Book Review: An Alternative Scenario for World War II

On December 8, 1941, the day after Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, it was not self-evident that the US would enter the war in Europe being fought between Britain and Nazi Germany.

The potent isolationist "America First" camp was reluctantly reconciled to battling Japan. They were not pacifists, and this was a war of no choice. However, nowhere was it foreordained that the US needed to go to war with Hitler. Indeed, who needed a two-front war?

British prime minister Winston Churchill was praying and lobbying for America to enter the European war because Britain was barely holding on against the Hitlerian onslaught. Recall the war began in September 1939. London and the British islands were mercilessly bombed by the Luftwaffe between July 10, 1940 – and October 31, 1940.

Despite strong isolationist opposition, since March 11, 1941, the US had been formally providing a near-bankrupt Britain with weapons. Some of which were channeled to the USSR, which since June 22, 1941, was also fighting Hitler. None of this would have been enough to turn the tide in Europe, and all sides knew this. The December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan put Lend-Lease into doubt, at least temporarily, because the US would need to focus its energies on Japan. London and Moscow would have to tread water.

As Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman remind us in their riveting Hitler's American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and the German March to Global War, it was Hitler who declared war on the US, not the other way around.

Therefore, the day that arguably deserves to go down in history is December 11, 1941, when the Nazi dictator – seeing a brief window of opportunity – made his fateful miscalculation. Only the American economic engine and the manpower of the American armed forces ensured Hitler's (and Japan's) defeat.

"The Fuhrer was convinced that 'the Jews' had suborned Roosevelt, who had manipulated the United States into such a hostile attitude toward the Reich that Germany had no choice but to declare a preemptive war," the authors argue.

By December 7, 1941, the Nazis had been waging frenzied war against the Jewish population of occupied Russia. With Hitler's declaration of war against the US, the Holocaust would now go into high gear to annihilate the Jews of western and central Europe as well. The authors remind us that on Pearl Harbor Day most European Jews were still alive. "The world war is here, and the extermination of the Jews must be the necessary consequence," Hitler told his subordinates after his December 11, 1941, declaration of war on the US.

That is the context in which the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, is best understood. This was the crucial bureaucratic planning meeting addressing the nuts and bolts details of the systematic industrial destruction of Europe's Jewish people

This book is not primarily about the Shoah, but the authors so effectively weave Hitler's twisted motivations showing how central his obsessive hatred of the Jews was to his reason for going to war and how he waged it. All his economic and diplomatic grievances against Britain and the US interlocked with his warped belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.

History is not linear, and nothing is foretold – it only appears orderly or sensible after the fact. Had Hitler not declared war on the US, the Roosevelt administration might not have found the political nerve to come to Britain's aid in WWII with boots on the ground.

Hitler's American Gamble focuses on five crucial days in the history of WWII – practically hour by hour. The book's pace is gripping, and the angle the authors take is distinctive. Highly recommended.