HITLER’S AMERICAN GAMBLE

BRENDAN SIMMS AND CHARLIE LADERMAN PEARL HARBOR AND THE GERMAN MARCH TO GLOBAL WAR

Allen Lane, 510pp, £25

‘Given the choice,’ said Arthur Herman in the Wall Street Journal, ‘Hitler always went for broke. “It’s the only call I’ll ever make,” he told Goering.’ So after Pearl Harbor he gambled that America lacked the will to fight a war on two fronts, and would offer only token support to Britain and the Soviet Union. With his troops within sight of Moscow, he declared war on America. This, say Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman, sealed his fate. Alas, they argue, it also sealed the fate of Europe’s Jews, who up until then had been held hostage. Unable to strike at America’s Jews, who he thought controlled Roosevelt, Hitler approved the Final Solution, which also, paradoxically, hampered the Nazi war effort.

Simms and Laderman concentrate on the hectic five days between Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s joining forces with Japan. ‘By unfolding the story in real time,’ said Saul David in the

Times, ‘the authors are able to emphasise the contingency of the decision-making process. But the drawback of this constantly shifting narrative – across cities and even continents – is that the reader is often left confused, even seasick from the back and forth.’

The New York Times’s Benjamin Carter Hett was more appreciative: ‘The greatest strength of this book is its success in accomplishing something supremely difficult: it reminds us how contingent even the most significant historical events can be, how many other possibilities lurked beyond the familiar ones that actually happened – and how even the greatest leaders often have only a shaky grasp of what is happening.’