Review by New York Times Review
HOW did the Wehrmacht, the best fighting force, lose World War II? The reader seeking the answer to this question, posed by Andrew Roberts in his splendid history, will be treated to a brilliantly clear and accessible account of the war in all of its theaters: Asian, African and European. Roberts's descriptions of soldiers and officers are masterly and humane, and his battlefield set pieces are as gripping as any I have ever read. He has visited many of the battlefields, and has an unusually good eye for detail as well as a painterly skill at physical description. (His nearly perfect sense of terrain and geography is marred only by his regrettable conflation of Russia with the Soviet Union, which leads to confusion about battlefield locations, German war aims and Soviet casualties.) He is just as much at home at sea as on land; from Midway to El Alamein his prose is unerringly precise and stirringly vivid. It is hard to imagine a better-told military history of World War II. The title of the book, "The Storm of War," conceals an answer to Roberts's central question about the reasons for the German defeat. The notion of war as a storm summons up the Nazi idea of a blitzkrieg, a lightning victory that would somehow resolve all of the political and economic problems of the German state. Yet the reference in the title is not German but British, not to Hitler but rather to Churchill, who told the House of Commons on June 4, 1940, that he had every confidence Britain could "ride out the storm of war." Lightning signals not the end but the beginning of a storm; he who escapes the flash can survive, endure, get the wind at his back and in his sails, and triumph. The Wehrmacht lost the war because the conflict was long, and it was long in part because Churchill refused to abandon the fight, but chiefly because Germany's main war aims were impossible to attain. Roberts, the author of several books of English history, maintains the tension in his narrative by suggesting that if the war had been a purely military rather than a political contest, fought without errors on the German side, then the Germans might have won. If one considers the categories of martial endeavor from bottom to top, from the bunker to Berlin, one can see what he means. The Germans enjoyed advantages in weaponry, engagement, tactics and sometimes strategy. But at the moments when strategy was linked to politics, the German advantage was lost. Hitler's war aims were vast, unrealistic and inextricably enmeshed in an ideology that celebrated destruction, above all of Jews and other racial enemies, but also of Germans when they failed to win. The quick successes in Poland in 1939 and France in 1940 convinced many of the generals that Hitler was indeed a genius. But what Hitler dreamed of was a rapid victory in the Soviet Union, which would have made Germany a great racial empire. Throughout the book, Roberts notes errors that, if avoided, might have helped the Germans to win battles and perhaps even the war itself. Hitler, he says, should have begun the war three years later than he did, in 1942 rather than 1939. He should not have allowed the British to escape at Dunkirk as France fell. He should have arranged for the Japanese to help in the invasion of the Soviet Union. Once on Soviet territory German forces should have recruited the non-Russian populations rather than repressing them, and returned farmland to peasants rather than exploiting their labor and taking their food. In September 1941, Army Group Center of the Wehrmacht should have pushed forward to Moscow rather than detouring to Kiev. Army Group South should have fought a war of maneuver rather than concentrating on Stalingrad. Inevitably, the reader of these observations will find himself posing counterfactual questions. If we agree with Roberts, as we should, that Churchill personally helped lengthen the war by keeping Britain from seeking peace terms after the fall of France, then we are also implicitly saying that, absent Churchill, peace might have been made. The war-winning alliance of the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union was sealed only in December 1941, and could not have been achieved had Britain left the war. But even if the case for Churchill shows us the importance of this implicit counterfactual, it is still unclear just how to deal with Roberts's explicit ones. Each depends upon careful judgment of what was thinkable in a given moment, and the fact that Roberts appears to use only English-language sources cuts against his ability to weigh convincingly what Hitler and other Germans considered possible. If Hitler had begun the war three years later, surely very many other things would have been different, and not all of them to his favor. In other cases, the what-if's require too much to be altered to be really useful. The reason German forces did not befriend the non-Russian minorities and assist the hungry peasantry in the Soviet Union was that they were embarked on a war of racial colonization that was meant to kill tens of millions of Jews and Slavs. In the end, as Roberts himself concludes, that is the war Hitler wanted. And as he knows, the reason Japan did not help the Germans in the Soviet Union was that Hitler did not want Japanese help. What's more, the Japanese themselves had already decided to move south into the Pacific rather than north into Siberia. Tokyo had been quite powerfully alienated from Berlin by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, in which Berlin seemed to exchange its alignment with Japan for an alliance with the Soviet Union. In other words, sometimes what appears at first to be just a matter of Hitler's own decisions in fact involves the thinking of leaders of other countries as well, which means that the exercise becomes much more complicated. Then, too, what if Poland had agreed in 1939 to join Germany in an invasion of the Soviet Union, as Hitler wanted? If Poland had allied with Germany rather than resisting, Britain and France would not have issued territorial guarantees to Poland, and would not have had their casus belli in September 1939. It is hard to imagine that Britain and France would have declared war on Germany and Poland in order to save the Soviet Union. If Poland's armies had joined with Germany's, the starting line for the invasion would have been farther east than it was in June 1941, and Japan might have joined in, which would have forced some of the Red Army divisions that defended Moscow to remain in the Far East. Moscow might have been attained. In this scenario, there is no Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and thus no alienation of Japan from Germany. In that case, no Pearl Harbor, and no American involvement. What World War II becomes is a German-Polish-Japanese victory over the Soviet Union. That, by the way, was precisely the scenario that Stalin feared. Whether they admit it or not, every historian reasons with what-if's. Their value is that they remind us of what we might otherwise take for granted: in this case, that Poland resisted Germany, thus beginning World War II as we know it, and as Roberts beautifully describes it. Though the counterfactuals in Roberts's conclusion provoke thought, the real interest of his book resides in its robustly conventional virtues - scholarly dedication to the sources, humane identification with the soldiers and remarkably effective prose. If the war had been a purely military rather than a political contest, the Germans might have won. German soldiers surrendering to the Russians in late 1941. Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, is the author, most recently, of "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 19, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
In a summary narrative of WWII, Roberts analyzes the result of the war by centering on Adolf Hitler's qualities as a strategist. This approach entails considering the dictator's critical wartime decisions and collaterally examining the military advice he received as the war reversed from apparent victory in 1940 to inexorable defeat in 1945. Roberts labels as blunders orders (e.g., to invade the Soviet Union before beating Britain) originating either in Nazi ideology or in Hitler's front-line experiences in WWI. Further, Roberts eviscerates postwar self-exculpations by surviving German generals, rebuking their blame-shifting by pointing out their support for Hitler's military mistakes and their involvement in his projects of genocide. Apart from the focus on Hitler, Roberts' recounting of WWII reflects a seasoned historian's astute grasp of campaigns and leaders in Europe and the Pacific, of armaments, and of the war's numbing toll of 50 million dead, which he humanizes in vignettes of soldiers and civilians. Arguing fluidly and forcefully, Roberts knowledgeably interprets the global conflict for a general audience.--Taylor, Gilber. Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This is history as it should be written. Award-winning historian Roberts, a master storyteller, combines a comprehensive command of sources, a sophisticated analytical dimension, and fingertip balance between great events and their personal dimensions. At the center of this "world-historical global cataclysm" was Adolf Hitler. Roberts presents the war as defined by Hitler's mistakes: "so heinous that he should have committed suicide out of sheer embarrassment...." Roberts (Masters and Commanders) says Hitler started the war before Germany was ready. He waged it with resources too limited for his grandiose objectives. He administered it through policies that made the Reich an enduring stench in the nostrils. Japan's war in the Pacific was no less ugly. Yet defeating the Axis required the strengths of three great powers. Roberts describes an Allied strategy shaped by the necessity of developing armed forces to match their foes. Britain kept the field in the war's darkest days. The U.S.S.R. drowned the Reich in "oceans of blood." America provided machines, money, and manpower-over 16 million in uniform. These synergized efforts were sufficient-barely sufficient, says Roberts. At every turn contingencies shaped outcomes that might have been very different absent the skill, will, and desperation demonstrated by the Grand Coalition. 4 pages of b&w photos; maps. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Roberts (Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945) gives readers a new, well-written retelling of the spectacular ebb and flow of World War II, mainly analyzing the European war, particularly German operations and Allied reactions. In some ways this is a psychological study of the various leaders. Roberts blames Hitler (rather than German army leaders) for the Axis defeat and argues that his obsessive Nazi ideology lead to disastrous military decisions. However, Roberts takes the German military leaders to task for not standing up to their pathological leader. Had Hitler let his generals do their job, the war would have lasted longer. Whether or not Germany could have won, it might have avoided total defeat. Roberts concludes that Britain, America, and the USSR needed one another to gain victory. A well-sourced and well-told introduction for general readers that will also be enjoyed by those in the know. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A comprehensive, insightful one-volume study of World War II that relentlessly pursues the question: Why didn't the Axis win?British historian Roberts (Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 19411945, 2009, etc.) captures the vigorous momentum undertaken by Hitler when it seemed to the world that the Nazi engine could not be stopped. Hitler was a devout student of military history, and the use of tactical surprise was carried out with repeated stunning success. Yetand here Roberts returns frequentlythere were crucial mistakes: Hitler's halt order given at Dunkirk on May 24, 1940, allowed the British Army to flee by sea; his inability to "grasp the fundamental principles of air warfare" over the English Channel led to the defeat in the Battle of Britain; he departed from the strategic principle of "concentration" by embarking on a two-front war; he resolved to invade Russia, despite the historical evidence of this folly and the reservations of his own general, in order to fulfill the Nazi worldview; and the subsequent harsh treatment of the captured ethnic groups in Russia sealed resistance to the Nazis. In the excellent chapter titled "The Everlasting Shame of Mankind," Roberts cogently analyzes the Nazi policy and system of extermination. Other important chapters treat the "Tokyo Typhoon," and battles at Midway, El Alamein, Stalingrad and Sicily; the cracking of the Enigma code; and the controversial uses by the Allies of carpet bombing and the atomic bomb. The author masterly shows how the Allied victory was never assured, while the Nazi defeat was the result, first and foremost, of its pernicious ideology.An energetic, elegant synthesis of enormous researchwith lots of maps!that will prove a valuable resource for students of European history.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
