"The Second World War," by Antony Beevor Toward the end of this powerful narrative of World War II, Antony Beevor quotes a report, by the Australian war correspondent Godfrey Blunden, of an encounter with some American troops who had just been released from German P.O.W. camps. They had been in Europe only a few months, thrown into combat and almost instantly captured during the Ardennes offensive, Hitler's last big throw of the dice. The men now had "xylophone ribs" and "gangling arms." Some of their fellow prisoners had been beaten to death by their guards for attempting to take sugar beets from fields. Blunden wrote: "They were more pitiful because they were only boys drafted from nice homes in a nice country knowing nothing about Europe, not tough like Australians, or shrewd like the French or irreducibly stubborn like the English. They just didn't know what it was all about. Norris G. McElroy/The National Archives - Agence France-Press, via Getty Images American Marines file past a dead Japanese soldier in an Okinawan village, April 1945. By Antony Beevor Little, Brown & Company. $35. Did anyone else? Even today, the meaning of this horrible, epic war remains elusive. In "The Second World War," Beevor calls it "the greatest man-made disaster in history." That description is very plausible; less so is his idea that it was part of an "international civil war between left and right." In 1941 the veteran anti-­Communist Winston Churchill allied himself with Joseph Stalin, frustrating the efforts of the Nazis to turn the war into an anti-­Bolshevik crusade. Nor were the Japanese much concerned that President Roosevelt was (relatively speaking) a man of the left; they attacked Pearl Harbor because of American threats to their interests, not to their ideology. On the other hand, ideological slogans could be strong motivators. Men clung to the idea of fighting for the Führer, or for the emperor, to keep them going in the face of certain defeat. Russians, for their part, were encouraged to fight for the motherland, rather than for the ideals of international socialism, in what was labeled the Great Patriotic War. In the West, national values were wrapped up with the concept of freedom - more so, perhaps, than with ­democracy, which seemed to many people a rather less tangible concept. But whether the outcome of the war was experienced as a victory for freedom depended very much on who you were and where in the world you happened to live. The Soviet advance into Eastern Europe created new types of suffering, including for Russian P.O.W."s who, after their supposed liberation, met persecution at the hands of their own government. "Abandoned by incompetent or terrified superiors in 1941, Soviet soldiers had starved in the indescribable horrors of German camps," Beevor writes. "Now they found themselves treated as "traitors of the motherland" because they had failed to kill themselves." Beevor does not spare us the details of such cruelties; the book is a grueling but gripping account. It is filled with stories of drowning, sickness (notably dysentery), starvation, massacre, mass rape, looting, ethnic cleansing and experiments with napalm, as well as the staggering statistics of death and injury through aerial bombing and the normal course of combat. Beevor's trademark - which he has deployed in previous books like "Stalingrad" and "D-Day" - is the use of eyewitness testimony to deliver haunting particulars. He quotes, for example, a Red Army soldier writing to his mother in the spring of 1945: "One walks on corpses, sits down to rest on corpses, one has one's meals on corpses. For about 10 kilometers there are two corpses of Fritzes on each square meter. This was not the worst. Beevor also quotes postwar investigators who found that the "widespread practice of cannibalism by Japanese soldiers in the Asia-Pacific war was something more than merely random incidents perpetrated by individuals or small groups subject to extreme conditions. The testimonies indicate that cannibalism was a systematic and organized military strategy. The horror is occasionally leavened by black comedy. Marrying shortly before their joint suicide, Hitler and Eva Braun are asked by the registrar, in line with Nazi eugenic law, whether they are of pure Aryan ­descent. Richard Toye's most recent book is "Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made."