Hitler's American Gamble
'History at its scintillating best ... hard-hitting, revelatory and superbly researched' Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny
'A rare achievement ... sure to become an instant classic' John Lewis Gaddis, Yale University
This gripping book dramatizes the extraordinarily compressed and terrifying period between the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler's declaration of war on the United States. These five days transformed much of the world and have shaped our own experience ever since.
Simms and Laderman's aim in the book is to show how this agonizing period had no inevitability about it and that innumerable outcomes were possible. Key leaders around the world were taking decisions with often poor and confused information, under overwhelming pressure and knowing that they could be facing personal and national disaster. And yet, there were also long-standing assumptions that shaped these decisions, both consciously and unconsciously.
Hitler's American Gamble is a superb work of history, both as an explanation for the course taken by the Second World War and as a study in statecraft and political choices.
Brendan Simms is Professor of the History of International Relations at the University of Cambridge. His major books include Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize), Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present, and Hitler: Only the World Was Enough.
Charlie Laderman is Senior Lecturer in International History at King's College London. He is the author of Sharing the Burden: The Armenian Question, Humanitarian Intervention and Anglo-American Visions of Global Order (shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society's Whitfield Prize in British History.)