This book by a professor at Georgia Southwestern State University is a compact, readable, and informative survey of the dominance of war in twentieth-century Europe. Anyone seeking to understand the present-day reluctance of much of western and central Europe to commit troops to assist in America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan need only read this volume. One realizes how deeply and continuously Europeans suffered during the last century from armed conflict and its threat. According to Richard Hall, Europe experienced a “Long War” that ran throughout nearly the entire twentieth century, comprised of three parts—the Balkan Wars in 1912 that extended through the end of World War I, lasted until 1921, and produced only a brief respite (eighteen years) of peace; World War II, the most intense phase of the conflict; and the Cold War, which ended with the collapse of Soviet power in eastern Europe in 1989 and of the Soviet Union itself two years later. While the Cold War also brought closure to several key issues still outstanding from World War II, notably the reunification of Germany, it did not finish armed conflict in Europe. “The collapse of Yugoslavia was, to some degree,” the author writes, a consequence of the termination of the division of Europe, and it extended European conflict into the twenty-first century” (p. 243).

Eleven of the fourteen chapters cover the period from 1900 to 1945. The Balkan Wars that raged periodically from 1878 to 1913 resulted primarily from nationalism imported from Europe into the region, especially among the peoples living in the Ottoman Empire. The Great Powers, themselves infected by nationalist ambitions and rivalries, struggled unsuccessfully to manage the Balkan conflicts. The wars there resulted in huge military casualties and were the precursor of World War I. “Mass mobilization, large turning movements, and trench warfare all occurred during this conflict,” observes Hall. “New weapons such as airplanes and rapid-fire artillery were utilized. Yet few lessons from the Balkan Wars enlightened the European military establishments that would soon find themselves engaged in conflict” (pp. 14–15). The author provides several reasons for why that was the case.

Chapters on World War I focus on the various deadly battlefronts, American intervention in 1917–18, and the peace settlement. Factors undermining the settlement—Germany's anger at, and determination to change, it; the policies of other revisionist countries, such as Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria, the isolationism of the United States; and the collapse of the European economic system—overwhelmed the factors preserving it—the League of Nations, a seriously weakened France, and the widespread sense of exhaustion and horror at the war's casualties and destruction that pervaded especially France and Britain and reinforced their desire to avoid another war.

Hall makes clear that a “Germany resurgent” and Adolf Hitler, driven by his Social Darwinism, Pan German expansionism, and the attainment of Lebensraum in the east, brought an even far more destructive and murderous war in 1939. In the German-Russian portion of the conflict, “the effectiveness of Russian arms and the ability and willingness of the Soviet peoples to sustain huge casualties to defeat the invading German and allied armies were the decisive elements in the war's outcome” (p. 155). Hall notes that while Stalingrad “is often perceived as the turning point of the German-Russian war, German plans had already gone seriously awry with their failure to take Moscow the previous year and rapidly conclude the campaign against Soviet Russia” (p. 148). Also the author, more so than many previous writers, emphasizes the difficult and slow advance of the American-led troops up the Italian peninsula. As during World War I, “the Americans provided strong material support for the war against Germany” (p. 170). Heavy American and British bombing of German transportation, industry, and cities also drew German air power away from the eastern front, something “of immense value to the Russians” (p. 170). A concluding chapter on World War II discusses collaboration, neutrality, resistance, and genocide in the struggle.

Hall emphasizes that the Cold War imposed a much more comprehensive partition on Europe, but “soon after the establishment of Soviet hegemony in eastern Europe, Soviet control there began to erode. To a considerable degree, the Cold War had developed out of the American reaction to the Soviet takeover of eastern Europe during and immediately after the Second World War” (p. 208). Even after conclusion of the Cold War, Europe's “Long War” persisted in an appalling manner in Yugoslavia, caused primarily by Tito's death in 1980, the waning of economic prosperity, and the reappearance of nationalism in the country.

The author is at his best in explaining the often confusing and tangled Balkan politics and violence, which provided much of the source for the “Long War.” Research for the book is based exclusively, as one might expect for such a work, on secondary sources. The volume presents little that is new in information or interpretation, but rather provides an easily understood synthesis of its subject. In this reviewer's opinion, the book could have been enhanced by several things, including mention of pre-World War I imperialism among the Great Powers, the dominant role of anti-Semitism in Nazi ideology and anti-Soviet and war policy, Anglo-French appeasement in the 1930s, and the post-World War II Nuremberg and other war crimes trials. Also needed is a more in-depth and balanced analysis of the Versailles treaty and an explanation of why Nazi V-weapons had such little success in 1944 and early 1945. The book is aimed at college students and a general audience.