World War II and the Fight for Freedom
1942: When World War II Engulfed the Globe by Peter Fritzsche (Basic Books, 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
2025 has been a big year for Peter Fritzsche. Current events have caused many people to read and discuss his 2020 book, Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich. This September, he has a new book out, 1942: When World War II Engulfed the Globe. In 1942, Fritzsche argues that “it was not so much locations but ideas that made the war global.” Fritzsche’s book manages to reflect both ways in which the Second World War was a global war. 1942 was a year with major territorial aggression and it was also a year that the ideas of the war were especially on display.
Fritzsche’s book brings many locations into focus, including Singapore, the Philippines, and India, as well as Ukraine and California. For American readers, this is a helpful reminder that there was a war outside of major battles in which Americans fought. This fuller view of the war also helps fill in more of the war’s tensions, especially the imperial ones. The fall of Singapore was a blow against British and European prestige. The Quit India movement in 1942, posed questions about how the British Empire would look after the war. And, in most ways, the so-called “liberation” of Asia under the Japanese was only a transition from one empire to the another.
Fritzsche highlights many places, but it is the way he writes about people that makes the biggest impact. He argues, successfully, that this was a people’s war. His chapters, which range the globe, describe the ways in which this was a war on civilians. There was mass migration, forced migration, famine, bombing, and impressment. In many countries civilians were involved in the war on a daily basis, and were sometimes more likely to be killed than soldiers. In some places civilians were victimized by soldiers from other armies, in some places their own governments caused them harm. When we think about wars, we often think about the psychological and experiential gap between the front lines and the home front, but in many countries, that line was very thinly drawn for very many people. Civilians made up most of the war dead in World War II.
It may have been a war on people, not just countries, but it was also a war for people, not just countries. Fritzsche emphasizes the principles that people were fighting for, especially freedom. The link between democracy and human dignity and rights and the Allied cause led to tension in some countries, because these things were not always upheld at home (the United States) or even agreed upon (South Africa). People around the world watched Gandhi and the Quit India movement, not just because of India’s proximity to the Japanese Empire, but because they wondered whether or not India would experience freedom after the war. The struggle of the Second World War was for and about values, not just rival claims to territory.
Though historians can be wary of relying too much on periodization, occasionally they do argue for the significance of a single year. Many historians of World War I consider 1917 to be a turning point. Tactics changed, the Germans made a gamble for victory, and there were mutinies in the trenches. Something shifted in 1917. Historians have identified 1968 as a cultural turning point in European and American history. 1848 was a year of revolutions in Europe. It was the “year that failed to turn” but it has remained significant. Fritzsche is not the first to emphasize a specific year from a broader context, but his emphasis has less to do with 1942 as a turning point in the war and more with the nature of 1942 and what it reveals to us about modern war, especially the ways in which it involved civilians and callousness about others. Many of the war’s big moments were happening in 1942, including the U.S. entry into the war, Stalingrad, the fall of Singapore, famine in India, and the Holocaust.
At the end of the book, Fritzsche contrasts 1942 with 1945 as a handle for interpreting World War II. After the Second World War, everyone thought about “the bomb” and the possibility of nuclear war. Fears and ambitions around the bomb drove politics in what remained of the twentieth century. But, as Fritzsche asks, “What if the future will look more like 1942, not 1945?” What if the Earth does not go dark in the solar system in the twenty-first century from nuclear war, but we face something like what Fritzsche calls “the tragedy of 1942,” which he describes as “the constancy of adjustment and adaptation in a state of permanent war.” What if we are more likely to see territorial aggression and refugees and famine and mass killing and less likely to be erased from the map? Is the future another Hiroshima, or more like the fall of Singapore and the imprisonment of Gandhi and China flooding its own provinces? Could we better prepare for our context by learning more about the push for dignity under the Japanese in the Philippines, the callousness of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, and the fight for racial integration in wartime California, than we will from doomsday prepping?
1942 makes a compelling case for the importance of that year in defining the nature of the Second World War and, potentially, in defining the kinds of conflict we will encounter in our own times. Even for readers not entirely sold on Fritzsche’s suggestions on the past as guide for the future, this sweeping narrative of the Second World War has plenty to offer. With its strong prose and compelling structure, this is a book many people will enjoy.
At right around 500 pages, 1942 is somewhat imposing. But the pages are well-formatted and not dense. 1942 is engagingly written and readable for a very broad audience. Fritzsche weaves literature throughout, as many World War II combatants and observers did with their experience. Fritzsche covers topics that have become familiar and integrates those that have fallen out of public memory. Readers especially interested in battles and tactics will be disappointed, but those interested in the ways in which the war shaped human experience and the postwar world will be well rewarded for reading.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
