THE greatest conflagration to engulf mankind erupted almost exactly 70 years ago.

Though the Japanese had been fighting a murderous war in China for some years and America would not be attacked until 1941, the events of September 1939 saw Hitler’s armies fighting for the first time, the beginning of Poland’s martyrdom, the Red Army on the march, and the British and French declarations of war, which ensured the inferno would not be confined to eastern Europe.

Small wonder historians have picked this moment to tell once more the terrible yet compelling story of these almost literally world-shattering events. The challenges include how to summarise this massive conflict, and to say anything new about subjects which have been examined so often before.

Into the breach, clearly undaunted, comes Andrew Roberts, with a typically well-researched and briskly written overview. Roberts is refreshingly opinionated – so long as you appreciate you don’t have to agree with all his opinions – and he’s done the groundwork to ensure he speaks with authority.

For example, he is surely right to arraign Germany’s military leaders for their culpability in the disaster, from their support when Hitler gained power to the shared guilt of many of them in the later genocide.

He throws fresh light on events, though it’s hard to find any major revelations. For example, we have long known Hitler didn’t order the Panzers to halt before Dunkirk to let the British go, but largely because army commander von Runstedt wanted them keeping intact to finish off the French.

There were some omissions I found odd. His account of the important but often neglected Tunisian campaign seemed curiously lopsided, and there is a jarring error over a date in the Italian campaign. But overall this is a fine achievement, with Roberts, as ever, relishing writing about the major figures who shaped the conflict; no surprise, then, that the baleful shadow of Hitler falls across so many of its pages.

It’s worth a look, too, at its immediate predecessor, Masters And Commanders, where Roberts concentrates on the remarkable achievements of Roosevelt and Churchill and their respective top military advisers, George Marshall and Alan Brooke, in defeating the Nazis, reaching the perhaps unfashionable conclusion that waging war “by committee” ultimately triumphed over “dynamic” individual leadership.

But if “great men” shaped events, it was ordinary people who suffered the consequences. For a deeper insight into the human cost one can turn to Martin Gilbert, biographer of Churchill and chronicler of the Holocaust.

He examines the conflict virtually a day at a time, and in among the fighting he sets out in individual detail how Jewish people suffered and died on almost every day of this very long war.

He tells of a Jewish girl, who had somehow stayed alive only to be bombed by British planes virtually at the war’s end. But when she met British soldiers she recalled: “They kissed us and tried to give us new hope and said to us: ‘Just you wait luvs. We won’t be a moment and we’ll get us all some food’.” It was a rare and uplifting glimpse of everyday humanity in a time of extraordinary horror.

• The Storm Of War, by Andrew Roberts. Published in hardback by Allen Lane, price £25.

• The Second World War, by Martin Gilbert. Published in paperback by Phoenix, price £18.99.

• Masters And Commanders, by Andrew Roberts. Published in paperback by Penguin, price £9.99