I started reading a really fascinating book last night, "The Second World Wars: How the First Global War was Fought and Won" by Victor Davis Hanson. He sets out to deconstruct the mythos of the monolithic "Second World War" into its various components - regional conflicts in the eyes of the Axis powers that interconnected in the eyes of the Allies into a global effort that the Axis powers completely misunderstood and for which they were hopelessly ill-prepared.
It's really a different view on WWII, and I'm enjoying it immensely.
What he seems to be laying out is that leaders in the US and Great Britain saw the various battlegrounds in global terms while the Axis powers, and Russia, approached it as Theater Warfare, and simply lacked the historical perspective to think of it globally. Britain being an imperial power, and the US being a former colony and by then a colonial power in its own right, both had the necessary perspective. The Axis, lacking that perspective, therefore couldn't see that their intentions were ultimately futile. So they stumbled blindly into the first global war lacking the necessary means to win it, because they couldn't think holistically.
Really, really fascinating, and I'm not even a third of the way into it.