Those following Hitler's invasion of the USSR were the worst, killing 1,582,000 men by contrast, 4,650 died at Alamein. Davies points out that the seven bloodiest battles of the war were fought between German and Soviet forces. This is all to the good, since British accounts of the war tend to emphasise the Battle of Britain, Montgomery's victory at El Alamein and the D-Day landings, while American memory focuses on the breakthrough in France, the Battle of the Bulge and the ending of the Holocaust. Now he examines Europe during the second world war, and it is no surprise that he gives prominence to the eastern front.
The Isles (1999), a tome almost equally massive but flabbier and more error-prone, was his attempt to escape from national insularity and write a continental history of Britain. His bestselling Europe: A History (1996) was an admirably comprehensive study that overcame the difficulties of generalisation by peppering the text with separate snapshots and thumbnail sketches. Much of Davies's academic endeavour has been to bridge the gulf, to show that Europe is a whole and that it makes no sense to examine its parts in isolation. Davies retaliates with Gandhi's answer to the question of what he thought of western civilisation: "It would be a nice idea." The Poles featured as "the orang-utans of Europe". The Enlightenment emphasised the gulf, depicting the east as a wilderness of peasant filth swarming with Jews, lice and wolves. Himself an expert on Poland, Davies objects to the division drawn since classical times between the civilisation implanted by Rome and the barbarism overflowing from the steppes. This is that the history of Europe has been monopolised by the west to the detriment of its eastern component. Norman Davies is obsessed by a single idea. Europe at War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory
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