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Justin Hart, 1945: The War That Never Ended, Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 2, September 2006, Pages 580–581, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486347
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Most readers of the Journal of American History will not, I am afraid, find much of use in Gregor Dallas's tome, 1945. Billed as a panoramic history of the aborted transition from war to peace in 1945, Dallas's book is actually a sprawling anthology of European social politics during the 1940s. 1945 does not make it to 1945 until almost halfway through the book; rarely does it depart from the European context. That myopic focus relegates even Franklin D. Roosevelt and the U.S.-British alliance to a virtual sideshow. Readers looking to understand U.S. politics and diplomacy during World War II in an international context should still turn, instead, to books such as Gerhard L. Weinberg's monumental A World at Arms (1994). More significantly, I have no idea how it is possible to write a history of 1945 that ignores almost entirely the dropping of the atomic bomb.
Limitations aside, this is a very interesting and extremely well-written book. It is based on a broad (though not exhaustive) array of secondary sources. (Dallas appears to have consulted primary sources only in published form.) Those who actually take the time to wade through his narration by saturation will be rewarded with countless nuggets of information. (I, for one, did not know that the Royal Air Force Bomber Command hired an art historian to advise them on the architectural significance of potential targets [p. 86].) Probably the most useful components of the book are the excellent timelines and glossaries of names and organizations that appear at the end.
