The Decision That Cost Hitler the War - The New York Times - 0 views
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He was also sure that the United States would enter the war against him sooner or later. He thought the only solution was pre-emptive: to get control of enough oil and food from the Soviet Union to enable Germany to hold its own against Anglo-America in a long war.
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the only alternative he saw to immediate war on the United States was slow but certain strangulation at Anglo-American hands. With a nod to an epigram from A. J. P. Taylor, Simms and Laderman offer this summation: “Hitler committed suicide for fear of dying.”
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Early December 1941 is the moment of the war in which plausible alternate scenarios seemed to loom the largest
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What if Vichy France and Fascist Italy had drawn closer together in a “Latin front,” as they were discussing at the time?
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What if the Japanese had attacked the British in Malaya and Singapore but not attacked the United States?
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What if the German who spied for the Soviet Union in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, had not supplied his masters with accurate information on Japanese plans, allowing Stalin to move 20 divisions from the east and redeploy them to Moscow for the shattering counterattack of Dec. 5?
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The other thing the book does effectively is to pay careful attention to how the timing of events played out around the world, especially in the pattern of reactions to Pearl Harbor.
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One of the last surprises in this book is how many world leaders saw accurately from that moment how the future would unfold.