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"In a mere nineteen months, from May 1940 to December 1941, the leaders of the world's six major powers made a series of related decisions that decided the course and outcome of World War II, cost the lives of millions and reshaped the course of human destiny from that point forward. How were these decisions made? What were the options facing these leaders as they saw them? What intelligence, right and wrong, did they have? What was the impact of personality, what that of larger forces? In a work with contemporary relevance, Ian Kershaw tells the connected stories of these ten fateful decisions from the shifting perspectives of the protagonists, and in so doing rescues them from the sense of inevitability that now envelops them and restores to them a feeling of vivid drama and contingency - the feeling that things could have turned out very differently indeed."--BOOK JACKET.… (more)
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These decisions were:
1. Britain deciding to fight on after the defeat of France.
2. Germany deciding to wage war on the Soviet Union.
3. Japan appropriating the colonies of countries at war with, or already defeated by, Germany, and allying itself with Germany and Italy.
4. Italy deciding to invade Greece.
5. America providing aid to England.
6. Stalin ignoring all signs that Germany was about to invade it.
7. America intensifying its assistance to Britain by an "undeclared war" on Germany.
8. Japan attacking the U.S.
9. Germany declaring war against the U.S after Pearl Harbor.
10. Germany putting into operation the Final Solution.
I found Kershaw’s evidence convincing with the exception of his argument that Hitler had little choice but to declare war on the US after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Despite the shortcoming in his central thesis, I recommend the book highly to anyone with an interest in World War Two. His close examination of each of these events takes into view nearly all of the major actors in all of the major theaters of the war.