Baker, a best-selling novelist (Vox, The Fermata) and a splendid non-fiction author (Double Fold), begins with the two-decades-long political and military run-up to Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland and ends on New Year's Eve 1941, in the month that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and America entered the war.

Baker says he wrote Human Smoke to pose two questions: "Was it a 'good war'? Did it help anyone who needed help?" To most readers the answers seem settled and obvious. The "Greatest Generation" went forth, defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and saved civilization.

Not so fast, counters Baker, who dedicates the book to American and British pacifists: "They failed, but they were right." In a breathtaking display of moral relativism, Human Smoke issues a multi-count indictment against Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt: Like Hitler, they were anti-Semitic (as though their private comments about Jews, however offensive, were as bad as Hitler's final solution); like the Nazis, they fire-bombed cities and killed civilians (indeed, Baker observes, England pioneered such tactics by bombing India in 1925 and later Palestine, and then hit the German cities first, possibly provoking, Baker hints, the Holocaust); they rebuffed Hitler's 1940 peace entreaties; and they conspired to provoke Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor to give America the excuse to enter the war.

The book's greatest flaw is its caricature of Churchill as a devious, bullying, embittered, racist warmonger who thrilled at firebombing civilians.

Gandhi emerges as a pacifist counterpoint to the flawed Allied leaders. But Hitler had already demonstrated pacifism's futility. With his animal-like instinct for the scent of weakness and fear, the Nazi leader had been emboldened by British appeasement over Czechoslovakia.

Human Smoke is not without merit. Brilliantly conceived without chapters, the narrative consists of more than 1,000 vignettes (most no longer than a paragraph or two) taken from original sources — particularly period newspaper accounts — arranged chronologically. The result is a gripping "you are there" assemblage of spare prose; an increasing sense of foreboding; and a catalog of human folly, greed, suffering, evil and courage.

But if Baker really believes that we should have never fought the Second World War, that Churchill and Hitler were equally culpable, and that the war helped no one, then Human Smoke is terribly, even monstrously wrong. Oddly, the book's very title undercuts Baker's thesis. When one of Hitler's generals saw flakes of ash floating over Auschwitz, he called it "human smoke." If the pure evil that lit that unholy fire were not worth fighting, then nothing is. Ever.

James L. Swanson is the author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer.

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