into the future. Christopher Bradbury looks at the events that led from the end of the Great War and finished with a fight to the death for a collection of strangers on the beaches of Dunkirk and above the fields of England. He asks the reader to open their mind, to look at the Second World War, not just as an explosion in history, but as a story of individuals who were caught up in someone else's struggle for power.