A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

The answer is simple. Adolf Hitler took a huge gamble….and lost. For the first two years of the Second World War, Hitler’s policy toward the U.S. was to hope that isolationism, anti-British sentiment in certain segments of the American public, and internal divisions would keep President Franklin D. Roosevelt too busy to enter the conflict before he had conquered the Soviet Union. He may have believed that FDR, who was clearly a supporter of Great Britain, would lose the 1940 Presidential election to a candidate who would be more accommodating to German hegemony in Europe. Hitler was none too thrilled when the Roosevelt Administration and a bipartisan Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act and sent the U.S. Navy to escort convoys as far as Iceland. But even when this led to an undeclared naval war in the Atlantic, the German dictator still held off from declaring war on America. Why? Partly because Hitler suspected that it would take the

What is a good counter-argument to “the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened if the Jews had guns”? The best counter-argument is this: Even if thousands of Jews had access to rifles, shotguns, and pistols of the era, they still would not have defeated professionally trained, professionally-led mechanized German forces. It’s elementary. The Germans would have made mincemeat of a Jewish militia. They would have suffered losses, as they certainly did during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of April 1943. But the Germans had tanks, planes, armored vehicles, and heavy artillery. The Jews did not. Also, consider: the victims of the Holocaust were not exclusively young men of military age in good health with access to firearms. They were civilians, and millions of them were elderly, children, and women. And it’s not like they had the ways and means to organize and arm themselves to form an organized resistance in several European nations occupied by the Germans and other Axis powers. That’s wh

Cover for the 1993 paperback edition. (C) 1993 HarTorch Books On May 26, 1992, Random House published the U.S. edition of Fatherland, the debut of novelist Robert Harris, formerly a writer and editor for the BBC and the newspaper The Observer. Previously known for his non-fiction works ( Gotcha! The Government, the Media, and the Falklands Crisis and Selling Hitler ), Harris went on to become aa author of novels, most of them which have historical themes. An "alternate history" work along the lines of Alfred Coppel's The Burning Mountain: A Novel of the Invasion of Japan, Fatherland depicts a dystopian version of Germany in 1964 as the victor of World War II in Europe. Set between April 14-20 in 1964, Fatherland begins with a murder investigation. Berlin Kriminalpolizei (Kripo) detective Xavier March is called to the shores of the Havel River on the outskirts of Hitler's redesigned (by his favorite architect, Albert Speer) capital of Berlin. A corpse of an elder

The term “greatest generation” used to smack of journalistic hyperbole or nationalistic jingoism, but the more I read the works of Stephen E. Ambrose ( D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, Band of Brothers ) or watch such classic documentaries as The War: A Film by Ken Burns and The World at War , the more I am inclined to agree with Tom Brokaw's use of that term to describe the men and women who came of age in the 1930s and '40s and created modern America. Brokaw, one of America's best television journalists and the former anchor of NBC's Nightly News, not only coined the phrase when he wrote The Greatest Generation; he backs it up in   his fascinating and inspiring collection of personality profiles of men and women, some famous (Bob Dole, Julia Child, George H.W. Bush), some not-so-famous but prominent (Norman Mineta, Daniel Inouye), and some neither prominent nor famous yet vitally essential (Leonard Lomell, Jeanette Gagne Norton) who e

Why didn’t the Western Allies invade France via Spain and avoid the fortified beaches on the Normandy coast? The quickest way to victory is to invade Northern France, then liberate Belgium and cross the border into Germany proper. There were many different factors involved, including the reality that Spain was officially neutral (albeit somewhat sympathetic toward the Third Reich). The main  military  reasons why the Allies didn’t invade France via a Spanish “back door,” of course, were  geography  and  logistics. Keep in mind that the primary proponents of the cross-Channel attack were the American commanders, Gen. George C. Marshall and his protege, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. They were of the opinion that the only way to defeat Nazi Germany was to land in France and drive directly into the Reich as quickly as the Allies’ resources would permit. The British, on the other hand, preferred an indirect peripheral approach instead of a head-to-head confrontation in the fields

American military history - as well as that of our adversaries - is full of controversies. And even though the Second World War is a rare case where the morality of the Allied cause is indisputable, the nature of the conflict and the fateful decisions made by the Axis and Allies still stir up heated debates about how it was fought - and how it was brought to an end. As historian Richard B. Frank writes in his introduction to Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, "[h]ow World War II ended in the Pacific remains one of the great controversies in American - and Japanese - history. At the center of this controversy is the atomic bomb. Indeed, almost all accounts of this period position atomic weaponry as the hub around which other considerations orbit. This approach, however, profoundly fails to recreate history as it originally unfolded." As a result of this fixation with the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a mythology has been created in both the U

Was Operation Market-Garden, one of the largest airborne operations ever mounted, doomed to fail at the start? Operation Market-Garden, along with the Battle of the Huertgen Forest, was one of the least well-conceived military operations carried out by the Allies in the Western Front. It’s all a question of bridges….. Market-Garden was the brainchild of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, who had won renown as the victor of the Second Battle of El Alamein (October 23-November 11, 1942), where he commanded the British Eighth Army. Known as “Monty” by his many admirers and detractors, in 1944 he was Britain’s most popular general due to his victories over Field Marshal Erwin “the Desert Fox” Rommel in North Africa, his successes in the ensuing invasions of Sicily and Italy, and for his handling of Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, on June 6, 1944 and afterwards. A veteran of World War I, Monty was a firm believer in training, planning, and carefully planned “se

It is  July, 1945: As the scientists and military men who have built the atomic bomb prepare to test the ultimate weapon, an unexpected thunderstorm arrives at the Trinity test site near Los Alamos, N.M. Lightning strikes the tower where the first bomb -- code named "Fat Man" -- is tethered, and in a literal flash, history is changed.  There are still two nuclear weapons left, but until the more complex plutonium bomb can be tested, their use is postponed until 1946. In the meantime, the conventional operation of the Japanese home islands, code named DOWNFALL, is launched as scheduled on Nov. 1, 1945. With this almost Shakespearean touch, novelist and World War II veteran Alfred Coppel ( Thirty Four East, The Dragon ) begins his "what-if" account of the invasion of Japan in 1945 and 1946. Instead of covering the entire two-part campaign (OLYMPIC, the landing on Kyushu, and CORONET, the final landing on Honshu) in the main body of The Burning Mountain , C

(C) 2007 Random House/Vintage In 2007, three years after the publication of Max Hastings’ “Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-1945,” the British imprint HarperPress published a companion volume about the end of World War II in the Pacific, “Nemesis: The Battle for Japan 1944-1945.” Like its predecessor set in the European Theater of Operations (ETO), “Nemesis” is an examination of the various military and political maneuvers that led to the Allied (primarily American) victory against the Japanese Empire during the war’s closing months. When Knopf, Hastings’ U.S. publisher, released the book for the American market as “Retribution: The Battle for Japan 1944-1945.” In this highly readable 688-page tome, Hastings depicts the earthshaking events that led to Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War in vivid prose and clear-eyed analysis of the various campaigns and battles that culminated with the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hastings sets up his Pacific War chessboa

I first played  Axis & Allies  almost 30 years ago when Milton Bradley (now Avalon Hill/Hasbro) first published it as a board game. It was heavily promoted in Playboy magazine with an impressive print ad campaign.  When Hector Perez, a college buddy of mine, and I were looking for an intellectually challenging pastime, I suggested we look for a copy of  Axis & Allies . Even though it was pretty pricey for my budget ($30.00 at Toys R Us), Hector and I went "halfsies" and bought a set. We ended up playing  Axis & Allies  all afternoon and well into the night, with the Axis (under Hector's command) triumphing over the overmatched Allies (yours truly). Change the Course of History in a Few Short Hours AXIS & ALLIES is a classic game of war, economics, and strategy. Victory goes not only to the team that conquers its opponents on the field of battle, but also to the individual player who seizes the most enemy territory. Axis & Allies  has many virtues