From 1937 to 1945 the world witnessed a succession of savage military policies, innovations, and actions on the field, in the water, and in the skies that resulted in the butchery of over fifty million people. The military history of the Second World War involves heroism and evil, effective and hopeless strategies, bold and pointless operations, calculation and luck, politics and diplomacy, and production and attrition. This study incorporates recent scholarship onthe military history of the Second World War to examine both chronologically and in a comprehensive geographic way the most destructive event in recorded human history. Annihilation argues that World War II evolved into a war of annihilation - a total war - that engulfed militaries and civiliansalike, and spared no country either destruction or blame for the carnage. The book questions the adopted intention of the "good war" thesis by wielding the "strategy of annihilation" on all sides as an architectural framework. Readers will find global coverage linking together all theaters of the conflict in a narrative that advances from the beginning to end of the war. This is the first study of the World War II that allows instructors to assign chapters of the book according to timeperiods or by place.