Master and Commanders

Master and Commanders
By Andrew Roberts

This book is an analysis of the prime movers in WWII strategy for the allies. Chief among them were Franklin D. Roosevelt and George C. Marshall for the Americans and Winston Churchill and Sir Allen Brooke for the British. The first question I raised in reading the inside of the jacket cover was who is Brooke? I found out five hundred plus pages later. The author does a convincing job in portraying Sir Allen Brooke as the grand master who got things done in spite of his boss, Sir Winston Churchill. While I give praise to the character the author builds in Brooke, I disparage the character built in Churchill. Having been the benefactor of reading Churchill’s accounts that are backed by a plethora of correspondence with key players of the war, I completed the book prepared to defend Churchill against yet another critic with a skewed opinion based in assorted fact, standing in shallow and murky water.

Aside from character building, which the author believes was an essential ingredient to decision making on a strategic level, the strategic planning of every Allied initiative are discussed in detail, where the page count of five-hundred-eighty-four was its only limitation. As the chronology progressed through time, I could not help but asking myself about Stalin and Hitler. In 1941 Roosevelt characterized the situation where ‘the principle objective was to help Russia,’ since ‘It must be constantly reiterated that Russian armies are killing more Germans and destroying more Axis material than all the twenty-five United Nations put together.

Through much of the war, the prevailing strategy seemed to be more the failure of Hitler’s strategy than the brilliance of any of the allied Commanders. As I closed the back cover of his book, I wrote a big question mark on my reading list. I have read in many accounting at surface level description of the inner works of the Hitler command, at least from a resulting decision perspective. But I have yet to read a comparable accounting of equal measure specifically from the German side, where Hitler’s strategy trumped his generals. I have learned that there was great disagreement, but how is it that the strategy that told the fate of this world conflict was really a losing strategy as opposed to a winning strategy and why have we left the details to that question uncovered? I generally understand that the western leaders drew a strategy from consensus, while Hitler dictated a strategy against the advice of clearer thinking Generals, excluding Goering. I ask only because I am ignorant to any book on such a theme.


As the Grand Strategy was taking its form, there was an overriding idea that it should be a Germany first strategy. This strategy was largely British driven and bought in to because the Americans were of a junior partner status and did not as well have a better strategy. While this strategy prevailed it was periodically tested as Japan drew the United States in to the war. The timing of Germany first seems to have been controversial throughout the war. Intervening events and competing strategies were played out. In the fog of a couple hundred pages it seems that the Russian’s advance across eastern Europe post Stalingrad, and Hitler strategy held sway over the timing than anything else, including victories in Africa. I am once again not certain that Stalin and Hitler, though little was written between the covers, should not have had their pictures on the cover of this book. While the book did much in terms of the timing of the Normandy invasion, Operation Overlord, It seems that the narrow one tracked thinking of Marshal and Eisenhower, borne in classic Clauswitzian military mentality, forced an invasion that cost millions of lives and only got the Allies to Berlin after the Russians.

And finally I must be critical be critical of yet another author’s inability to see a folly of strategy that led to a Russian victory of WWII and a postponement of the Allied victory, where victory is defined by the liberation of Europe, that had to wait 45 years for the end of the Cold War. I say this because riddled throughout this book are arguments between Brooke and Churchill and then between the British and the Americans. In all arguments the author goes through pains to color Churchill as the cigar smoking, drunken strategy zealot, and in that course clouded his vision to draw that reality to the forefront is fogged over. The big decision to attack Germany from the beaches of Normandy, as we did, or to have attacked the Germans from the Italian front was a vexing intrigue on many levels, in the strategy for the race to Berlin. It was a protracted debate that could only have been equaled by the Germany First debate. All these debates carried the background references of each of the participants to readings of past great war strategies where the decision makers banked their views upon.

Here is my argument on both who the Masters and Commanders are, and what was the winning strategy. The early strategy was clearly a counter strategy to anything Hitler had already accomplished. The Brits when in to North Africa first because it was their only option at the time and second then needed to shore up their empire along what I refer to as the English Tierra; the arc from the horn of Africa through the Middle East down to India and through to Singapore ending at Australia. This was the heart of the English Empire and thus a worth prize to protect. Meanwhile the Americans agreed to participate merely because they had to do something of consequence to keep the American people bought in to the war effort. Meanwhile the Americans were formulating a Clausweitizian front across the same Channel that the Germans failed to see through in 1940. To think this massive attack could overshadow the wisdom of an assault from already conquered shores in Italy can only be rationalized by weak arguments provided both the actors of the book and the author. One can only wonder that if half the Herculean effort applied in Normandy was applied to the Ljubljana gap between Yugoslavia and Italy, the Allies could have first had an easier and shorter route to Berlin and second have precluded the Russians of their land grab of eastern Europe which set the stage for a forty-five year long Cold War.

I don’t know whether to compliment or criticize Andrew Roberts for his effort. There is enough granularity in this snap shot of history to reveal an alternative ending to World War Two, if only the masters and Commanders under the American flag had paid closer attention to Britain and namely Churchill. Roberts delivers this enlightenment through first person views and his narrative of the events. Yet he camouflages this nugget of insight at an alternative ending with unnecessary coloring of Churchill as a reckless egomaniac. In this review I interlace ‘My Comments’ with pertinent bibliography notes to demonstrate how the enlightenment makes itself apparent, in the shadow of ridicule of one of the most important men of the twentieth century.

Notes

Page 24: …it was at Forth Benning, in Georgia for five years head of infantry school , that Marshall showed his capacities as a reformer. His experience of the later stages of the Great War had convinced him that, in any future conflict, officers would not be able to wait for perfect orders written out over four pages of single-spaced foolscap sheet, such as the ones GHQ had provided then, especially with un reliable intelligence reports that might be expected from a fast moving battlefield.

Page 26/26: In July 1938….Marshall was ordered to Washington DC to become assistant chief of staff in the War Plans Division of the War Department. This was a key position, overseeing all future offensive operations of the United States. Three months later and a fortnight after the Munich Agreement, he was appointed chief of staff. It was In that post that he attended a conference at the White House on November 14, 1938 to discuss the Presidents plans to build fifteen thousand war plans

According to Arnold’s notes of the White House meeting the President did most of the talking, emphasizing that ideally he would have liked to build twenty thousand warplanes and create an annual capacity for twenty-four thousand, but acknowledged that this would be cut in half by Congress.

Page 27: Marshall well understood Roosevelt’s way of suborning people in this way, and refused to be drawn in to it. As chief of staff he didn’t visit Roosevelt’s country estate in Hyde Park (ever), saying that he found informal conversation with the President would get you ion trouble.

In this paragraph is an interesting end note: (it was suspected in the Churchill family that Marshall disapproved on moral grounds of the President’s affair with Lucy Mercer Rutherford.) This is not common knowledge in 2010.

Page 33: Whether Marshall had a “feel” for operations and a sense of strategy is a central question that this book will seek to answer.

Page 37: The BEF escaped destruction of Dunkrik. Even Pownall admitted in June 1946 that Brooke ‘came out trumps’. As we shall see, the experience of the campaign taught Brooke a number of important lessons about how he believed the rest of the war should be fought, lessons that diverged sharply from te ones Marshall had learned at Fort Leavenworth, Chaimount and Fort Benning.

Page 42 On 11 October 1940, staying at Chequers for the weekend, Churchill and Brooke disagreed over the use being made of the eccentric but occasionally brilliant Major-General Percy Hobart, who was then languishing as a lance-corporal in the Home Guard due to the War Office’s extreme inclination to employ him. Brooke said he was too wild , recorded Colville but ‘Winston reminded him of the Wolfe standing on a chair in front of Chatham brandishing a sword. “ You cant expect, he said “to have the genius type with conventional copy-book Style” That exchange could almost be taken as a template for their future relationship.

My comment: At this point I notice the difference in the dynamics between Marshall and Roosevelt and Brooke and Churchill. Where Marshall was smart enough to keep his boss at arms length, Brooke was not. In this case where Brooke challenged Churchill, even his own command was hesitant to use him militarily. Thus leaving a little grandstanding as a viable play to inspire the English people. Churchill used all the faculties of his people, ( and other Presidents, people) where Brooke’s vision was strictly military.

Page 45: The adoption of the memorandum, first by Marshall and then by Rossevelt- though not in writing – and then by the US Joint Planning Committee, meant that te United States had an outline plan to use durning the secret, arm'-length Anglo- American Staff talks, code named ABC-I which were about to start. No such talks could be organized before Roosevelt’s third inauguration on 20 January 1941, because during the election campaign he had promised American parents that ‘Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.’

Page 52: In a nine page hand written letter on 4 August, 1940 to his cousin and confidante Margaret ‘Daisy’ Suckley, who lived close to him in Dutchess County, New York, Roosevelt described how he had been secretly transferred from his presidential yacht the Potomac on to the heavy cruiser USS Augusta, and, with another cruiser and five destroyers as escort had made his way to Newfoundland. The Potomac had continued to fly his presidential flag once he’d left her, in order to maintain deception: “even at my ripe old age I feel the thrill in making a getaway, especially from the American Press.”

Page 68: The Grand Strategy Arcadia (1940) agreed was summarized in a document written by Churchill entitled WW1, which was to represent the Allies overall position until superseded by another document, CCS 94 in August 1942. This enshrined the concept of Germany first.

Page 69: Eisenhower agreed with Admiral Stark’s original assessment in ‘Plan Dog’ that the defeat of Germany would make the defeat of Japan a matter of time, whereas the defeat of Japan would not materially weaken Germany.

Page 77: Marshall’s institution of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could not, however, wholly alter the disorganization in the American system which Jacob had commented on so tartly. Roosevelt’s desire to retain power closely in his own hands, and to keep Administration officials competing for his favor, les him to adopt methods that seem indescribably Byzantine, even administratively dysfunctional, to modern eyes.

Page 91: On January 18 1942, in a memorandum to Roosevelt, Marshall identified what was for Brooke also a key aspect of the war, and one that the British believed justified the Gymnast operation. ‘The future effort of the Army is dependent on shipping, he wrote. ‘More shipping than is now insight is essential if the national war effort is not neutralized to a serious extent.’ Marshall estimated that by December 1942 there would be 1.8 million American troops ready for over seas service and by the end of 1943 about 3.5 million.

Page 110: Eden wanted to abolish the Defence Committee altogether, but recorded that Churchill was ‘obstinate about it, and maintains that it is better to have one place where service members have a show’ Eden thought that since it effected little and tended to attract criticism in parliament, it ought to go, but Churchill spotted that is would be better for an important committee to attract criticism than the real power-house of the war which were the Staff Conferences – meanwhile Ismay was the oil-can that greased the relationship between Churchill and Brooke.’ Says General Fraser – much as Dill oiled that between Brooke and Marshall.

Page 111: Dining with John Kennedy at the Savoy Grill on 4 June 1942, Ismay said Churchill ‘needs someone to use as a whipping boy on whom to blow off steam’ and he was ‘quite frank in admitting this as his chief function’ He added that someone with sounder and stronger judgment could hold his job it would be doubtless better, but chances are that such a person would soon be thrown out.’ Kennedy concluded that he would never have Ismay’s job ‘for anything in the world.’

Page 117: Like Brooke, Kennedy considered the bombing campaign against Germany ‘ineffective’ and ‘beyond our means.’ He repeated to his diary the views he injudiciously blurted out at Chequers the previous year, that if it came to worst, ‘It is certainly more important to hold India and Ceylon than to hang on in Egypt. We are getting very little for our effort in the Middle East and certainly not enough to compensate for serious losses of positions in the Indian Ocean. After hearing Churchill’s views on Singapore, Kennedy reiterated: ‘It is wrong to depend so much on one man who is so temperamental, so lacking in strategical knowledge and in judgment, despite his other great qualities.’ This summed up the view of Churchill that was held most universally among senior British Planners and especially Brooke., though none failed to praise those ‘the great qualities’, principally the fillip he gave national morale.

Page 119: Brooke’s adamant opposition to an early Second Front alienated plenty of liberal intellectuals …..who believed that Marshall’s judgment was ultimately better that Churchill’s and far ahead of General Brooke…whose judgment about Russia, was abysmal. In fact had a far more hard-headed attitude towards the Russians, who had until very recently been allies of the Nazis and had been supplying them with grain and oil right up to the night of Barbarossa was launched…Brooke was rather impatient with our attitude of giving everything Russians ask and getting nothing in return. Pf course the Russians are fighting - but for themselves and not for us.

Page 140: Brooke’s experiences in France in the two BEF expeditions of 1940 had a deciding influence on the assumptions underlying his formulation of grand strategy in the Second World War, principally in convincing him that the French could not be relied upon and that the Germans were very formidable opponents indeed.

Page 141: According to Hopkin’s notes of the trip, from 4p.m. to 6p.m. Marshall presented the broad outlines of his Memorandum to Churchill’s, who ‘indicated that he had told the Chiefs of Staff that, in spite of all the difficulties, he was prepared to go along.’ Churchill repeated the objections that the Chiefs of Staff had put, ‘all of which he had heard in Washington before coming to England’. Marshall was more optimistic about the interview than Hopkins, thinking that ‘Churchill went a long way and he Marshall, expected far more resistance than he got..

What Hopkins guessed, but Marshall seems not to have, is that Churchill privately opposed an early Roundup and Sledgehammer just as much as Brooke.

Page 155: Brooke then stated unequivocally that ‘The Chiefs of Staff entirely agreed that Germany was the real enemy. At the same time, it was essential to hold Japanese and ensure that there was no junction between tem and t Germans. He conjured up the by now familiar lurid scenario in which the Japanese won control of the Indian Ocean, allowing the Middle East to be gravely threatened and oil supplies prevented from going though the Persian Gulf. Under those circumstances, Germany would seize Persia’s oil, the southern route to Russia would be cut off, and Turkey would be isolated, destroying any hope of her joining the Allies, while Germany and Japan could exchange any hardware they needed

Page 156: Of Brooke he explained that the Germany First policy had been adopted because the US High Command wanted to fight on land, at sea, and in the air, as well as in the most useful place, and in the place where they could attain superiority, and they were desirous above all of joining in an enterprise with the British. He might have been more honest if less comradely, if he added that Roosevelt and Marshall realized how more difficult the task would be if Britain lost to Germany darning the time that it took for the United States to defeat Japan.

Page 170: ‘On 13 January last’ Marshall wrote to Roosevelt, on 5 May, ‘you authorized an increase in the enlisted strength of the Army to 3.6 million by 31 December 1942. Authorization for additional men in 1942 is now essential to out plans.’ In the intervening four months the Army had to garrison the lines of communication to Australia, and rush reinforcements to Hawaii, Alaska, and Panama.

Page 171: Roosevelt characterized the recapture of previously British- and Dutch-owned islands as ‘premature’. In the Near East and East African theaters, the responsibility was against the British, although America “must furnish all possible material’ in Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and the Persian Gulf. Britain and America would split responsibility for the Atlantic, while ‘The principal objective was to help Russia,’ since ‘It must be constantly reiterated that Russians armies are killing more Germans and destroying more Axis material, than all the twenty-five United Nations put together.’

Page 198. So, just as Marshall, King and Eisenhower were trying to consign Gymnast to a strategic, logistical and even ‘logical’ grave in Washington – hardly resisted by an almost equally skeptical Brooke- Churchill resurrected it at Hyde Park. In getting Roosevelt on his own there, Churchill had a considerable advantage, as ‘amateur strategist’ President tended, at least at this stage of the war, to defer to him on military matters in a way that he would not have done had Marshall been present. ‘I must emphasize’, admitted Wedemeyer, after the war.

Page 200: The American response to the news about Tobruk was instinctive, and was often later recalled with powerfully nostalgia by all Britons present. ‘For a moment or two no one spoke,’ recalled Ismay, but then the silence was broken by Roosevelt. ‘In six monosyllables he epitomized his sympathy with Churchill, his determination to do the utmost to sustain him, and his recognition that we were all in the same boat: “What can we do to help?”

Page 214: Churchill himself admitted being haunted by the ghosts of the Somme and in the Closing Ring he wrote of Roundup: “The fearful price we had to pay in human life and blood for te great offensives of the First World War was graven on my mind….

Yet is wasn’t so much getting to Passchendaele and the Somme that worried the British strategists in 1942-4 as the Dunkirk and Brest campaigns of the summer of 1940. Rommel’s and Guderian’s seemingly unstoppable blitzkrieg campaign across France featured more in their fears – especially Brooke’s and Dill’s – than the mud and blood of Flanders of a quarter century before.

Page 220: Brooke explained his view and thus his fundamental difference of view from Marshall. “ Having been forced to fight on two fronts during 1914-18 War’ he began te Germans ‘had further developed their East-West communications with double railway lines and autobahns, to meet the possibility of being again forced to fight on two frontiers. They were capable of moving some six to eight divisions…simultaneously from East to West. That the Germans had far less maneuverability ins southern Europe and the Mediterranean, where he argued the rail and road communications from northern France to southern Italy and the Mediterranean were very poor.

Page 233: ‘I have carefully your estimate of Sunday’ wrote Roosevelt to Marshall and Stimson on Tuesday 14 July, before his return to the White House the next day. “My first impression is that the [Pacific Option] is exactly what Germany hoped the United States would do following Pearl Harbor. Secondly, it does not in fact provide American troops in fighting, except in a lot of [Pacific] islands whose occupation will not affect the world situation this year or next….

Page 235: Dill also mentioned another un-welcomed fact to Churchill in his telegram, namely that the American Chiefs of Staff were reading Field Marshall Sir William Robertson’s two-volume memoir about grand strategy of the Great War, Soldiers and Statesmen, and that Marshall had sent him a copy with the third chapter of the first volume heavily annotated. Churchill would have understood immediately what that meant. Robertson, whi had been CIGS from 1915 to 1918, was a Clausewitizian, and volume I chapter III of his book covered the Dardanelles expedition. ‘An essential condition of success in war being, the concentration of effort on the decisive front, ….

Over the Dardanelles, Robertson did not deny that ‘it might be desirable to threaten interests which are of importance to the enemy, so as to oblige him to detach for their protection of force larger than te one employed making the threat, thus rendering him weaker in comparison on the decisive front,’ which was precisely Churchill’s and Brooke’s Italian strategy for 1943-4, but Marshall is unlikely to have underlined that for Dill’s attention. Much more likely candidates for annotation were Robertson’s strictures on ministers – primarily Churchill himself – who were indifferent to, or ignorant or, the disadvantages which always attend on charges of plan and t neglect to concentrate on one thing at a time’ Churchill was also criticized by name for having briefed the supreme strategy-making body, the War Council, directly, instead of allowing the Admiralty professionals to do it, ‘as was, in fact done after Churchill left the department’.

My Note: First the Clauswitzien strategy of WWI only produced an armacist and planted the seeds of the Second World War. To be direct it was a failed strategy that cost millions of lives. Of this excerpt there is far too much conjecture. First the author attempts to connect the dots of history back to the Dardanelles and pin full blame on Churchill, when other accounts find that there was nothing wring with Churchill’s strategy in the Dardanelles if only the Admiral of the Fleet at the time had sailed into the ports of a Turk army who was completely out of ammunition. Additionally in his concluding sentences to indict Churchill of over reaching his authority, the author does not concede that at the time of Churchill’s address to the War Council, that it was his place and duty to do so, regardless of future changes in structure. The author is guilty of “piling on” in wrongful criticism of a leader who with faults led the world to victory in WWII. Form this point, on through the rest of the book the reader witnesses the bias of the author. Where as the strategy unfolds Churchill’s idea of attacking Germany from the south, may have inflicted lives cost in terms of lives and blood, and as well have reached Berlin far ahead of the Russians which would have stalled the Russian land grab of which was known for forty-five years as the Eastern Bloc countries that fell under the heel of the USSR.

Page 238: On the evening of 14 July, at a meeting at No 10 Downing Street of representatives of Allied countries grandly entitled the Pacific War Council, Kennedy recorded: “Winston in his blue romper suit but with clean white shirt with cuffs…looked well and serene, lit a cigar and proceeded to give a general survey of the war, speaking slowly and without effort.”. After asking the New Zealand High Commissioner Sir William Jordan to stop taking notes because it distracted his attention, he talked of shipping losses, the efforts to sustain Russia, and the Eastern Front, and pointed out that Germans had only seventy-five days before winter fell there. He believed ‘The Japs would attack Russia when the moment came the- they would stab her in the back…. But for the moment they were gorged with their prey’.

Page 251: Eisenhower reacted somewhat melodramatically to the news, telling Butcher that Wednesday 22 July 1942 could well go down as ‘the blackest day in history’ if Russia was defeated by ‘the big Boche drive now so alarmingly under way’ and the West had done nothing to save her.

Back in Washington, Stimson insisted on seeing the standoff in terms of ‘a fatigued and defeatist government which lost her initiative, blocking the help of a young and vigorous nation whose strength had not he been tapped so much as wrecked, and Britain’s along with it. The experience of these negotiations with Marshall and King must have been rather like reliving his June 1940 conversation with Churchill at Lamans.

That day John Kennedy was given a full briefing on the negotiations by Brooke, who told him that Roosevelt had given instructions to Marshall to the effect that the American Army must get into action somewhere against the Germans and that he was to go and make plans accordingly. This is so remarkably accurate that Brooke simply must have known or at least the gist of the secret instructions that Roosevelt had given Marshall and Hopkins before they left. Had Hopkins leaked them to Churchill, who passed them on at 11:00 PM meeting at Downing Streets? However he came by the information, Brooke knew that if he stayed utterly intransigent over Sledgehammer – if he kept ‘looking into the distance’ – Marshall was under orders to finally buckle.

Page 254: Like Portal, Kennedy also thought that superior British arguments rather than presidential diktat had won the day, ‘The last week has seen a development in our planning with Americans that may govern the future outcome of the war’ he wrote.

Page 255: As so often in hard-fought compromises between Staffs m the key detail was to be found towards the end, almost in the small print. Under paragraph C subsection 4 it stated: ‘That it be understood that a commitment to [Torch] renders Roundup in all probability impracticable of successful operation in 1943 and therefore that we have defiantly accepted a defensive encircling line of action for Continental European Theater, except as to air operations and blockade.

That might sound like Brooke’s strategy, but there was a catch, pone that Michael Howard has even likened to Faustian compact made between British Chiefs of Staff and the Americans, CCS 94 seemed to imply that Churchill’s original WWI document from Arcadia Conference had now been officially superseded, and that instead of Germany First, the phrase ‘defensive encircling line of action, meant that Americans could now concentrate more on the Pacific.

My Note: seems to imply is always a warning sign that the author may be attempting to add a new color to history. Robert Andrews does this often to cast Churchill in a critical light.

Page 258: The change of Allied policy from attacking Cherbourg in France to attacking Casablanca in Africa, swiveling the whole focus of grand strategy 1,250 miles to the south, cannot have but rankled with Marshall. Even ten months later walking to a meeting together in Washington, he told Brooke: ‘I find it very hard even now not to look upon your North African strategy with jaundice eye!!’

Considering that even the US secretary for War had bet the President that the American invasion of Morocco would fail – something that would surely have forced his resignation if know publicly – there was much ground to be made up.

My Note: The reader must be very careful to note where the end quotes are and where the conjecture begins in the above second paragraph. Earlier in the book the author portrays the North African Strategy as the only one available at the time where action must be made to demonstrate deterrence and affirmative action on the Allied part. For Marshall, there could only be a tactical interpretation of the North African campaign as he was always a Clausewitz advocate and North African distracted that effort. I’ll share my views in the body conclusion.

Page 267: On Brookes decision to remain Churchill’s strategist and not assume command in the field, deferring the job to Montgomery: Brooke was not persuaded by Smuts, not least because he was a gentleman, he couldn’t bear the idea that Auchinleck ‘might think that I had come out here on purpose to work himself into his shoes!’ He thought over the offer throughout the day, but remained convinced that his decision was the correct one, and that he could ‘do more by remaining CIGS’…..we assume that politicians are driven by personal ambition, but soldiers are too, and although in career terms to swab the job of CIGS for Near East commander-in-chief might have looked like a demotion, in fact it would have afforded, Smuts intimated, a ‘wonderful future’.

Page 268: Brooke and Churchill also agreed that Alexander Should succeed Auchinleck in Cairo, Lieutenant- General Thomas Corbett and Brigadier Eric Dorman-Smith were to leave their commands altogether, and Lieutenant-General William ‘Strafer” Gott was to lead the English Army, although Brooke had misgivings about this. Yet on his way to take up his new command on the very next day, 7 August, flying the Burg el Arab to Heliopolis route, which was considered safe, Gott’s slow transport plane was shot down ‘inflames’ by a lone German fighter. Churchill and Brooke then quickly settled on the man whom Brooke had wanted originally, Lieutenant General Bernard Law Montgomery.

My note: By now the reader is cautious on an author’s bent to color history. With an agenda to criticize Churchill’s credibility, Roberts could have provided evidence as to Brookes preference of pick.. While the story may or may not an accurate reflection of Brooke’s preference, this book does not stand on its own on this point.


Page 270: Everyone cheered up once Churchill passed on to what he called operation Torch, at which Stalin ‘became intensely interested’

Page 273: On the failed Operation Jubilee : A small German convoy in the Channel alerted the shore defenses before the assault could take place, so the element of surprise was lost, yet Mountbatten ordered it to go ahead anyhow.

Although no German troops were moved from East to West as a result of the debacle, coastal defenses were massively strengthened. ‘If I had the same decision to make again,’ Mountbatten nonetheless answered, ‘I would do as I did before. It gave the Allies the priceless secret of victory.’ This is trip, unless the lesson of not attacking a well-defended town without proper intelligence and a preliminary aerial and naval bombardment is a ‘priceless secret’….Yet even as late as 2003 historians would still take Mountbatten at his word, with one writing” ‘The catastrophe provided priceless lessons for a full scale amphibious invasion”.

My note: While this time I agree with Robert’s assessment or coloring of Mountbatten’s decisions, Roberts falls prey of criticizing other historians where his narrative stands on its own. In my view Mountbatten’s strategy and tactics has not been the benefactor of history’s long view on numerous other occasions; specifically post war India.

Page 276: It was Stalingrad that finally, in Stimson’s words, ‘banished is the spectre of a German victory in Russia, which had haunted the Council table of Allies for a year and a half.’ IT also greatly reduced the likelihood of a German attack through Spain, cutting off American forces from their supply lines. Just as Wellington’s campaign in the Iberian peninsula had been small but significant “ulcer’ for Napoleon, but certainly not the Russian ‘coronary’ that destroyed him, so too the North African and Italian campaigns would be ulcerous for Hitler, but it was the Eastern Front that annihilated the Nazi dream of Lebensraum for the mater race.

My note: To my observation on the missing strategy are those of Stalin and Hitler. Each of which contributed to the outcome of the Second World War, yet over looked in this book.

Page 279 We are undertaking something of a quite desperate nature and which depends only in minor degree upon professional preparations we can make or upon the wisdom of our military decisions,’ wrote Eisenhower in his diary that week. “in a way it is like the return of Napoleon from Elba – if the guess as to psychological reaction is correct we may gain a great advantage in this war; if the guess is wrong, it would be almost certain that we would gain nothing and lose a not.’ He feared that there might be a ‘very bloody repulse’ and that Vichy France and even Spain might enter the war against the Allies.

Page 281: When Roosevelt’s cable duly arrived on Monday 31 August it caused consternation.’ I feel very strongly that the initial attacks must be made by an exclusively American ground force supported by your naval and transport and air units,’ it read. This was because Roosevelt believed that the French would offer less resistance ‘to us than they will to the British’.

Page 293: Smuts suggested that the real victory front was to be found ‘from the South not from the West’, and Churchill agreed,

Page 297: It was a magisterial rebuke, and the figures still have the power to impress. An army of fewer that two hundred thousand when the European war broke out in September 1939 would grow into one seven million – thirty-five times its size- a mere four years later. In divisional terms, the US Army had 37 trained divisions at the time of Pearl Harbor, 73 by Operation Torch, 120 by the summer of 1943 and 200 by D-Day. By contrast the British Commonwealth had seventy-five divisions by the summer of 1943 and hardly any more the nest year. Nor was the American Revolution confined to the Army; on 13 November 1942 a US shipbuilding yard built a standard 10,500-ton merchant vessel - a Liberty ship in exactly four days and fifteen hours. Two days later the ship was fully equipped and ready for service. No other country or alliance could begin to match such efficiency and productive power.

Page 299: Had the entire German and Italian army in Tunisia- approximately a quarter of a million men- not been captured, they might well have stalled the later Allied advances into southern Europe. It might be, therefore, that the very lack of early success immediately after Torch paradoxically increased the success later, given Hitler’s unwillingness to retreat even tactically, a characteristic that American strategists were about to note with glee.

Page 301: With Churchill and Brooke now tending to agree on the big issue – that the next stage in the war ought to be in the Mediterranean rather than across the Channel – Brooke allowed himself to be irritated only by small issues, such as Churchill’s love for rodomontades during meetings. At one Defense Committee with Winston holding forth, he passed a note to Grigg saying ’15 minutes gone and no work done’, which he subsequently altered to 20, 30, 35, 40 and then 45, before the real business of the beating began. ‘Winston is really stupid the way he tries his team’ concluded Kennedy after he heard this…

My comment: Other than to tarnish an otherwise brilliant performance of Churchill , the author spends too much print like above to make his disenchantment with Churchill known.

Page 303: CIGS is quite determined to go flat out in the MED recorded Kennedy

We can waste German strength there and tackle him on equal or better terms in outposts like Sardania, Sicily, tip of Italy, Crete. We cannot develop an an offensive on both fronts. The essential condition for France is still a crack in German morale and strength. Italy may be knocked out of the war by a combination of landing attacks and bombing. The Balkans are a weak spot for the Axis. If we can get near enough to bomb the Roumanian oilfields and cut the Aegean and Turkish traffic (chrome, etc) we can go far to hamstring the Germans

My comment: What is missed by the author and the western strategists is had we marched from Yugoslavia to Berlin, the Russians would not have taken that territory and we would not have had a fifty-year Cold War.

Page 311: The strategy of North Africa-Ital-France, stated the American historian Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison in an Oxford lecture series in the 1950’s ‘was a perfectly cogent and defensible strategy; but Sir Alan Brooke disclosed it only bit by bit, which naturally gave Americans the feeling that they had been had.. He cited Admiral King’s prediction that once forced to the Mediterranean, We would be forced to go on had proposed North Africa as a stepping stone to mainland Italy and the Balkans, and possibly beyond, right at the start, the Americans would never have undertaken Torch.

Page 317: Broke thought it best to put the war against Japan high on the agenda, reasoning that if Admiral King ‘was able to get everything about the pacific “off his chest”, then perhaps he ‘would take a less jaundiced view vis-à-vis the rest of the world’

Page 323: At 5:30 PM the Combined Chiefs, along with Eisenhower, Alexander and Tedder, met Roosevelt and Churchill in the first of three plenary sessions- ‘at which we did little’, recorded Brooke, ‘except that the President expressed views favoring operations in the Mediterranean’. Far from little, this was the first glimpse that as with Torch, the Americans were split over strategy, and therefore might be prevailed over isolating Marshall again. This time it would take much detailed argument, especially by Staffs, rather than the point-blank veto that Brooke had exercised in London backing July.

Page 334: When the Combined Chiefs of Staff met again at 3p, the compromise paper was accepted with only a few minor alterations. The recapture of Burma through Anakim and a south-west Pacific offensive to Rabaul and then on to Marshall and Caroline Islands would be conducted with whatever means could be spared without compromising the objective of defeating Germany.

Page346: Ian Jacob believed that being expelled from North Africa ‘would be shattering for Italians. Their vitals would be exposed to attack.’ The surrender of Italy would present Hitler with a tough choice: either to let her go or else reinforce her by taking troops from elsewhere, such as Russia and the Balkans. There was an aspect to the Fuhrer that was only just becoming apparent to the Allied High Commands: it seemed clear from the orders that he gave both to Paulus in Stalingrad and to Rommel at El Alamein (and again in Tunisia) the he could not countenance even strategically justified with drawls.

Page 347: Churchill insisted on th President being carried up on to the roof of Villa Taylor, ‘his paralyzed legs dangling like limbs of a ventriloquist’s dummy, limp and flaccid’ in the words of an on looker, and together they watched the purple mountains changing color in the setting sun. It was from that roof that Churchill painted his only picture of the war, despite taking his canvases and paint box on several trips.

Page 384: In a Cabinet discussion on war criminals on 7 July, Churchill reported that FDR [was] inclined to let our troops shoot them out of hand! ‘I suggested the United Nations [should] draw up list of fifty or so who would be declared as outlaws by the thirty-three nations. (those not on the list might be induced to a rat!) If any of these were found by advancing troops, the nearest officer of Brigade rank should call a military court to establish identity and then execute without higher military authority.’

Page 402: On Monday 16 August, Brook and Marshall returned to the Trident system of off-the-record meetings. The secretaries and Planners left the Salon Rose, and for three hours after 2:30 p.m. the Combined Chiefs undertook ‘the difficult task of finding a bridge.’ These discussions were ‘pretty frank’ with Brooke opening by saying that ‘the root of the matter was that we did not trust each other’. He went on to accuse the Americans of doubting the British commitment ‘to put our full hearts into the cross Channel operation next spring’, while their part the British were not certain that Americans ‘would not in future insist on our carrying out previous agreements irrespective of changed strategic conditions’. This was a veiled reference to the seven divisions due to be withdrawn from the Mediterranean theatre only eleven weeks hence.

Page 403: Vast amounts of construction work had to be done – hard roads, railways to beaches, exits, fuel and storage tanks, railway sidings. The amount of construction in southern England was terrific. It is interesting to note that millions of pounds were spent from early 1943 onwards, when there was only COSSAC Staff; millions spent on a plan which had not been approved

‘It was the logic of events resulting from a loss of time more than logic of argument’

Page 404: Meanwhile, Churchill was still pressing hard for an attack on the northern tip of Sumatra, code named Operation Culverin. Rather condescendingly Brooke wrote that ‘Winston…had discovers with a pair of dividers that we could bomb Singapore’ from Sumatra, ‘and he had set his heart on going there’. Brooke believed Sumatra to be unsuitable place for any long term projects against the Malay States, and told the Prime Minister at a meeting at t Citadel at noon on 19 August the ‘when he put his left foot down he should know where the right foot was going to go’. In cold black and white print, that does not look too rude, but we cannot know the tone of voice and the body language that accompanied it. The result was Churchill lost his temper completely and shook his fist in Brook’s face saying ‘I do not want any pf your long term projects that cripple initiative!

Page 419: So the meeting served no useful purpose other than blowing off ministerial steam. It was not mentioned at all in Churchill’s war memoirs, probably because he did not want readers to appreciate how doubtful he was about Overloard.. Yet he was, and so – at least on this occasion –was Brooke.

My comment: Operation Overloard was clearly from the military books and minds of the Americans. It proved to be a victory or at least in my mind we didn’t lose. It was a victory at the cost of immense loss of life. Likely more so than the strategy being argued by the British at the time; which was to advance in to Germany from the south through a landing in what was then Yugoslavia. War was won by the Russians as much as the Allies. Overloard was the seed of the Cold War. Overloard was pushed by American who buy 1944 were contributing more to the war effort and therefore carried the commanding voice, without listening to alternative strategy.

Page 427: reported by Sir Alan Lascekes: great problem at the moment is to teach th Americans that you cannot run a war by making rigir ‘lawyers’ agreements’ to carry out preconceived strategic operations at a given date (ie Overloard), but you must plan your campaign elastically and be prepared to adapt it to the tactical exigencies of the moment. They don’t seem to grasp that a paper-undertaking made in the autumn to invade Europe (or any other Continent) in the following spring may have to be modified in accordance with what the enemy does or does not do in the intervening winter.

Page 428: With only days to go before the Cairo Conference began, The British crystallized their ideas about what they wanted out of it. The main desiderata would be to continued the offensive in Italy, to increase the flow of supplies to the partisans in the Balkans, to try to induce the Balkan powers to break away from Germany, to induce Turkey to enter the war, and to accept a postponement of Overloard. Of these five British hopes only the first two were adopted.

Page 433: Roosevelt evinced yet more hostility towards Britain in the COSSAC proposals for the division of post war Germany into zones, codenamed Rankin. He believed that ‘the British wanted the north western part of Germany and would like to see the US take France and Germany south of the Mouselle River. ‘ He said ‘he he did not like that arrangement’. Other than mentioning its Roman Catholicism, the President did not explain what he had against ‘southern Germany, Baden Wurttemburg, everything south of the Rhine’, but clearly preferred America to control the Protestant north-west of the Reich The reason was doubtless because that was generally where the manufacturing industries were located.

…continued onto page 434: King added that the military plans for Overloard were too far developed to permit any changes in deployment. Roosevelt then astonishingly suggested that American forces might instead be sent around Scotland and land in northern Germany, adding that “He felt that we should get out of France and Italy as soon as possible, letting the British and the French handle their own problem together. There would definitely be a race for Berlin. We may have to put the US divisions into Berlin as soon as possible

My comment: Again we find within his own words an author taking the ever popular attack on a religious argument when he also includes the practical argument for ones desires on the spoils of war. Andrew Roberts expounded on the religious points and glossed over the practical. And you wonder why there is a popular view against religion.
Page 436: Although the British wanted an agreement on Overloard and the Mediterranean before they all me the Russians in Tehran, the Americans needed a decision on south-eat Asia immediately, but wanted to discuss Overloard and the Mediterranean only at Tehran, where the knew they would be supported by Stalin, who was desperate for Overloard as he was opposed a Western presence In the Balkans. Furthermore, Roosevelt and Marshall rated Chaing Kai-shek highly and saw China as a post-war great power, where as Churchill saw him as a peripheral figure and Brooke considered him “Evidently [had]…no grasp of war in its larger aspects…

Page 440: Roosevelt had wanted to invite Moscow to Cairo but the Russians wouldn’t meet the Chinese generalissimo for fear that it might compromise the uneasy truce the Russians maintained with Japan since 1941.

Page 444 The Russian dictator stated unequivocally that Overloard should be the overriding priority for 1944, that the Italian campaign was a mere diversion (and an unimpressive one at that); that Turkey would not enter the war so Britain’s Aegean planes were still born, and that southern France needed to be invaded before Overlord.

Page 451
Stalin promised to declare war on Japan after Germany surrendered, and to launch an offensive during Overlord to discourage the Wermacht from moving troops westwards during the initial stages.

My comment: a convenient promise by Stalin, but it is not mentioned that Stalin did not declare war on Japan, and we fought on resorting to the Atom bomb.

Page 453: The realities were spelt to Stimson by Roosevelt after Marshall had specifically refused to ask for t Overlord post: ‘The President said that he had decided on a mathematical basis that if Marshall took Overlord it would mean that Eisenhower would become Chief of Staff. Yet Eisenhower was unfamiliar with the war in the Pacific and, in Stimson’s view he ‘would be far less able than Marshall to handle the Congress’…

Page 463: Brooke added that, when he visited Italy that December, ‘The terrain defies description. It’s like the North-West Frontier: a single destroyed culvert can hold up an army for a day.’ He then went on to talk about the Germans, saying they were fighting magnificently: ‘Marvelous it is perfectly marvelous.’ Hitler’s strategy was all wrong, however, in trying to establish a front in Italy so far south while simultaneously holding Nikopol on the lower Dnieper, for “While one is on the wave of victory no one can successfully violate all the established rules of war. But when one starts to decline, one cannot violate them without disaster.

Page 476: …when the War Cabinet was informed that there could be as many as 160,000 civilian casualties as a result of bombing the French railway network prior to Overloard, Cunningham noted,’ Considerable sob stuff about children with legs blown off and blinded old ladies but nothing about saving of risk to our young soldiers landing on a hostile shore. It is of course intended to issue warnings before hand’

Page 477: From Cunningham’s journals it is evident that the Chiefs of Staff were looking towards the post-war situation, with a suspicions eye towards Russia, almost before any other British government agency or institution.

My comment: yet they insisted on a text book attack of Overlord as opposed to attacking through the Balkans.

Page 490 The day after D-Day, Alexander reported that if he were left with his twenty-seven divisions in Italy, and not lose any to Anvil, he could break through the Appennines into the Po Valley, take eighteen divisions north of Venice and force the Ljubljan Gap between Italy and northern Yugoslavia. Once there, he stated in his memoirs, the way led to Vienna, an object of great political and psychological value’. The prospect appealed to Churchill and Clark, but not very much to others…

Marshall vociferously opposed forcing Ljubljana Gap, arguing that Eisenhower needed the southern French ports so that he could deploy on a much wider front, and that the Germans would merely withdrawal from north Italy to the Alps under Alexander’s attack, which could then be held with far smaller forces.

Page 490: Churchill’s dreams of British Commonwealth forces planting Union Jack over Schonbrunn and the Hofburg before the Russians arrived in Vienna was ended by Brooke, who knew Marshall’s view of it. There would still be plenty of teeth gnashing before Churchill relinquished his project,…

Page 498: said McMillan we should have to give in if Eisenhower and Marshall insisted upon ‘Anvil”. We can fight up to a point, we can ;eave on record for history to judge the reasoned statement of our views, and the historian will also see that the Americans have never answered any argument, never attempted to discuss or debate the points, but have merely given flat negative and slightly Shylock-like insistence which they conceive to be their bargain.

My comment: With all the negative color that the author puts on Churchill I don’t know what to make of him putting the most critical analysis of the most critical decision in terms of joint strategy in a first person voice of one of the actors of the story. Being that McMillan was not a prime mover of this book this critical analysis could have gone un noticed.

Page 499: Churchill’s reply on 1 July was anguished. Even though he began with first person plural – ‘We are deeply grieved by your telegram’ – he soon slipped into more intimate vernacular, saying that this was ‘the first major strategic and political error for which the two are responsible. At Teheran you emphasized to me the possibilities of a move eastward when Italy was conquered.’ He claimed that ‘N one involved in these discussions has ever thought of moving armies into the Balkans,’ but stated that Istria and Treste were strategically and politically important position ‘which, as you saw yourself, very clearly might exercise profound and widespread reactions, especially now after the Russians advances’ Finally Churchill stated that:

If you still press upon us the directive of your Chiefs of Staff to withdraw so many of your forces from the Italian campaign and leave all our hopes there dashed to the ground, His Majesty’s Government, on the advice of their Chiefs of Staff must enter a solemn protest…. It is with the greatest sorrow that I write to you in this sense. But I am sure that if we could have met, as I so frequently proposed, we should have reached a happy agreement.

That is precisely what Marshall had feared, and was one of the reasons Churchill did not meet the President at all throughout the nine months between December 1943 and September 1944, despite having seen him thrice in the seven months in 1943. Churchill‘s force of personality was blunted once it was translated on to printed telegraph slips…

My comment: The most critical turn of strategy is depicted in the book from page 436 through page 499. It bares the power to the phrase “let history” judge our actions. I am simply suspect that our author was so bent on the critique of Churchill that he missed an opportunity to expound on the genius of Churchill.

Page 505: Churchill agreed, telling Charles Moran ‘Good God, can’t you see that the Russians are spreading across Europe like a tide; they have invaded Polan, and there is nothing to prevent them into marching in to Turkey and Greece!...but the Americans would not listen to him….But The Americans would not listen to him. Moran concluded that Churchill was distraught, but you cannot get him down for too long.’He sat up in his bed as his speech quickened and he expounded on how “Alex might be able to solve this problem by breaking into the Balkans. Out troops are already in the outskirts of Florence. They would soon be in the valley of the Po.’ Churchill’s promise to Roosevelt on 1 July that ‘No on involved in these discussions has ever thought of moving armies into the Blalkans’ there for is obviously completely misleading.

My comment: I have learned that what an author in history uses words like obviously; it was a harbinger that the words immediately following is an attempt to either re-write history, bend it, or perhaps cast an undue judgment of history. In this point I find Andrew Roberts guilty as charged as history clearly finds that the period immediately after WWI was the dawn of the phrase Soviet Bloc which included all the countries that the USSR invaded while the Allies were spending all their effort in operation Overlord. So when the West say they won WWII I beg to differ. The USSR won WWII and the West won a Cold War that could have been avoided, had they listened to Churchill.

Page 510: That question then led to the next: what kind of front would the Allies choose in the drive to the Rhine and beyond? Would it be a broad one that comprehensively forced the Germans back towards the Fatherland, with two major advances on wide fronts north and south of the Ardennes or would the attack instead be on narrow fronts, spearheaded by several faster thrusts to try and capture important targets deep within Germany, possibly even including Berlin before the Red Army reached it? Here again Roosevelt and Marshall supported Esienhower’s inclination for the former, while Brooke and Churchill tended to opt for Montgomary’s and Patton’s preference for the latter.

On the question of what the armies in Italy under Alexander and Clark would do once Lucain Truscott’s fifth Army and Sir Richard McCreery’s Eighth Army broke through the Gothic Line, the Americans strongly deprecated moves towards Treste, Istria, the Ljubljana Gap, Vienna and the Balkans.

Page 511 On 29 August Churchill sent Roosevelt a telegram about the Mediterranean in which the final paragraph once again brought up their Tehran conversation. It ended, ‘I an sure the arrival of a powerfull army in purely military values.’ Although the condition of Hungary could not be predicted, he believes that having troops there would leave the Western Allies ‘in a position to take full advantage of any great new situation.’ Roosevelt passed this on to Marshall, who asked McNarney and Handy to work on a draft reply that covered Italy in full but deliberately bypassed Istria completely. Churchill cannot have failed to mark the implications.

My comment: In this paragraph you see Roosevelt’s hubris coming out. His economy was saved by a war. Are participation in that war was only granted the time to tool up by the British of who he arrogantly ignores the visionary words of an Allies with much more intimate experience in European affairs in than himself. While Roosevelt did much good in holding his country together through a great depression, his economic and war time strategy receives low scores from the 20/20 perspective of history.

Page 515[Brooke] believes that seizure of the Istrian peninsula ‘not only had a military value, but also a political value of the Russian advances in the Balkans’.

Page 525: That same day Roosevelt and Churchill, amazingly enough initialed the Morgenthau Plan, which said that Germany needed to be turned into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in character. Brooke was fundamentally opposed, already seeing Germany as a future ‘ally to meet the Russian threat of twenty-fie years hence.

Page 527: Churchill went on to claim, rightly, that Britain had nonetheless saved Greece from the flood of Bolshevism.

Page 528: Marshall later recalled: We were very much afraid that Mr. Churchill’s interest in matters near Athens and in Greece would finally get us involved in that fighting, and we were keeping out of it in every way we possibly could.’ On 13 December, Roosevelt cabled Churchill to say that ‘the traditional policies of the US’ meant that as head of state he had to be ‘responsive to the state of public feeling’ against Britain on the Greek issue, and concluded, I didn’t need to tell you how much I dislike this state of affairs between you and me. Churchill replied generously: ‘I have felt it much that you were unable to give a word of explanation for your actions, but I understand your difficulties.’ The new burden of combating Communism in south-eastern Europe therefore looked as if it would be carried entirely by the British

Page 531: On 29 November Churchill made clear his objections to the early liberation of the Channel Islands, telling the War Cabinet that while the twenty-eight thousand Germans there ‘can’t get away’, if they surrendered Britain would have to feed them.

Page 535: The battle of the Bulge, for the potential danger it posed in the west, was only half the size of the [Russian] battle of Kursk, for example.

Page 539: This was particularly so in regard to the Balkan states and the now-termed satellite states. ‘You can’t treat military factors in the way you do political factors. It’s quite a different affair.’ Marshall felt that his brief was not to save eastern Europe from Communism but instead to win the war in the shortest possible time and with the fewest possible Allied lives lost.

My comment: First it is Roosevelt’s job to tell Marshall what the objectives are. Had Roosevelt listened to Churchill earlier in the game of war strategy he could possibly have had his cake and eat it too. As much as the author took license to bend history and inject his comment elsewhere on to cast Churchill in poor light I find his vision slightly clouded by American hubris as well.

Page 532: In 6 February [at Yalta] [Marshall] summarized the Burmese campaigns for t Russians, and Marshall reported that ‘in the face of unparalleled difficulties’ 44,000 tons of supplies had been flown over the Himalayas the previous month, which he described somewhat hyperbolically, as ‘the accomplishment of the greatest feat in all history’ and beside which he said inter-Staff co-operation ‘should be relatively easy. One problem frequently encountered was the reluctance of even high-ranking Russian military officers to commit themselves to anything, however minor, until it ad been referred back to Stalin; the hitherto short life-expectancies of marshals of t Soviet Union made that a sensible precaution.

Page 553: Although Balaklava mattered much to men like Churchill and Brooke who had grown up with Tennyson’s poem, the Prime Minister complained that local Russian guides had shown ‘no sort of feeling’ there. Either they thought they had won the battle or they had never heard of it…. We stood on the little ridge on the end of that famous battlefield where the Charge of the Light Brigade took place. All around us were twisted remains of German anti-tank guns.

My comment: having read up on the Crimean War I noted to myself that while the Charge of the Light Brigade was eventually successful, the British actually lost the battle of Balaklava. This was at some level because that while the taking of the objective in the Charge of the Light Brigade, there was no coordinated effort with the rest of the British and French armies, hence they soon lost their prize back to the Russians. I must be critical of the author, a historian, who did not seem to portray history correctly.

Page 555: Because he is usually accredited the victor of Yalta, it is sometimes forgotten that Stalin made a number of concessions there. He gave a firm date of entry into the Japanese war (three months after the Tennyson’s poem e German surrender); agreed to observe the provisions of the Atlantic Charter in eastern Europe by signing the Declaration of Liberated Europe, which affirmed the right of all peoples to choose their form of government under which they live’; assent to France sitting on the Control Commission for Germany, and agreed that the USSR would join the new United Nations Organization, largely on Roosevelt’s terms. Taken together these seemed significant, yet in reality they amounted to relatively little.

Page 556: Speaking in 1974, Ed Hull made the sensible but rarely heard argument that: All that Yalta did was to recognize the facts of life as they existed and were being brought about…The only way we could have in any way influenced that in a different way was not to have put our main effort into France and the Low Countries but to put it into the Balkans…It might have meant that Bulgaria, Rumania, and possibly other of those Eastern European countries that are now Communist-dominated would have other type of control. But…it would also mean that all of Germany and probably a good portion of t Low Countries, Belgium, Holland, and even France, might have Soviet influence over them rather than Western influence. To me there was no choice to make.

My comment: Again since the author took critical license out on Churchill throughout the book, albeit slight; to take grave objection to him actually taking down Hull’s statement in this book and failing to be critical. Imagine the Russians leapfrogging over Germany to actually occupy Western Europe. To use that is a mitigating circumstance is absurd. The book is subtitled how Four Titans Won the War using superb strategy. He then proceeds to berate one of the titans, and then describes a missed strategy and writes it off as insignificant lesser of two evils. Who really won the War appears to have been the USSR. It was not until the USA won the Cold War that Europe was fully liberated from tyranny.

Page 557: It is hard to be naïve and cynical at the same time, but Roosevelt was both when it came to Stalin and the fate of the Poles. ‘of one thing I am certain’ he told the Polish Prime Minister-in-exile Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, ‘Stalin is not an imperialist.’ To the former American Ambassador to France, William C Bullitt, he also said: “I have a hunch that Stalin doesn’t want anything other than security for his country, and I think if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace’

My comment: When an author writes these words in a book one has to think his cover subtitle is off the mark.

Page 561: As there was no point in doing that, there was no race to Berlin between Montgomery and Patton, or anyone else. Berlin was in the Soviet zone, and if the Allies had reached it first they simply would have to withdraw.

Page 565: Roosevelt’s curt reply to Churchill –“I do not get the point’ – ended with his ‘regret that phrasing of a formal discussion should have so disturbed you but I regret even more at a moment of a great victory we should become involved in such unfortunate reactions. Churchill could hardly have felt that it was worth while ripping up various agreements made with the Russians over Occupation zoning in order to dash for Berlin. More likely he wished to put in writing that he was on the right side of the Cold War which he saw – earlier than anyone else except perhaps Brooke – was looming. Between Churchill’s wildly over-optimistic report to the War Cabinet on returning from Yalta and this doleful telegram to Roosevelt only two months later, Stalin had given no indication that his promises of free and fair elections in Eastern Europe had been genuine.

Page 567: despite the tension between the two Masters in the last year or so, there is no evidence to support the notion that Churchill’s absence was ‘because he felt the President had latterly become unsupportive’, or that ‘the emotional link was never as close as commonly thought,’ as some historians suggested.

Page 569: Truman, who in all military matters understandably tended to defer to Marshall, followed the Joint Chief’s line that it was best to adhere to the Yalta zoning arrangements whatever the legal or political circumstances. Brooke wanted Prague to be liberated by the Western Allies for the ‘remarkable political advantages’ that would accrue, but Marshall merely passed this information on to Eisenhower with the comment: ‘Personally, and aside from all logistics, tactical, or strategic implications, I would loath to hazard American lives for purely political purposes.

My comment: Here I struggle with American lack of consolidation of a military effort to not acquire a lasting peace. First the President is the Commander in Chief and Truman failed to lead. As a result we saw no real commitment from the Russians against Japan, which led to Truman’s calculated decision for the Atom Bomb. This lit the fuse for the nuclear arms race, and subsequent waves of nuclear proliferation around the world of which the world now. What if the Russians helped draw the Japanese War to an end without the benefit of the Manhattan Project; where would we be now?

Our Finest Hour

Our Finest Hour
By Winston Churchill

This book is a second in a series of five and spans the historical moment of a man who wrote his own history. As a continuation of the first book The Gathering Storm, Churchill begins with the grave World situation at the very moment he took the office of England’s Prime Minister. After 12 years of arm waving and foot stomping about the German build up, England and the World gave Winston Churchill the opportunity once denied him at the close of The Great War. It was at this time in history that Churchill formed a government under his leadership. With Churchill’s accounting of the job he undertook, the reader of this series gets to learn the merit of diplomacy and war and the intrigue of how they work hand in hand.

In the opening Churchill continues to criticize the French. This continues throughout, with the exception of de Gaulle. In the first book it was the governments inability to recognize a threat and do anything about it. This book opens with two chapters of narrative on how poorly prepared and organized the French army was. They were poorly prepared in terms of capability at all levels. Churchill is most critical of the leadership of the French Army and the Vichy government. And today the French arrogance continues, even though there exists museums that document the betrayal of the Vichy government we allow it…I am guessing or hoping it is because of their wine, women, food, and appreciation for the good life.

While the French government and her Army were politely criticized at many important junctures leading up to and during their quick fall to Germany the reader would be inclined to have a feeling of empathy towards the French people. After all it is cliché to say “it’s the government not the people”. But in this book is where the reader gets to the story describing events in the face of German army being three days from Paris, and an Italian declaration of war on France, the French people were found moving country carts and lories on an airfield to prevent British bombers from launching an attack on Milan and Tourin; one begins to wonder about “things French”.

Contemplating this in the wake of the excessive war reparation France imposed on Germany after WWI compels one to think even twice about things French. It is nice to believe that the world could be peaceful, but if world history were studied in the Science Colleges or vice-versa there would be a higher level of rational thought dedicated to applying lessons learned? Perhaps a step in that direction would be for our Universities to do a better job providing our youth with an appreciation of all the other aspects beyond their specific majors of our interrelated world. I’d recommend a curriculum entitled “Putting It All Together, Personally, Professionally, & Socially”. I know the reader might hand me Poly Si curriculum but then only 2% of those who needs to learn this actually do…and the rest of the 98% call the Poly Si majors and/or Law grads (Lawyers) crooks. Beware of the broth cooked in a black kettle or which kettle is black.

To punctuate the French fall with French request for Britain to agree to a French surrender, which was agreed they would never do three months earlier, exposes the fortitude of the French culture once again. This in conjunction with the French request to Roosevelt for help and Roosevelt’s refusal pressed by American people in the face of very apparent eminent domination of the world by an evil axis of power, reminds me of how dangerously French-like we are here in America. To punctuate this with an exclamation point, reading this fresh off of Churchill’s Gathering Storm, America cannot continue making alliances involving military protection as the French did to all of Europe and then falling short at the first or any sign of difficulty. In war there are no predictable outcomes. Making an alliance means exactly what Churchill wrote to France’s leadership at the time when Reynuad asked for relief of the French commitment to fighting Germany… in short he said NO. Churchill’s book includes the three-paragraph letter, which makes it an honorable and respectful no. I hope this passage of diplomacy in itself compels this reader to read Churchill.

Without the benefit of reading this book, my generation of Americans does not appreciate Churchill’s deeds to the same degree as one experiencing the same in first person. While the book is fraught with communiqué to an from key participants in history the following passage strikes at the heart of Churchill’s profound leadership. As The Battle of France closed Churchill wrote the following to his people and published it to the world. As I know it is unlikely for my readers to read the book…I provide this excerpt.

"""However matters may go in France or with the French Government or another French Governments, we in this island and in the British Empire will never lose our sense of comradeship with the French people…If final victory rewards our toils they shall share the gins-aye, and freedom shall be restored to all. We abate nothing of our just demands; not one jot or tittle do we receed… Czechs, Poles, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians, have joined their causes with our own. All these shall be restored.

What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our British life, and long the continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say, “ This was their finest hour”.""""

What I find most honorable is that these words were written by a man who had experienced years of French capitulation on commitment to common cause. He saw it immediately preceding this with French reneging on the Pols and Czecs. And most dramatically while the Battle of France was actually happening a large contingent of the French Government Ministers were taking action to surrender to the Germans as they would prefer to be subservient to a German regime as opposed to being a Anglo/French Union. What the reader also learns in this book it that while Churchill held a place in the future for the French, so did Herr Hitler, as was stated and documented in the dialogue minutes between Molitov and Rippentrop in the meeting preceding the Tripartite Act. What I find interesting and at the same time amusing is that while Molitov and Hitler were meeting relative to their interests in the “Pact”, Churchill sniffed out the meeting and bombed the city indiscriminately. He did this to show Stalin that England is indeed a lethal threat.

Mixed in with the above notes in history are the events, among many, of Dakar where it became imperative to defend the West African Coast so that England could sail around the Cape and the Atlantic Ocean would be safe for shipping to and from the Americas. In preparation to land in Dakar, under fire from French War Ships, Churchill made the importance of this painfully clear to Roosevelt, and the book describes the tribulation Churchill observed in Roosevelt in how to “sell” American involvement to a French (head in the sand) thinking American public. The reader is once again and not purposefully, I believe, drawn to question things French.

An intriguing strategy at the fall of France was Churchill’s immediate decision to swiftly capture or destroy the French Fleet. This was done the day after France signed an armistice with Germany. The reader becomes aware of the Naval consequence of world dominance by the Axis Powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy. As Britain drew her fleet home, the Pacific lay now free for Japan to roam. And Japan did just that. To those with wild conspiracy theories against Roosevelt, I say bunk. What occurred whether there existed details of Roosevelt folly prior to Pearl Harbor is immaterial to our national security derived from our “head in the sand” mentality as an American people with French traits. I fear those traits exist still today. I say this as I reflect on these words of Churchill that represent his mind set as he wrote those famous “Finest Hour” words to the world:

"""During our first four years of the last war the Allies experienced nothing but disaster and disappointment…We repeatedly asked ourselves the question “ How are we going to win? And no one was ever able to answer it with much precision, until at the end, quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, our terrible vision collapsed before us, and we were so glutted with victory that in our folly we threw it away."""

Of Things French “ because I think a certain way, so must the world” my quote and critique of the French. This book and Churchill’s first book The Gathering Storm indirectly leads one to draw this conclusion. In my opinion the French lifestyle could be convincing. However history tells a darker story that would lead one to look at the other side of a coin to guarantee its authenticity.

Things American contrasted by things Roosevelt in the face of an American public opinion in 1940 that matched that of the French of the 1930’s you read in the letters from “Former Navel Person to President Roosevelt” (Churchill when he was Prime Minister) the influential hand in guiding Roosevelt to the eventual pearls becoming eminent upon the United States. While I can be critical of Roosevelt’s handling of the economy, I can be grateful for his attention to the words of Churchill. In this book those letters are made public and in my opinion should be mandatory history lessons to our American people, if for no other reason but to ward off the head in the sand mentality to looming international dangers. Also made apparent were the anxieties of Churchill, as he had to decipher the American newspapers to get a feel for American support towards the cause for freedom. Roosevelt’s deal on 50 destroyers and some of the details, from Churchill’s perspective of the precedent setting move of a Lend Lease Act are included in this book. While Churchill was a guiding light, Roosevelt did have to find a way to wake up his people and he did. Although December 7 is a day of infamy, much credit must be given to leaders who were prepared to respond accordingly.

Things magnanimously Churchill: among many was his un wavering allegiance to the French people, despite the Vichy government’s betrayal to not only her Continental allies but to England as they gazed upon the opportunities of subservience to Germany. In spite of this was his memorial statement to Chamberlain, a person of whom he was very critical of in the handling of the looming German threat in the 1930’s. When I read the passage I marked the pages for documentation in my closing. And now having finished the book I close with the statement as I strongly feel that we must continue to use history as written by the participants to mold our children as our future leaders and therefore guide our destiny.

“""At the lychgate we may all pass our own conduct and our own judgment under a marching review. It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again a few years later, when the perspective of time as lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all of this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield. Because we are often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the Fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour”

“Whatever else history may or not say about these terrible, tremendous years, we can be sure that Neville Chamberlain acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating acts in which we are now engaged…”""

Can we learn two things from this piece of history? First can we learn to be undaunted in the travails of a war of any kind? Second, can we do a better job in managing the peace? I think the answer in those questions lay largely in the character of the British as since then America has struggled to match those qualities. And to be more specific, perhaps the qualities are not generally British but specifically Churchill.



Simple notes of corollary conversation to today:

Here at the beginning of the German invasion of France is an interesting bit of information gleaned from Churchill’s accounting of the British retreat from Belgium. This combined with more yet separate collection of history makes for not just interesting, but ironic turns of events. There are more to come. The Germans leaving the British to have to fight their way to Dunkirk for an escape by the sea encircled the essential Generals of the British army. The German Panzer tank supremacy could have stopped this if it were not for direct orders from Hitler to not risk the tanks in the honeycombed cannel geography of Belgium. I read an earlier book called What If. Hitler was a Private in WWI and was part of a defeated division in that exact place. “What If” described an event where Hitler almost lost his life..What IF he did. Well not losing his life, lead Hitler to make a blunder that allowed the British command to escape, regroup and though much had to occur it was these same Generals that led the liberation of Europe five years later where Hitler took his own life anyway.


Page 322 Churchill gave orders to shoot down German Red Cross aircraft. This was in the face of the cry from German doctors that called a violation of the Geneva Convention. Churchill boldly said bunk to a country that violated every treaty it signed with other nations. Both the World and England accepted and praised Churchill’s actions. There were no indictments or criminal investigations. Churchill closed this section sighting that England rather picked up the airmen from the “shot down aircraft” in fishing boats and then the Germans blew up the fishing boats.-

Page 364 I found it interesting that Churchill had an open sense of retaliation towards German in a tit-for-tat war. HE equally endorsed the indiscriminate bombing of German cities. The strategy was the same...to demoralize the German citizens. In today’s Terrorist War, we experience an agenda by the terrorist to sway public opinion and vote (Jimmy Carter, Spain) and it worked both times. However somewhere in war history and the Geneva Convention as interpreted by today’s far fetched anti war mongrels, we must raise above the character of the enemy as though we are running a police action as opposed to a war. If President Bush made his war message more clear in 2001, there would have been a lot more support for all the domino action that followed and will continue. He did say the War on Terror will be long, protracted, and with a hard to identify enemy. He only said it once.

In the development of Operation Compass a plan to take the offensive in Egypt, I found it interesting that the Generals who developed the plan did so in secret, even from Churchill. They did so to maintain a high level of surprise on Mussolini and Hitler. When Churchill found out about it in due course, he was pleased and approved it into action. I contrast it with today’s far fetched left news “investigative journalist” who are prone to site some concoction of our laws to indict the plotters; all in a frenzy to fulfill the political agenda of their respective agencies. In 1940, this level of secret operative planning led to freedom. In 2006, the treasonous exposure is leading to the demise of our way of life.

Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
By William Shirer

There are few threads of thought to consider in this book. First there is a prevailing theme throughout the book represented by the German word lebensraum, meaning “more land.” For the people of neighboring lands an onslaught of terror was felt. Hitler’s original goal was always to conquer Russia and the Slavs as he despised Communism and the Jews that were driving the Russian state of mind as he believed it to be. This belief took root in him as a vagabond in Austria where he felt oppressed by Jewish merchants and businessmen. Secondly and ironically he always looked to the East and waged war with the West, presumably out of some poorly thought out strategy. While he held a vengeance towards France, he was willing to leave England and the West alone. Albeit his actions of bombing London for months on end contradicted even that of his many shallow convictions. Third was a theme that became a consistent irony was one where on the eve of every onslaught upon a neighboring country, leaders held out hope that “it would not happen”. One could make an argument in defense of Poland and perhaps even France individually, but collectively the world leaders could not gain consensus on eminent threats or preventive action. They had to wait until the fox was in the hen house. Fourth, I am left aghast at Neville Chamberlain as he sold out the Austrians and the Czechs, but more so, the world leaders who through silence allowed this to happen. After closing the last page in this book I stand even more firmly in my view that this world of ‘East’ or ‘West’ ideologies owes a world of tribute and gratitude to Sir Winston Churchill. Finally, though the book incriminates Hitler, it is also about German people with Hitler as their representative and scapegoat of the servant German mind. They had eleven hundred years of practice through the first and second Reich’s, and shallow convictions seemed to loom just below the surface of the German people of this time as well.

I read this book with the purpose to better understand the “collective conscience” or, better said, “collective unconsciousness” of the German mind. I was rewarded with a history that provided a multi faceted accounting that indicts not just Hitler’s regime but also the German people. Fundamentally there are a couple characteristics in German philosophy that enabled the madness of Hitler’s mind to prosper. In the book the reader begins to understand the mind of Hitler and to also appreciate that his madness was not single-minded. Before him came a long line of German history & philosophers that not only influenced Hitler, but the German people as well. Hitler had in his favor great oratory skills to convey and congeal a German collective conscious, harvested from already fertile soil. At Hitler’s determent he lacked the skills to see the world in a way that he could achieve his goals. Along with Hitler’s alchemy of words the crucible event that enabled a willing audience was the legendary stab-in-the-back the German people felt, and emphatically felt by Hitler, with the Armistice that concluded the First World War. Germans felt betrayed by their leaders in 1919. Hitler brought German honor [a deceitful and conflicted mind, compelling me to read further back beyond this book] back from the hibernation.

Hitler’s conquest strategy included propaganda and sleuth diplomacy that were undermined by amateur war strategy and a complete misunderstanding of the world. With regard to war miscalculations, Hitler missed the mark on his understanding of the English and the Russian willingness to remain beaten. His delusional mind conspired against him to leave newly conquered territory undefended or a job not quite finished. This led him to over reach the capabilities of the Wehrmacht, (war machine)] and he eventually found his generals requesting a retreat and regroup.

So to exacerbate the situation Hitler held a fundamental flaw that he carried to his own death, which was to never surrender or retreat. When you look at the wisdom of Churchill’s Dunkirk –v- Hitler’s Stalingrad you find the fundamental error in Hitler’s war strategy. At a human drama level, it is interesting to note that Hitler’s experience in the Netherlands in WWI caused him to pause long enough for Churchill to get most of his army out of harm’s way. At the same time, and to Hitler’s credit as a man of his word, at his core belief he expected his soldiers to die for his country, not surrender, which led to German demise at Stalingrad. With an overwhelming mountain of evidence of his propensity for a contradicting word, there was one word or code he held himself to. This one word came as a detriment to many German lives through the war years, and it was exactly that same word, code of honor, that took his own life securing an end to the nightmare. His suicide right or wrong, was not an act of cowardice, but the final result of his most deeply held convictions.

The toughest aspect to read about was the chapter called “The New Order.” When reading about the Rise of the Third Reich you become impressed with facts that Hitler had a lot of help in all circles of German society. The Wehrmacht was not his first internal conquest, but subsequent to his assent to even the head of the Wehrmacht, he groomed even more help to conquer more lands. It is when you get to the New Order chapter; of the prosecution of Jewish Poles and conquered non Aryan people you become overwhelmed with the overall mentality the German people as represented by their collusion. First you read about the German soldiers actually executing people in horrid ways. As the nightmare continues you read about German businessmen like Krupp bidding on devices like gas chambers. You do not get to wake up from the nightmare until you read about German doctors performing medical experiments and then writing reports and giving lectures to the German medical society and no one raises a note of objection. Like a bad dream it continues with reading about the collection of jewelry and dental work form the death camp victims and then fenced through the Reich Bank and then filtered through German pawnshops to be purchased by Aryan German people. And the German people bought it! Hence the author closes this bad dream with the following quote:

Such, has been sketched in this chapter, were the beginnings of Hitler’s New Order; such was the debut of the Nazi Gangster Empire in Europe. Fortunately for mankind it was destroyed in its infancy – not by any revolt of the German people against such a reversion to barbarism but by the defeat of German arms and the consequent fall of the Third Reich.

I think it is very important for history students to clearly understand that the prime subject is the people of the Third Reich who held a philosophy that allowed Hitler to be their prime mover towards a blight that should hang over their heads for years to come. To simply blame it on Hitler would be a grave mistake. Austria appreciates this and makes it a crime for anyone to suggest publicly that those heinous crimes were not committed. As a valuable lesson of how they got there should be a lesson on how they and the world healed. I am not sure where that is written.

To help substantiate my question mark on the healing of a wounded society, I raise the intriguing passages of the conspirators, those who conspired to rid the world of Hitler, and specifically by 1944 when it was apparent that Germany would lose the war, the conspirators hatched yet another plot to overthrow Nazi Germany. This plot would derive another armistice that would preserve a pre Nazi Germany. After reading 1036 pages of atrocity, this reader had no sympathy for a group who a.) Was guilty of war crimes and b.) Displayed a sense of treason only when they felt doomed. It was on their minds though that a defeat of arms to the West would help them pass the blame on to the Nazi’s and absolve them of their crimes on the basis of they were following orders. Unfortunately the West took the bait as there developed a common interest in the prevention of Bolshevisms throughout Europe. The conclusion left, even in the face of Nuremberg Trials, too much history to be swept under the carpet. It is doing no one any good if these lessons are not taught to our youth. As poetic justice a 50 year sentence in Berlin and East Germany may have been the medicine required to cure the ailments of the German mind.

To keep my own perspective in check this book helped me see that the West can be considered anything of the British Empire while the East is all the rest. Looking briefly at British world history leaves me with more reading to do before putting just the Germans in check. It is now clearer to me that all the popular arguments for or against the Iraq war are flawed. I continue to find disappointment in those who vehemently only echo the shallow words of talking heads, without taking a deep look our grave moment in history. It is through reading this history that I find the ironically enlightened conclusion.

I read this book to gain perspective on the German mind that allowed such terror to exist in their land. From this perspective perhaps one could better apply a remedy to the terror imposed upon people in today’s world. Coincidently I saw the movie The Last King of Scotland where Forest Whitaker did a remarkable job transforming the terrorist myth of Edie Amien into a person full of fear. This book does an equivalent job with Hitler. The author sums up the many failed plots to overthrow Hitler with the following assessment of the German mind:

This paralysis of the mind and the will of grown-up men, raised as Christians, supposedly disciplined in old world virtues, boasting of their code of honor, courageous in the face of death on the battlefield, is astonishing, though perhaps it can be grasped if one remembers the course of German history, outlined in an earlier chapter, which made blind obedience to temporal rulers the highest virtue of Germanic man and put a premium on servility.

Who did they serve? Why did they serve? I have a saying that goes like this “desperate people do desperate things.” In their material world the Germans felt desperate in consideration of their new lot in post First World War circumstance. Today’s instruments of world terror, despite of their ideology [Islam] are desperate. Not because of any direct imposition of the West, but because of the oppression of their rulers. Their Imams shine a light on ‘salvation’ of sorts. Much like Hitler did in 1930. Much like what became the remedy for Germany was an undeniable defeat of arms, looms the world destiny today.

Alternatively, let’s look at their leaders. Could a conspiracy of sorts be hatched from this? Well, let’s look at Hitler one last time. According to the authors documentation there is a personal dynamic in Hitler that is exposed in his relationship with Eva Braun. She was his kept mistress through out his whole reign of power. Their love was also kept a closely guarded secret. It was a love only to be exposed in the end when they wedded and then purposely moved on to another existence. Why and what would the reader learn from this?

Hitler knew what he wanted so much so that he wrote a book, Mein Kampf. He was 100% dedicated to the purpose of his book that was solely born from a mind devoid of love. This book was a roadmap to his destiny. When he wrote the book Eva was not in his life and he was not about to make any adjustments to accommodate his heart. He would not allow distractions from the thoughts of his delusional mind. While he put is love on hold the rest of Germany did not, giving Hitler the focus and mental edge where in conjunction with his great oratory skills we was able to win the mind of a pre-occupied people. Pre-occupied with their own plight in life. Germany then fell under the spell of a loveless being, a creature with a mind that played tricks on itself. He was left with the power to remake the perfect world into his world as he held it in his mad mind.

Had Hitler recognized that a perfect world had already been created, had he been raised in a life that allowed this recognition, in a society devoid of corrupt philosophy, perhaps a person of Hitler’s oratory skill would have found his or her way to the pulpit bestowing heart felt peace and love. When you live only in your mind and without the benefit of love, beginning with yourself you eventually find fear. Fear that the world could be other than what is reality. Fear that you could be wrong and therefore you could be totally invalid as a human being. Is it possible to elevate the consciousness of the world leaders beyond fear?

All world leaders use diplomacy that for some reason does not carry the tune below. These words resonated with the hippies of my day. Then like many hippies, me included we became caught up in the real world of making a living. At the ripe age of fifty-one these words sound prophetic and the way to peace, in reflection. But at the same time I am not about to sit back and allow Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il, and a cartel other “axis” lunatics repeat history in the same way unlikely partners in crime did in the 1930’s and 40’s. Ironically, singing songs to these folks does not work; developing a collective consciousness hasn’t proved a timely solution. I hate to say it, but the only thing that brought a Reich of Germany around to peace to be a defeat of arms. There is no Fourth Reich..

Perhaps these words could be the sneak attack if enough of the world joined hands with the world leaders in the loop and sang it. But, perhaps I’m just a dreamer.

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

I got these words off the Internet…oddly the one missing word is you.
Personally, I’d prefer to sing my way out of my next fight. And at the same time I am not willing to ignore history and lose my personal freedom in a chorus of bliss

I am including these end notes as I suspect most will not chose to endure this book. These notes are the seeds to my review. I am sure my review will not move you as the book would. You need to endure it, the nightmare, as so many did and actually still do. I may say though the book may not change the way you look at war…but will change your views on its cause. When you look at a human race that killed more people as a “civilized society” in the 20th century than ever before, something needs to change. That change is not necessarily in our heads.






End Notes
The back drop of Hitler’s eventual stage to power

1. p 23. Though Hitler was to forget it when he cam to power in Germany, one of the lessons o f his Vienna years which he stress, at great length in Mein Kampf is the futility of a political party’s trying to oppose the churches. “ Regardless of how much room for criticism there was in any religious denomination: he says, in explaining why Schoenerer’s Los-von Rom (Away from Rome) movement was a tactical error, “a political party must never for a moment lose sight of the fact that is all previous historical experience a purely political party has never succeeded in producing a religious reformation.
a. My reaction is first that all the “self help” and keys to “success books” tell the reader to have a plan. AND Hitler did… Mein Kampf. We should learn from this
2. p23 But it was the failure of the Pan-Germans to arouse the masses, their in ability to even understand the psychology of the common people, that to Hitler constituted their biggest mistake. (my comment) An assessment Hitler made at age 21.
3. p25 Though refraining from participation in Austrian party politics, young Hitler salready was beginning to practice his oratory on the audiences.
4. p31 Thus emerged for Hitler, as for so many Germans, a fanatical belief in the legend of “the stab in the back” which, more than anything else, was to undermine the Weimar Republic and pave the way for Hitler’s ultimate triumph.
a. This is reference to the way the leaders of Germany capitulated in WWI when the German people thought that war was winnable.
5. p53 Thus the German Republic born, as if by fluke. If the Socialist themselves were not staunch republicans it could hardly be expected that the conservatives would be. But the latter had abdicated their responsibilities. They and the Army leaders, Ludendorff and Hindenburg, had pushed political power into the hands of the Social Democrats. In doing so they managed to also place on the shoulders of these democratic working class leaders apparent responsibility for signing the surrender and ultimately the peace treaty, thus laying the blame for Germany’s defeat and for whatever suffering a lost war and a dictated peace might bring upon the German people. This was a shabby trick, but in Germany it worked.
6. p60 The masses of the people, however, did not realize how much the industrial tycoons, The Army and the State were benefiting from the ruin of the currency. All they knew was a large bank account could not but a straggly bag of carrots.

The Mind of Hitler
7. p 81 relative to Mein Kampf : But it might be argued that had more non Nazi Germans read it before 1933 and had the foreign statesmen of the world pursued it carefully while there was still time, both Germany and the world might have been saved from catastrophe.
8. p 90 A crude Darwinism? A sadistic fantasy? An irresponsible egoism? Megalomania? It was all these in part. But something more. For the mind and passion of Hitler- all aberrations that possessed his feverish brain – had roots that lay deep in German experience and thought. Nazism and the Third Reich, in fact, were but a logical continuation of German History.
9. p97 There had been among the Germans, to be sure, some of the most elevated minds and spirits of the Western World. Leibnitz, Kant, Herder, Humbildt, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Bach, Beethoven – and they made unique contributions to civilization in the West But he German culture that became dominant in the 19th century and which coincided with the rise of Prussian Germany, continuing from Bismark through Hitler, rests primarily on Fichte and Hagel …..and then on Treitschke, Nietzsche, Richard Wagner…the succeeded in establishing a spiritual break with the West: the breach has not been healed to this day.
10. p. 104 with regard to Houston Stewart Chamberlain: This son of an English admiral, nephew of a British field marshal, sir Neville Chamberlain, and of two British generals, and eventually son-in-law of Richard Wagner…was drawn irresistibly towards Germany of which he ultimately became a German citizen and became one of the foremost thinkers and in whose language he wrote all of his many books, several of which and an almost blinding influence on Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler and countless lesser Germans. ….under Prussian influence was receptive to the glories of militant, conquering Prussia.
a. My reaction to this as you read about Neville Chamberlain giving away countries to Hitler…just what were they talking about in those meeting?
b. You read over and over Hitler never had aspirations for England or America. So much of Hitler’s life was deeply conflicted and fraudulent.

The Road to Power

11. p 117 Between 1924 and 1930 German borrowing amounted to some seven billion dollars and most of it came from American investors, who gave little thought to how the Germans might make eventual repayment. The Germans gave even less thought about it.
12. p 118 a Hitler quote: if out voting them takes longer than out shooting them (the opposition in political party) at least the result will be guaranteed by their own constitution.
a. My reaction, while you can claim the political landscape was manipulated by Hitler; the other parties played the same games and the German people did vote Hitler in to power.
13. p135 another quote of Hitler: there was to be no revolution to gain control of the State. That goal was to be reached by mandate of the voters or by consent of the rulers. To get that vote Hitler only had to take advantage of the times.
14. p144 Fritz Thyssen head of a German steel trust and many other industrial magnates invested into Hitler
15. p145 Dr Schact resigned from The Reichbank in 1930…and devoted the next two years of all his considerable abilities to bringing the Fuehrer closer his banker and industrialist friends

The Nazification of Germany

16. p198 The Reich enacted the Enabling Act – the law Removing Distress of the People an Reich as it was officially called. Its five brief paragraphs took the power of legislation, including control of the Reich budget, approval of treaties with foreign states and the initiating of constitutional amendments, away from Parliament and handed to over to the cabinet for a period of four years. More over the laws drafted by the Cabinet were to be drafted by the Chancellor (Hitler) and might deviate from the Constitution.
17. p205 a quote from Hitler “The revolution is not a permanent state of affair, and it must not be allowed into such a state. The stream of revolution released must be guided to develop into a safe channel of evolution.
18. p211 on foreign policy after Hitler left the Disarmament Conference in 1936: That the Allies at this time could have easily have overwhelmed Germany is a certain as it is that such an action would have brought an end to the Third Reich.


Life in the Third Reich

19. p 239 It would be misleading to give the impression that the persecution of Protestants and Catholics by the Nazi State tore the German people asunder or even greatly aroused the vast majority of them. It did not.
20. p 248 Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restraint, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they hade heard on the radio or read in a newspaper.
21. p 256 In such a manner were the youth trained for life and work and death in the Third Reich. Though their minds were deliberately poisoned, their schooling interrupted, their homes largely replaced so far as their rearing went, the boys and girls, the young men and women, seemed immensely happy, filled with zest for the life of a Hitler youth.
22. p259 General Ludendorf, in his book Total War ….published in Germany in 1935, had stressed the necessity of mobilizing the economy of the nation on the same totalitarian basis as everything else in order to properly prepare for total war.
23. p266 One particular swindle perpetrated by Hitler on the German workers deserves passing mention. ( interpreted by this author) This has to do with Volkswagon (the peoples car) …Hitler instigated a plan for the worker to commit from his wages 990 marks - $396 towards his own car…just like the Americans. Hitler took the money but the German people never saw their car.
24. p 267 what enabled the German mind to bend towards Hitler the author writes: In the past, for so many, for as many as six million men and their families, such rights of free men in Germany had been overshadowed, as he said, by the freedom to starve. In taking away the last freedom, Hitler assured himself of support of the working class

The Road to War

25. This great journal, one of the chief glories of English journalism, would plat, like the Chamberlain government, a dubious role in the disastrous British appeasement of Hitler. But to this writer, at least it has even less excuse than the government, for in its Berlin correspondent, Norman Ebbutt, it had, until he was expelled on August 16, 1937 a source of information about Hitler’s doings and purposes that was much more revealing than provided by other foreign correspondents …he much complained of both the “government and press” ( interpretation for efficiency) knowing what was really going on in Nazi Germany and how grandiose Hitler’s promises really were.
26. p 293 about the German defense capabilities in 1936: As General Jodl testified at Nuremberg, “considering the situation we were in, the French covering army could have blown us to pieces”
27. p 299 about Hitler in 1937: Most important of all, perhaps, he had released the dynamic energy of the German people, reawakening their confidence in a nation and their sense of mission as a great and expanding world power…..
28. p300 neither Great Britain and France, their governments and their peoples nor the majority of the German people seemed to realize as 1937 began that almost all that Hitler had done in his first four years was a preparation for war.
29. p 344 Chamberlain was quoted as saying that “what happened (at Berchtesgaden) was merely that two statesmen had agreed upon certain measures for the improvement of relations between two countries…It appeared hardly possible the to insist that just because two statesmen agree in the interest of relations between them – the one country had renounced its independence in favor of the other. …In view of the British Legation in Vienna, as I myself learned at the time, had provided Chamberlain with the details of Hitler’s Berchtesgaden ultimatum to Schuschnigg ( the Austrian Premier), this speech, which was made to the Commons on March 2, is astounding. But ir was pleasing to Hitler, He knew he could march into Austria without any complications with Britain.
30. p346 President Miklas of Autria testified that the Austrian government, which immediately had informed Paris and London of the German ultimatum, was continuing “conversations” with the French and the British governments through out the afternoon in order to ascertain their “frame of mind” When it became clear the their “frame of mind” was to do nothing more than utter empty protests, President Miklas a little before midnight, gave in. (to Hitler)
31. p 364 with regard to the Czechoslovakia: The furthest the British would go was to warn, as Dirksen says Halifax did, that : in the event of a European conflict it was impossible to foresee whether Britain would not be drawn into it”. As a matter of fact, this was as far as Chamberlains government would ever go – until it was too late to stop Hitler.
32. p 368 with regard to the German generals reluctance to war: [General Beck] “In full consciousness of the magnitude of such a step but also of my responsibilities I feel it is my duty to urgently of the armed forces ask the Supreme Commander [Hitler} call off his preparation for war.”… Beck took his memorandum to Brauchistich and augmented it orally with further proposals for unified action on the part of the Army generals….at the Nuremberg trials to the question : Did an officer have a higher allegiance than the one to the Fuehrer? Dozens of generals excused their war crimes by answering…they had to obey orders.
33. p 375 Alas for Beck, and for the future of most the world, it was Hitler and not the recently resigned Chief of the General Staff who proved to have the shrewder view of the possibilities of a big war.
34. p 376 Despite the angry questions in the House of Commons, the Germans noted, Chamberlain had not denied the veracity of the American dispatches….On June 1, the Prime Minister had spoken, partly off the record, to British correspondents, and two days later the Times had published the first of its leaders which were to help undermine Czech position…
35. p 376 It was on that day August 3, that Chamberlain had packed off Lord Ruciman to Czechoslovakia on a curious mission to act as “mediator” in the Sudeten crisis. I happened to be in Prague that day of his arrival and after attending the press conference and talking with members of his party remarked in my diary that “Runciman’s whole mission smells.
36. p 377 my diary notes for the first evening and subsequent days make it clear the Czechs knew perfectly well the Runciman had been sent by Chamberlain to pave the way for the handing over of the Sudetenland to Hitler. It was a shabby trick.
37. p 379 the German hesitation to move on Sudetenland: But they needed assurances of another kind – whether, after all, they had been right in their assumption that Britain and France would go to war against Germany if Hitler carry out his resolve to attach Czechoslovakia….the sent agents to London to not only find out what the British government intended to do but if necessary influence its decision bi informing it that Hitler had decided to attack in a certain date in the fall, and that the German Staff, which knew the date, opposed it and was prepared to take the most decisive action to prevent it if Britain stood firm against Hitler to the last.
38. p 386 with regard to a German [Hitler] proposal: “Would Britain agree to a secession of the Sudeten region, or would she not?… a secession on the right of self determination. The proposal did not shock Chamberlain. Indeed, he expressed satisfaction that they “ had now got down to the crux of the matter.” According to Chamberlains own account, from memory, re replied the he could commit himself until he had consulted his cabinet and the French. He also stated “ he could state personally the he recognized the principle of detachment of Sudeten areas…He wished to return to England to report to the Government and secure their approval of his personal attitude”
39. p 388 Lord Ruciman was summoned from Prague to make recommendations…He advocated transferring the predominantly Sudeten territories to Germany without bothering a plebiscite. [General election]
40. p 406 Theodor Kordt, counselor of the German Embassy in London, that day, confiding that the Prime Minister [Chamberlain] was prepared to go a long way to meet Hitler’s demands in the Sudetenland.
41. p 411 of the German generals prior to Czechoslovakia: Neville Chamberlain, they claimed, was the villain! By agreeing to come to Munich he forced them at the very last minute to call off their plans to overthrow Hitler and the Nazi regime!
42. p 426 Germany was in no position to go to war on October 1, 1938, against Czechoslovakia and France and Britain, not to mention Russia….Chamberlain’s stubborn, fanatical insistence on giving Hitler what he wanted, his trips to Berchtesgaden and Godsberg and finally the fateful journey to Munich rescued Hitler from his limb [being overthrown by his generals] and strengthened his position in Europe.

The Diplomacy Prior to Hitler’s Attack on Poland

43. p 465 on Chamberlain just before Hitler attacked Poland: Great Britain, France, backed by Russia, could have taken action to stop Hitler at very little cost to themselves. But peace-hungry Chamberlain had shied away from such moves.. Not only that he had gone out of his way, he had risked, as he said, his political career to help Adolph Hitler get what he wanted in neighboring lands. He had done nothing to save the independence of Austria. He consorted with the German dictator to destroy the independence of Czechoslovakia, the only truly democratic nation on Germany’s eastern borders and the only which was a friend to the West and which supported the League of Nations and the idea of collective security. He had not even considered the military value to the West of Czechoslovakia’s thirty-five well trained, well armed divisions entrenched behind strong mountain fortifications at a time when Britain could only put two divisions in France and when the German Army was incapable of fighting on two fronts and according to the German generals incapable of penetrating Czech defenses.

Now overnight, in his understandable bitter reaction to Hitler’s occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain, after having undertaken to unilaterally guarantee and Eastern country run by a junta of politically inept Colonels, who up to this moment had joined with the Germans in carving up Czechoslovakia and whose country had been rendered militarily indefensible by the very German conquest which Britain and Poland had helped the Reich to achieve. And he at the eleventh hour risk without bothering to enlist the aid of Russia, whos proposals for joint action against further Nazi aggression he had twice turned down within the year.

Finally, he had done exactly what for more than a year he had stoutly asserted that Britain would never do: he left it to another nation the decision whether his country would go to war.

44. p 477 with regard to Stalin’s position on Poland:
1. To continue to pursue a policy of peace and consolidation of economic relations with all countries
2. …Not to let our country be drawn into conflict by warmongers, whose custom is to let other pull their chestnuts out of the fire
This was a plain warning from the man who made all the ultimate decisions in Russia that the Soviet Union did not intend to be maneuvered into a war with Nazi Germany in order to spare Britain and France and it was ignored in London, it was at least noticed in Berlin.
44. p 480 The significance or Litvinov’s abrupt dismissal was obvious to all. It meant a sharp and violent turning in the Soviet foreign policy. Litvinov had been an archapostle of collective security, of strengthening of the power of the League of Nations, of seeking Russian security against Nazi Germany by military alliance with Britain and France. Chamberlains hesitations about such alliance were fatal to the Russian Foreign Commissar.
45. p 494 Stalin’s distrust of Britain and France and his suspicion that the Western Allies might in the end make a deal with Hitler, as that had the year before in Munich, was thus publicized for the world to ponder.
46. p 502 It was a well-founded impression. As the confidential British Foreign Office papers would make clear, the political talks in Moscow had reached an impasse by the last week in July largely over the impossibility of reaching a definition of “indirect aggression” To the British and French the Russian interpretation of that term was so broad that it might be used to justify Soviet intervention in Finland and the Baltic States even if there ware no Soviet threat, and this to London at least – the French were prepared to be more accommodating. – would not agree
47. p 508 If the Fuehrer considered war “inevitable” then Italy would stand by her side. But the Duce reminded him that war with Poland could not be localized; it would become a European conflict. Mussolini did not think this was a time for the Axis to start such a war. He proposed a constructive peaceful policy over several years.
48. p 515 “The great drama” Hitler told his listeners, “ is now approaching its climax” While political and military successes could not be had without taking risks, he was certain that Great Britain and France would not fight. For one thing, Britain “has no leaders of real caliber. “The men I got to know in Munich are not the kind that start a new world war.” As in previous meetings with his military chiefs the Fuehrer could not keep his mind of England’s and he spoke in considerable detail of her strengths and weaknesses, especially the latter
49. p 526 the mindset of USSR in signing the Nazi Soviet Pact: We formed the impression [said Stalin] that the British and the French Governments were not resolved to go to war if Poland were attacked, but that the hoped the diplomatic line-up of Britain, France and Russia would deter Hitler.
50. p 544 Stalin’s cynical and secret deal with Hitler to divide Poland and to obtain free hand to gobble up Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and Bessarabia was not known outside Berlin and Moscow, but it would soon become evident from Soviet acts and it would shock the rest of the world even at this late date. [1959]
51. p 561 Nobel in form and intent as all these neutral appeals were, this is something unreal and pathetic about them when reread today. It was as if the President of the United States, the Pope and the rulers of the small Northern European democracies lived on a different planet from that of the Third Reich and had no more understanding of what was going on in Berlin than what might be transpiring on Mars. This ignorance of the mind and character and purposes of Adolph Hitler, and indeed the Germans, who, with few exceptions were prepared to follow him blindly, no matter where or how, regardless of morals, ethics, honor, or the Christian concept of humanity, was to cost peoples led by Roosevelt, and the monarchs of Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Norway and Denmark dearly in months to come.
52. p 593 Sir Nevile Henderson’s [British ambassador to Germany] disillusionment seemed complete. Despite all his strenuous efforts to appease the insatiable Nazi dictator, his mission to Germany, as he called it, had failed….And though would suffer one more typical, incredible lapse the next day, the first day of the war, an ancient truth was dawning on him: that there were times and circumstance when, as he at last said, force must be met by force.
53. p 595 Hitler has been in a fine fettle all day. At 6P.M on August 31 General Halder noted in his diary, “Fuehrer; has slept well...Decision against evacuation [in the West shows that he expects France and England will not take action.

Admiral Canaris {German}...one of he key anti-war Nazi conspirators, was in a different mood. Though Hitler was carrying Germany into war, an action which the Canaris circle had supposedly sw orn to prevent, by getting rid of the dictator, there was no conspiracy in being now that the moment for it ad arrive.

The War
54. p 642 The Wilhelmstrausse, it is now known from secret German documents, was encouraged to believe by reports it was getting from Paris through Spanish and Italian ambassadors there that the French had no stomach for continuing the war.
55. p 643 On Oct 2, Attoloco [Italy) handed Weisaeker [German] the text of the latest message from the Italian ambassador in Paris, stating that the majority of the French cabinet were in favor of a peace conference and it was now mainly a question of “enabling France and England to save face”
56. p 710 in Norway: The Wehrmacht commanders – Goering, Brauchitsch, Halder, Keitel, Jodl, Raeder and the rest – had for the first time had a foretaste during the Norwegian campaign of how ther demonic Leader cracked under the strain of even minor setbacks in battle. It was a weakness which would grow on him when, after a series of further astonishing military success, the tide of the war changed, and it would contribute mightily to the eventual debacle of the Third Reich
57. p 710 For the remaining neutral states Hitler’s latest conquest was also a terrifying lesson. Obviously neutrality no longer offered protection to the little democratic nations trying to survive in a totalitarian – dominated world. Finland had just found that out- and now Norway and Denmark. They had themselves to blame for being so blind, for declining to accept in good time – before the actual aggression – the help of friendly world powers.
58. p 734 after sweeping through Belgium and in northern France: Hitler was in very good humor…and gave us his opinion that the war would be finished in six weeks. After the he wished to conclude a reasonable peace wit France and then the way would be free for an agreement with Britain…
59. p 748 on the speculation of America being drawn in: On June 12, for example he [Hans Tomsen German ambassador to the USA] cabled Berlin in code “ most urget, top secret” that a well-known Republican Congressman” who was working “closely” with German Embassy had offered $3,000, to invite fifty isolationist Republican Congressman to the Republican convention so that they may work on the delegates in favor of an isolationist foreign policy…the same Tomeson want $30,000 to place ads in newspapers headed “Kepp America Out of The War.
60. p 760 with regard to German views prior to Operation Sea Lion: Jodl recognized that the fight against the British Air Force must have top priority. But on the whole he thought this as well as other aspects of the assault could be carried out with little trouble. He said: “ Together with propaganda and periodic terror attacks, announced as reprisals, this increasing weakening of the basis of food supply will paralyze and finally break the will of the people to resist, and thereby force its government to capitulate.
61. p 760 prior to a land invasion of England’ There seem to have been at least two reasons for the delay. One was the belief at OKW that the bombing of London was causing too much destruction, both to property and to British morale and that invasion might not be necessary.
62. p 776 Now Goering made the first of his two tactical errors. The skill of the British Fighter Command in committing it planes to battle against vastly superior attacking forces was based on its shrewd use of radar.
63. p 780 in a Hitler talk to an applauding German women’s group: “when they declare” Hitler continues, “that the will increase their attacks on our cities, then we will raze their cities to the ground”. At this I noted the young ladies were quite beside themselves and applauded phrenetically.
64. p 803 Prior to Hitler’s turn to Russia: Ribbentrop gave a sly hint of the Four Powers – The Soviet Union, Italy, Japan, and Germany – to adopt a long range policy … by the delineation of their interest on a world wide scale.
65. p 816 on return from a trip to visit the Duce as the tide was changing: Hitler went north with a bitterness in his heart. He had been frustrated three times – at Hendaye, at Montoire, and now in Italy. In the lengthy winter evenings of the next few years these long exacting journeys were a constantly therme of bitter reproaches against ungrateful and unreliable friends, Axis partners and deceiving Frenchmen.
66. p 819 in an effort to gain Spanish support at the Rock of Gibraltar:… About one thing, Caudillo, there must be clarity: we are fighting a battle of life and death and cannot at this time make any gifts…The battle which Germany and Italy are fighting will determine the destiny of Spain as well. Only in the case of our victory will your regime continue to exist.
67. p 820 The Fuehrer is of the opinion [Raeder wrote] that it is vital for the outcome of the war that Italy does not collapse…He determined to …prevent Italy from losing North Africa.
68. p 821 It was at a war conference that Hitler described Stalin as “a cold blooded blackmailer” and informed his commanders that Russia would have to be brought to her knees “as soon as possible” “ If the USA and Russia should enter the war against Germany the situation would become very complicated. Hence any possibility for such a threat to develop must be eliminated at the very beginning. If the Russian threat were removed, we could wage war with Britain indefinitely. If Russia collapsed, Japan would be greatly relieved: this in turn would mean increased danger to the USA.
69. p 830 Hitler on the war with Russia: The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. The officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies.
70. p 833 Did any German, even one single German, protest against this planned ruthlessness, this well-thought-out scheme to put millions of human beings to death by starvation? In all the directives concerning the spoliation of Russia, there is no mention of anyone’s objecting – as at least some of the generals did in regard to the Commissar Order. These were not merely wild and evil fantasies of distorted souls such as Hitler, Goering, Himmler, and Rosengerg. For weeks and months, it is evident from the records, hundreds of Germans officials toiled away at their desks in the cheerful delight of the warm spring days, adding up the figures and composing memoranda which coldly calculated the massacre of millions.
71. p 839 the Soviets went out of their way to appease Berlin as the date of the German attack approached. Stalin personally took the lead on this.
72. p 846 Keitel testifies in Nuremberg the following quote on Hitler: The main theme was that this was the decisive battle between two ideologies and that practices which we knew as soldiers – the only correct ones under international law – had to be measured by a completely different standard.
73. p 850 Of Hitler’s strategy on invading Russia: We have no chance of eliminating America. But it does lie in our power to exclude Russia. The elimination of Russia means at the same time a tremendous relief for Japan in East Asia, and thereby the possibility of a much stronger threat to American activities through Japanese intervention.
74. p 867 when facing disaster on the road to Moscow: Hitler’s triumph over the Prussian officer corps was thus completed. The former Vienna vagabond and ex-corporal was now head of State, Minister of War, and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces
75. p 868 Hitler’s fanatical order that the troops must hold fast regardless in every position and in the most impossible circumstances was undoubtedly correct. Hitler realized instinctively that any retreat across the snow and ice must, within a few days, lead to dissolution of the front and if that happened the Wehrmacht would suffer the same fate that had befallen the Grande Armee.
76. p 875 the Fuehrer coaxing Japanese aggression on the USA As to the United Staets America was confronted by three possibilities: she could arm herself, she could assist England, or she could wage war on another front. If she helped England she could not arm herself. If she abandoned England the latter would be destroyed and America would then find herself fighting powers of the Three-Power Pact alone. In no case, however, could America wage a war on another front. Therefore the Fuehrer concluded, never in human imagination could there be a better opportunity for the Japanese to strike in the Pacific than now.
77. p 883 Strangely enough, it never seems to have occurred to him [Hitler] or to anyone else in Germany until very late that Japan had her own fish to fry and that the Japanese might be fearful of embarking on a grand offensive in the Southeast Asia against British and Dutch, not to mention attacking Russia in the rear, until they secured their own rear by destroying the United States Pacific Fleet.
78. p 893 on Dec 8 1942: The Nazi Foreign Minister also informed the ambassador, according to the latter’s message to Tokyo, that on the morning of the eighth “ Hitler issues orders to the German Navy to attack American ships when-ever and where ever they meet them.
79. p 912 It was the darkest moments of the war for the Allies and correspondingly one of the brightest for the Axis. But Hitler, as we have seen, had never really understood global warfare.
80. p 916 The shifting of this powerful armored unit back to the drive on Stalingrad was one of the fateful decisions which Hitler made on July 23. His fanatical determination to take both Stalingrad and the Caucasus at the same time, against the advice of Halder and the field commanders, who did not believe it could be done, was embodied in Directive 45, which became famous in the annals of the German Army. It was one of the most fateful of Hitler’s moves in the war, for in the end, and in a very short time it resulted in failing to achieve either objective and led to the most humiliating defeat in the history of German arm, making it certain that he would never win the war and the days of the Thousand-year Third Reich were numbered.
81. p 917 The continual under estimation of enemy possibilities [Halder noted sadly in his diary that evening] takes on grotesque forms and is becoming dangerous. Serious work has become impossible here. Pathological reaction to momentary impressions and a complete lack of capacity to assess the situation and its possibilities give this so-called “leadership a most peculiar character.
82. p 923 For about twenty-four hours Hitler toyed with the idea of trying to make an alliance with France [occupied France] in order to bring her into the war against Britain and America and, at the moment to strengthen the resolve of the Petain government to oppose the Allied landings in North Africa. He probably was encouraged in this by the action of Petain in breaking off diplomatic relations with the United States …and by the aged French Marshal’s statement to the US charge d’affairs that his forces would resist an Anglo-American invasion.
83. p 932 on Hitler’s attitude towards his generals who surrendered rather that fight to the death on General Paulus: Hitler’s venom toward Paulus for deciding to live became more poisonous as he ranted on “ You have to imagine he’ll be brought to Moscow – and imagine that rattrap there. There he will sign anything. He’ll make confessions, make proclamations – you’ll see. The will now walk down the slop of spiritual bankruptcy to its lowest depths…
84. p 934 as the tide turned and Russia was on the march into Germany: For the first time the civilian German people, like the German soldiers at Stalingrad and El Alamein, were to experience the horrors which their armed forces, and inflicted on others up to now.
85. p 943 getting even : France was forced to pay 31.5 billions of total, its contributions of more than 7 billions coming four times the yearly sums which Germany had paid in reparations under the Dawes and Young plans after the first war – a tribute which seemed such a heinous crime to Hitler.

On the New Order
The Atrocities on Man Kind committed by the German People
A collective conscious...not of just Adolph Hitler
86. p 949 about the conditions of the slave labor camps: Dr. Jeager reported the situations of Krupp and even to the personal physician of Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the owner but in vain. Nor did his reports on other Krupp slave labor camps bring any alleviation.
87. p 951 Even the Slav women seized and shipped to Germany for domestic service were treated as slaves. As early as 1942 Hitler had commanded Saukel to procure a half million of them “ in order to relieve the German housewife” The slave labor commissar laid down the condition of work in the German house hold. “There is no claim to free time. Female domestic workers from the East may leave the household only to take care of domestic tasks…”
88. p 971 There had been the records show, some lively competition among German businessmen to procure orders for building these death and disposal contraptions and for furnishing the lethal blue crystals. The firm of A Topf and Sons of Erfut, manufacturers of heating equipment, won out in its bid for the crematoria at Auschwitz. The story of its business enterprise was revealed in a voluminous correspondence found in the records of the camp.
89. p 973 Of the deposits of the jewelry, and gold dental work removed from the dead victims of the death camps: The Reich bank, in fact was overwhelmed by “Max Heilger” deposits. With its vaults filled to overflowing as early as 1942, the bank’s profit minded directors sought to turn the holdings into cold cash by disposing of them through municipal pawnshops. [my words and the German public bought these items]
90. p 979 of the medical experiments: Although the “experiments” were conducted by fewer than two hundred murderous quacks – albeit some of them held eminent posts in the medical world – their criminal work was known to thousands of leading physician of the Reich, not a single one of whom, so far as the record shows, ever uttered the slightest public protest.
91. p 986 of the “freezing experiments” in Dachau: Apparently a few German Luftwaffe medics were beginning to have their doubts. When Himmler heard of this he wrote Field Marshall Milch protesting about the difficulties caused by the “Christian medical circles” in the Air Force….he suggested that he find a “non-Christian physician, who should be honorable as a scientist” to pass on Dr. Raschers valuable works.
92. p 987 of the “freezing experiments” in Dachau: According to the testimony at the ‘Doctors Trial’, ninety-five German scientists, including some of the most eminent men in the field, participated, and though three doctors left no doubt that a good many human beings had gone to death in the experiment there was no questions put as to this and no protests therefore made.
93. p 994 Such, has been sketched in this chapter, were the beginnings of Hitler’s New Order; such was the debut of the Nazi Gangster Empire in Europe. Fortunately for mankind it was destroyed in its infancy – not by any revolt of the German people against such a reversion to barbarism but by the defeat of German arms and the consequent fall of the Third Reich, the story of which now remains to be told.

The Fall
94. p 1036 Just as ominous for the conspirators was the military situation. The Russians, it was believed, were about to launch an all-out offensive in the East. Rome was been abandoned to the Allied forces. In the West the Anglo-American invasion was immanent. Indeed, there was a growing number of conspirators, perhaps influenced by the thinking of the Kreisau Circle, who began to feel that it might be better to call off their plans and let Hitler and the Nazis take responsibility for the catastrophe. To over throw them might merely perpetuate another stab-in-the-back legend, such as that which had fooled so many Germans after the First World War.
95. p 1081 This paralysis of the mind and the will of grown-up men, raised as Christians, supposedly disciplined in old world virtues, boasting of their code of honor, courageous in the face of death on the battlefield, is astonishing, though perhaps it can be grasped if one remembers the course of German history, outlined in an earlier chapter, which made blind obedience to temporal rulers the highest virtue of Germanic man and put a premium on servility.

The Last Days
96. p 1108 One fine evening early in April Goebbels has sat up reading to Hitler from one of the Fuehrer’s favorite books, Carlyle’s of Fredrick the Great. The chapter he was reading told of the darkest days of the Seven Years War, when the great King felt himself at the end of his rope and told the ministers that if by February 15 no change for the better in his fortunes occurred he would give up and take poison.
97. p 1120 Hitler to one of his secretaries: “No Hanna” she says the Fuehrer replied. “if I die it is for honor of our country, it is because as a soldier I must obey my own command that I would defend Berlin to the last”
98. p 1131 The last sentence [of is will and testament] was straight out of Mein Kampf. Hitler had begun his political life with the obsession that “territory in the Easr” must be won for the favored German people, and he was willing to end his life with it. All of the millions of German dead, all of the millions of German homes crushed under the bombs, even the destruction of the German nation had not convinced him the robbing of the lands of the Slavic peoples to the East was – morals aside – a futile Teutonic dream.