An excellent argument that America’s WWII began on Dec. 11, 1941.
A meticulous historical account of “five momentous days” at the beginning of World War II.
Congress declared war on Japan the day after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, but it didn’t declare war on Germany. That was Hitler’s idea, and he declared war on the U.S. on Dec. 11. Most historians argue that this was a terrible decision, but Hitler showed no doubt. Simms and Laderman deliver an insightful account of those five days. As the authors note, few considered Japan a serious military threat, and most experts believed that it had bombed Pearl Harbor at Hitler’s behest. Franklin Roosevelt and Allied leaders continued to consider Germany the major threat. Yet when Roosevelt’s Cabinet met and Secretary of War Henry Stimson urged a declaration of war against Germany, no one supported him, and Roosevelt did not mention Germany in his famous “day of infamy” speech. Always attuned to public opinion, he deferred to powerful opposition to another European war, as embodied by the America First Committee, which had grumpily agreed to fight only Japan. Many histories report that Churchill “slept the sleep of the saved and thankful” after hearing the news of Pearl Harbor. That’s hindsight, write Simms and Laderman, noting how he documented that sentiment later. At the time in Britain, “opinion was split on whether the new Pacific war was good or bad news.” Many, Churchill included, worried that the U.S. would focus on Japan and leave Britain to face Hitler alone—a realistic concern given that the U.S. had immediately suspended its massive lend-lease program. Hitler’s declaration of war solved the problem, and the authors conclude that he did not declare war in ignorance of America’s immense power but because of it. “In late 1941,” they write, “the Führer saw a narrow window of opportunity not to defeat the United States outright but to create a self-sufficient Axis bloc strong enough to withstand it. Otherwise he risked gradual strangulation.”
An excellent argument that America’s WWII began on Dec. 11, 1941.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5416-1909-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.
A story of ordinary people, both victims and survivors, thrown into extraordinary history.
Pellegrino says his book is “simply the story of what happened to people and objects under the atomic bombs, and it is dedicated to the hope that no one will ever witness this, or die this way, again.” Images of Aug. 6, 1945, as reported by survivors, include the sight of a cart falling from the sky with the hindquarters of the horse pulling it still attached; a young boy who put his hands over his eyes as the bomb hit—and “saw the bones of his fingers shining through shut eyelids, just like an X-ray photograph”; “statue people” flash-fossilized and fixed in place, covered in a light snowfall of ashes; and, of course, the ghosts—people severely flash-burned on one side of their bodies, leaving shadows on a wall, the side of a building, or whatever stood nearby. The carnage continued for days, weeks, and years as victims of burns and those who developed various forms of cancer succumbed to their injuries: “People would continue to die in ways that people never imagined people could die.” Scattered in these survivor stories is another set of stories from those involved in the development and deployment of the only two atomic weapons ever used in warfare. The author also tells of the letter from Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard to Franklin D. Roosevelt that started the ball rolling toward the formation of the Manhattan Project and the crew conversations on the Enola Gay and the Bockscar, the planes that dropped the Little Boy on Hiroshima and the Fat Man on Nagasaki. We have to find a way to get along, one crew member said, “because we now have the wherewithal to destroy everything.”
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9798228309890
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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