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"The Story of World War II" is a completely rewritten, expanded, and updated version-more than 75 percent new-of the classic narrative of the war that captures all the immediacy of the original work and contains hundreds of new firsthand accounts. In late 1945, Henry Steele Commager finished a history of World War II that he had begun writing even while the fighting raged. Commager had worked as a propagandist and historian for the U.S. Department of War, and in his book he collected eyewitness descriptions of the fighting by outstanding correspondents, including Ernie Pyle, John Steinbeck, and Martha Gellhorn. But Commager's history could only be preliminary because many documents and official records had not yet been made available. Today we know much more about World War II, and it is possible to place the war in its proper historical context.