1939: Countdown to War

'A brilliantly executed extended essay that reads like a tense political thriller' Sunday Telegraph 24 August 1939- The fate of the world is hanging in the balance. Hitler has ambitions to invade Poland and hopes Stalin will now help him. The West must try to stop him. If they don't, world war will result. In this dramatic account Richard Overy re-creates hour-by-hour the last days of peace in 1939, as politicians and the public braced themselves for a war they feared might spell the end of European civilization. Nothing was predictable or inevitable. The West hoped that Hitler would see sense if they stood firm. Hitler was convinced the West would back down. The one constant feature was the determination of Poland to fight against the armed might of Germany. Countdown to War brings to life a defining moment in the history of the twentieth century.

Richard Overy has spent much of his distinguished career studying the intellectual, social and military ideas that shaped the cataclysm of the Second World War, particularly in his books The Origins of the Second World War, The Inter-War Crisis, 1919-1939, Why the Allies Won, Russia's War and The Morbid Age. Since 2004 he has been Professor in History at the University of Exeter. Richard Overy's book, The Dictators- Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, won the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hessell Tiltman Prize.