Hitler's American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and the German March to Global War

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Most Americans, if asked, would probably say that Franklin Roosevelt declared war on Nazi Germany, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. Unlike its enemies in Europe and its potential Japanese antagonist in Asia, Britain faced having to fight across two continents and two giant oceans. Todman details, from 1939 to 1941, “British strength determined, for the last time, the future of the world. As the world descended into a “truly global war,” Britain, though still indispensable to the fight against the Axis, was forced to confront its loss of global pre-eminence, not to its enemies, but to its new superpower allies.

‘Hitler’s American Gamble’ Review: The Mistake That Changed

By kayoing Britain and quickly Nazifying Western Europe, the former corporal theorized, the Reich could steel its forces to counter whatever the world’s largest industrial power might muster as a cross-ocean counter punch. His book Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta and Atlanta Remade Professional Sports is available from the University of Nebraska Press. To this list add Brendan Simms’s and Charlie Laderman’s similarly excellent Hitler’s American Gamble. The Führer was betting America would not be able to ramp up its war machine and continue to maintain the flow of Lend-Lease materiél, initially to Britain and then to the USSR. Yet none was more pivotal than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which brought the United States into the war and ultimately doomed the Axis powers to defeat.There were many hinge moments in the Second World War: Hitler’s decision to invade Russia in 1941, the Battles of Midway and Stalingrad in 1942 and D-Day in 1944. To understand the complex and precarious position in which Britain found itself in late 1941, the first volume of Daniel Todman’s “Britain’s War” is essential reading. Beefing with the Americans turned out to be Hitler’s ad hoc version of the Kaiser’s Schlieffen Plan of a quarter century before. Gamble’s dissection of December 1941 is unquestionably one of the most compelling and eye-opening monographs on World War II in recent memory.

Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to

He expected a shortfall that would sap British capacity to repel German assaults and force the island nation to submit. The coauthors offer a gripping blow-by-blow of the five-day span between Pearl Harbor and Germany’s December 12, 1941, declaration of war on the United States. A fantastic new crop of revisionist histories focused on World War II’s staggered beginnings and endings is adding nuance to scholarly and popular understanding of the global conflict. The assumption is that the US was bound to fight Germany from the moment Japan launched its pre-emptive strike. Clayton Trutor (11/1/2023) Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War.

Yet the resources on which its population depended to live and its armed forces depended to fight came from distant colonies and, increasingly, the U. Marc Gallachio’s 2020 Unconditional presents the intense debates across Washington, DC, on how to end the war in the Pacific as a durable triumph of liberal internationalism over historical American anti-interventionism. It ranges across the British Empire and is as attentive to social history and the lives of ordinary people as it is to high politics and grand strategy. The war declaration ranks as Hitler’s worst strategic blunder—even worse than his decision to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941, when he pitted the Wehrmacht against an opponent with much greater manpower reserves and strategic depth. Since we were at war with imperial Japan, the logic would run, we were obliged to be at war with Japan’s Axis ally.

Best: Books on the Global March to War - WSJ Five Best: Books on the Global March to War - WSJ

In fact, it was Adolf Hitler who declared war on the United States—four days after Pearl Harbor, on Dec. Frederick Taylor’s 2020 book 1939 addresses extraordinary efforts made by many European leaders and diplomats to avoid another world war. It didn’t work out that way, in large part because the Allies did a remarkable job of coordinating their efforts while the Axis powers failed at forging a global strategy.

Each for its own reasons, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and Japan eagerly sought Germany’s entry into a shooting war with the United States. com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 25,000 articles originally published in our nine magazines. In retrospect, many parties to the larger conflict, particularly those taking the American side, have cast American participation in a multi-theater war against the Axis as inevitable.