Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of VE Day, "The Oxford Companion to the Second World War" is a wide-ranging and balanced reference work on World War II. Its 1750 alphabetically-arranged entries vary from brief definitions and one-line signposts to major pieces of description and analysis of several thousand words. They cover every aspect of World War II, from strategy, politics, tactics, and weaponry to logistics, political and military leaders, economics and the effects on society (sex outside marriage, usually thought shocking in the 1930s, had become commonplace by the 1960s; partly because the war had helped to make it so; partly because the war had stimulated research into birth control). World War II often divides the views of historians today as much as it divided combatants at the time (whether "Barbarossa", the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941, was delayed by the Balkan campaign, for instance, is still a matter of dispute). To reflect the diversity of views about the war the book has been written by an international team of more than 140 distinguished contributors and includes Japanese, German, and Italian perspectives. All entries are fully-cross referenced and the volume also offers a general index, chronology, and appendix of place-name changes. It includes: major country surveys; the experience of the war in all the important belligerent states, typically including the domestic life and economy, government, defence and civil defence, armed forces, intelligence services, merchant navy, resistance and culture; more peripheral countries and colonial possessions - for example, indicating allegiance (and changes of allegiance) of French colonies, the fate of the Dutch East Indies, the involvement of South American states; individual actions - battles, bombings, sinkings, and other events such as the battles of Kasserine Pass and the River Plate, Warsaw Uprisings, Iwo Jima, sinking of the Scharnhorst, Anzio landings, Doolittle Raid, July Bomb plot, Kursk and the bombing of Nuremberg. Military campaigns and operations are described: Fall Gelb, Cerberus and Veritable, as well as Barbarossa and Overlord, the battle for Berlin, the Fall of France, and Burma Campaign. There are entries on wartime leaders: Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, Chiang Kai-shek, Churchill, Mussolini and Hirohito; Military, political and other leading wartime figures such as Grand Admiral Doenitz, General de Gaulle, Count Ciano, Admiral King, Ho Chi Minh, Prince Konoe, Odette Sansom, Charles Lindbergh, Claus Barbie, Harold Macmillan, Marshal Timoshenko, Robert Menzies, Martin Bormann, Rudolph Hess, Admiral Ozawa and Aung San.