I'm John Bachelor, continuing my conversation with Professor Paul Thomas Chamberlain.

His new book is Scorched Earth, a global history of World War II.

This is about competing empires in 1930s and 1940s.

Berlin, Rome, and Moscow and Tokyo all wanted to see their empires

either secured or grown in this contest that we call the Second World War.

It's an extension of the failure of the Versailles Treaty

to describe the world as it is as opposed to the way Wilson and Lloyd George wanted it to be,

and let's not leave out Clemenceau.

However, we're now in France again, not in Versailles.

We're in Normandy, an enormous battle that takes place between June and August when they enter Paris

and then rolls on towards Germany.

At the same time, Stalin has promised to launch an offensive called Brigadion

against the German army in the east, this vast landscape.

The two squeezing Berlin between them.

And the leaders of the countries, of the empires that are involved, are looking to the future.

We're going to Yalta and January 45, but before we get there, Professor, my concern now is

the Chinese. They're watching these resources being poured into Europe. And one of the themes of your

book that you explore very carefully is the clear racist language that is used at the time. We joke

sometimes about it, calling it white man's burden and laugh at them, but they thought it was a real

policy. What do we say right

now about race and the contest as they enter the battles of 1944? What can we say about how

Russia and France and Britain and the United States saw their burden?

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