Each nation has its myths about the Second World War. We Brits see ourselves as the stoics ... steadfastly tholing the Blitz with a cheery ; the French fondly believe their every man, woman and child fought in the Resistance ... while the Yanks imagine THEY won the conflict single-handedly.

Such stereotypes can be enormously entertaining over a in the pub, but they're usually avoided by historians who, instead, often devote long passages (like the one on which I'm about to embark ... so be WARNED!) to demolishing them.

Writer, Norman Stone, however, has little time for those analyses: Arising from his own efforts to encapsulate the entire war into a mere 200 pages - leaving no space for subtlety - he uses grand, sweeping statements. "Poland", he declares, "was the martyr ... just as Great was the hero and the United States, the victor". <

France, he maintains, was merely a nation of cheese-eating monkeys ... not only did it fail to produce a Churchill to lead its people, but the whole of French society was deemed rotten from top to bottom; the working classes, he says, comprised "dirty, sullen, cigarette-chewing individuals who smelt of cheap ".

's amusing - so long as you're not French ( one of our members here ... username, 'Pacific Electric' ... IS, though!) - yet it's a bit worrying nonetheless, in a tome claiming to represent serious history ... ignoring, as it does, the fact that the British would have [probably] collapsed just as fast as the French, were our shores not protected by the English Channel. Moreover, it also contradicts the HUGE body of evidence in our Mass Observation archives showing that morale in Britain was nowhere near as chirpy as we like to think.

Once Stone has accepted stereotypes like these, all kinds of errors begin to emerge ... e.g., Britain is credited with cracking German codes whereas, in effect, both the early codes and the German Enigma machine were given to us by the Poles.

There again, Churchill is absolved of responsibility for handing Stalin control of *Eastern Europe ( ... wish to Christ he'd kept *it - Stalin, I mean!) at the Tehran Conference in 1943 - despite it being clear from his letters that he [Churchill] didn't put up any form of resistance to the transfer. Communists are easy bogeymen: Stone blames them for deliberately antagonising the Germans into committing acts of reprisal against civilians. But, for example, it was Czech nationalists - NOT communists - who thereafter proceeded to assassinate high-ranking Nazi, Reinhard Heydrich ... in turn, provoking the infamous Lidice Massacre.

Apparently, too, throughout the book, the author makes increasingly controversial statements without backing up their legitimacy. And, while most military historians nowadays, view the **war in the Mediterranean as a vital stepping stone en route to D-Day, he appears to dismiss **it as "an irrelevant sideshow" - in the same way as he seems convinced that D-Day itself could've been achieved in 1943 ... a theory that's rather difficult to take too seriously. Similarly, the strategic bomber offensive is then denounced as a "strategy without logic".

Stone's book is, undoubtedly, an intriguing and entertaining read, full of quirky detail. There's even a description of the Romanian tanks that could not defend themselves on the Soviet Front because mice had chewed through the wiring.

Ill-balanced and unreliable as this account of the war may seem to its readers, it is undeniably stimulating.