HITLER AND JAPAN: THE HOLLOW ALLIANCE

Expanding on George Kennan's theory that the outcome of World War II was inevitable, Johanna Meskill (a German-born Vassar professor) explores the political, economic, military, and theoretical differences between Germany and Japan that contributed to both nations' gross miscalculations concerning the economic requirements of a major war. Secret addenda to the original Tripartite Pact were only the first steps in a long series of conflicting maneuvers; sham conferences, verbal shadow-boxing, shallow promises and inflated estimates of their own and each other's success potential interfered with any actual reasonable coordination of Axis efforts throughout the whole of the war. There is some slight relation of this book to contemporary events in the brief discussion of Japanese actions in French Indo-China, but otherwise the average reader may be inclined to chalk The Hollow Alliance up to history, especially since it is built of long involved sentences woven into even longer paragraphs, in a decidedly static style. Appendices give the text of the Tripartite Pact and related documents and the Military Agreement among the three Axis powers, as taken from the records of the Japanese and German Foreign Ministries.