Charlie Laderman

This book focuses on the diplomatic and political events between 7 December 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, and 11 December, when Hitler and Mussolini declared war on the USA. There is some attention given to the events prior to December 7, and there is an appendix that briefly describes the course of the rest of the war. But this mainly is a detailed study of the events of those few days.

The narrow scope brings with it some limitations. It is not just the time window. The authors give most of their attention to the actions of politicians and diplomats. They describe the circuit of messages between Tokyo, Berlin, Rome, Moscow, Washington DC, and London in great detail, with occasional forays to other capitals. It gives good insight in how diplomacy worked, or did not work, during this crucial week. It even has some comedy value. The spectacle of Mussolini giving a brief speech just because he wanted (despite prior agreements) to send his declaration of war a few minutes before Hitler's, is characteristic for the nature of the Axis collaboration.

But in doing so, they skip rather lightly over the parallel development of industrial and strategic thinking. By doing so, they probably make history look more malleable than it was, and give themselves more leeway for "what-ifs" than they rightly deserve. For example, there is mention of Wedemeyer's "Victory Program" and its leaking to the press in July 1941, but there is no deeper discussion of how US war plans developed during 1940 and 1941, including military coordination with Britain, and matured into Rainbow Five. The Lease-Lend act plays a central part in this book, but there is no discussion of the growing industrial collaboration, such as the large orders France and Britain placed with US industry, or the British decision to hand over the design of the cavity magnetron in September 1940. The future allies were more entangled before December 11 than Simms and Laderman allow for.

The chronological sequence is carefully retraced and wisely includes events elsewhere, such as the Soviet counter-offensive before Moscow and the fatal deportation of European Jews to camps and ghettos in the east. This is a well researched book, with extensive endnotes, but the authors are perhaps a bit over-confident in bringing some aspects of the story without admitting that they are controversial, especially when it comes to the timing of Hitler's decision to murder the European Jews.

There are no surprising new discoveries here, so it doesn't contribute a lot of new insights to our understanding of the course of WWII. But it is informative.… (plus d'informations)

This was a fun read but not the book I thought it would be. I expected an analysis of the reasons Hitler chose to declare war on the U.S. What I received instead was a very well researched and engagingly presented hour-by-hour global tour through the events of Dec. 6-12, 1941.

The narrative strategy-- one chapter per day, frequent cuts from one nation to another to capture events in chronological order-- has its merits but by the third or fourth day becomes a bit repetitive. Dec. 9: British *still* worried that Lend Lease aid will be diverted to the Pacific theater. On the other hand, Profs. Sims and Laderman are telling a really good story.

The story they're not telling, however, is why Hitler decided to bring a still recalcitrant after Pearl Harbor U.S. into the European war. Their interpretation-- Hitler thought the Japanese strike gave him a window of opportunity to build a geopolitical bloc sufficiently strong to withstand American industrial might-- takes up maybe 2% of the book, and hardly the best reasoned part.

Similarly, I find unconvincing the assertion that Hitler intended merely to hold West European Jews, as opposed to their Polish and Soviet brethren, hostage to Roosevelt's behavior. The lack of supporting evidence in an otherwise well-footnoted work grounded in the latest scholarship is telling.

Even so, a good and well-researched read. Worth the time. 4 stars.… (plus d'informations)

I liked the approach, focusing on one day at a time, all around the world. The story was quite absorbing. Still, there was too much focus on the Americans, with relatively little on Germany and Japan, and next to nothing on Stalin. The book didn't really live up to its title or central argument, because there was too little information about how Hitler decided to declare war on the US.

> Negotiations effectively collapsed on November 26, 1941, when Hull handed Japanese diplomats Kichisaburo Nomura and Saburo Kurusu a list of demands. Japan, Hull insisted, must withdraw entirely from China and Indochina and abjure the Tripartite Pact. There was no time limit specified, but in the fevered atmosphere in Tokyo, Hull’s note was regarded as an “ultimatum.” Nomura believed that it made war inevitable.

> the Germans and Italians would agree that in the event of the outbreak of war between Japan and the United States, they would both immediately come to the aid of Tokyo and wage war against the Americans with all their might. Unlike the Tripartite Pact—which was defensive and only committed the contractants to come to each other’s aid if attacked by the United States—this agreement was, implicitly, offensive in nature. Moreover, it was to be kept secret and only published in the event of war, and was thus not intended to deter Roosevelt. Instead, the planned agreement was plainly intended to encourage a Japanese attack on the United States

> Senator Arthur Vandenberg ruefully remarked, “The interventionist says today—as the president virtually did in his address to the nation—‘See! This proves we were right and this war was sure to involve us.’ The non-interventionist says (and I say)—‘See! We have insisted that this course would lead to war and it has done exactly that!’”

> King realized just how significant a moment this was. His understanding of American politics meant he knew to whom the Allies should be grateful: “We have to thank Germany and Italy, not the people of the U.S. themselves for the U.S. coming into the war.”

> “When Pearl Harbor happened,” the president’s economic adviser John Kenneth Galbraith recalled, “we were desperate.… We were all in agony.” This was because he and like-minded British sympathizers feared that the administration would be “forced” by the public “to concentrate all our efforts on the Pacific, unable from then on to give more than purely peripheral help to Britain.” To the amazement of the president and his advisers, Hitler made the “truly astounding” and “totally irrational” decision to declare war on the United States. Galbraith remembered an indescribable “feeling of triumph” upon hearing the news from Berlin: “I think it saved Europe.”

> Whether Roosevelt had wanted to enter the war against Hitler as a full-scale belligerent before December 7, 1941, remains unclear. The president, in the words of Rexford G. Tugwell, one of his advisers and subsequently one of his most perceptive biographers, “deliberately concealed the processes of his mind. He would rather have posterity believe that for him everything was always plain and easy… than ever to admit to any agony of indecision.”

> Hitler also told the gauleiters of his intention to “make a clean sweep” in the “Jewish question.” He was referring to central and western European Jewry, the hostages who were now held responsible for the behavior of the United States, as the Führer had long threatened they would be. He reminded the gauleiters of his threat in 1939 to retaliate against Jewry in the event of their “plunging” Europe into war. “The world war is here,” Hitler continued, “[and] the extermination of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.”

> The American entry into the war closely coincided with the end of the German advance and the success of the Soviet counteroffensive before Moscow.… (plus d'informations)