Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941
Ian Kershaw
Language: English
Pages: 672
ISBN: 0143113720
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The newest immensely original undertaking from the historian who gave us the defining two-volume portrait of Hitler, Fateful Choices puts Ian Kershaw?s analytical and storytelling gifts on dazzling display. From May 1940 to December 1941, the leaders of the world?s six major powers made a series of related decisions that determined the final outcome of World War II and shaped the course of human destiny. As the author examines the connected stories of these profound choices, he restores a sense of drama and contingency to this pivotal moment, producing one of the freshest, most important books on World War II in years?one with powerful contemporary relevance.
Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan
Isaac's Army: A Story of Courage and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland
The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (The Liberation Trilogy, Volume 3)
the party and acted upon by its chosen organs, the Central Committee and the Politburo’.24 But by the time the Second World War began, this had long been the most blatant of fictions. The Central Committee, the party’s sovereign body, had for years been no more than a sham. Its membership had swollen since Lenin’s day (when it had comprised forty-six voting and non-voting members), and the frequency of its meetings had declined. It had become, in fact, a vehicle entirely controlled by Stalin and
cruelly, was far from ready to counter the threat. In the wake of the disastrous showing in the Winter War, steps were taken to adjust as far as possible to the new situation. The pace of rearmament was sharply stepped up. Workers were subjected to even more draconian labour discipline than had previously existed in order to increase arms production. The armed forces were reorganized as some purged officers returned and the next generation of commanders (some to gain fame during the coming years)
him a reason for war. He was not yet ready for it, but ‘it will come to war with the United States one way or the other’, he remarked. Roosevelt, and the Jewish financiers behind him, worried about their losses if Germany should win the war, would see to that. His only regret, Hitler went on, was that he still had no aircraft capable of bombing American cities. He would happily hand out such a lesson to the American Jews. The Lend-Lease Act had brought additional problems, but these could be
her to join the war even if Japan, not the United States, launched the attack. More by good luck than good judgement this agreement had still not been signed when the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. Hitler was not obliged, therefore, by the Tripartite Pact or any other treaty to do anything at all. He had what he wanted: Japan’s engagement in war against the United States in the Pacific. He could have been content with the presumption that, through the godsend of Pearl Harbor, America would have her
appears to be the case from the suggestion that his decision was puzzling? We need to return for a moment to the place of the United States in his developing war strategy in 1940–41. He was receiving mainly reliable information from General Bötticher, his well-informed military attaché in Washington, about the pace of American rearmament. But Bötticher misled Hitler in two ways. First, he overrated the importance of the Pacific in American overall strategy, downplaying the commitment to the war
