How long does it take to read The Second World War?
a complete history
The Second World War by Martin Gilbert takes about 15 hours 31 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 15 hours 31 minutes
A long haul
First published 1970. 846 pages, about 232,650 words.
32 days (about 5 weeks) at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 25 hours 51 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 15 hours 31 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 9 hours 42 minutes |
The page count is the median across 14 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill, here offers a complete history of World War II. It began with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. By the time it came to an end on V-J Day --August 14, 1945 -- it had involved every major power and become global in its reach. In the final accounting, it would turn out to be, in both human terms and material resources, the costliest war in history, taking the lives of forty million people. With unparalleled scholarship and breadth of vision, Gilbert weaves together all of the war's aspects -- the political, the military, the diplomatic, and, not least, the civilian -- charting an almost day-by-day account of the terrible progress of the war's juggernaut of death and destruction. Through it all, his aim is to show what happened, not from the point of view of any one of the warring nations but from a global perspective. The result is the first total history of this global war, a work that is both a treasure trove of information and a gripping dramatic narrative.
